Helping businesses get support grants during the pandemic
Content design for Leeds City Council in 2020.
The situation
During the pandemic, thousands of businesses in Leeds were forced to shut. Leeds City Council had the job of distributing government grant money to help these businesses survive.
We had to make the online application process as easy as possible, while ensuring council staff did not have to spend too much time processing ineligible applications.
The problem
In this case study, I’m going to focus on one specific problem – though we solved many problems during our work on the business support grants.
One of the support funds was made available several times: in November, December and January. Each of the 3 grants from this fund had a different name.
If a business had applied during the earlier rounds, they didn’t need to apply again and would receive the next payments automatically.
After the second round of applications in December, the product owner came to us for help.
They told us that:
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previous applicants were applying again, even though emails and social media had told them they would get their next payment automatically
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70% of the applications were duplicates from the November grant
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the 3 members of the admin staff were overwhelmed with applications
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it was taking 6 weeks to process and send each grant payment
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concerned businesses were unnecessarily filling out applications and contacting the council to chase up, not realising that they had already been paid
The ask
For the third round of payments, the product owner asked us to close the online form and write some web content to inform people that they would be paid automatically.
But, research at the beginning of January revealed that:
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many eligible businesses had not applied yet but could still apply retrospectively for the previous payments
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some previous applicants had moved premises and we had to ensure their application was updated
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most customers actually expected to apply again when the government announced the January grants
For the January grant applications, we knew we had to:
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make it easy for new applicants to apply
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stop previous applicants from applying and tell them they would be paid automatically
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let previous applicants reapply if their address had changed
In other words, we had to encourage applications and stop applications at the same time.
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What I did
I reworked the existing online form in collaboration with another content designer.
Making it easy to apply
The new version of the online form let new applicants apply for any or all of the grant payments. To achieve this, the admin team agreed that they would check each eligible application to see which past payments the business qualified for, as this was a relatively easy process for them.
We also kept the web content for the previous payments to capture any new applicants being referred by search engines, local news sites or GOV.UK.
Stopping previous applicants
From experience, we knew that static written content alone was not enough to stop ineligible people from starting an online form.
People typically read 28% of a web page at most, and we would be putting the onus on stressed business owners to figure out their eligibility from a page of text.
In addition to new web content, we added questions to the form.
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The first question asked applicants which grants they had already applied for.
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If they answered that they had applied for the November or December grant payments, they would be asked if they had moved premises since applying.
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If they had moved premises, they could continue with the form.
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If they were still on the same premises, they would go to an exit page reassuring them that they would get their payment automatically.
There was a very small risk that a business could have changed their bank details since their previous application. As a cautionary measure, the grants team agreed to put their email address on the exit page, so that people could get in touch to change their bank details if needed.
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The image shows a wireframe of the first few questions of the online application form.
There were also challenges in asking people what they’ve already applied for, because:
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all 3 of the grant payments had different names
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there were several other business grants available around the same time
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the central government and other local authorities had named their grants differently
To try and avoid confusion with the different grants:
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we added dates to the names of the 2 previous grants to make them easier to identify
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we used checkboxes so people could select more than one type of grant if needed
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we added a ‘not sure’ option to allow people to progress if they were really stuck
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The result
Our changes succeeded in increasing the quality of applications.
Over the next 3 months, admin staff reported only a handful of duplicate applicants. For comparison, they had around 700 duplicate applicants during the previous round of funding in December.
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This helped speed up the processing time in the back office, which reduced from 6 weeks to 2 weeks.