Keep.id

Keep.id is committed to solving the lack of identification for people who experience homelessness. Since the homeless are likely living outside, they are prone to loss of documentation through theft, misplacement, or environmental damages. Without identification, they cannot apply for government aid, jobs, medical services, etc. - causing them to be stuck in the cycle of homelessness. Keep.id proposes a solution that will provide the homeless with secure and easy access to their documents. We partner with nonprofit organizations, leveraging their existing resources to help find and store homeless clients' physical documents onsite. These documents are uploaded to Keep.id for secure virtual storage and clients can access them at any public computer or through cell phones. Clients can use this data to autofill applications and forms. If this were scaled globally, Keep.id would drastically decrease homelessness by empowering the homeless to get the resources they need and deserve.

Within the World Bank's Mission Billion Challenge, Keep.id is looking to solve the identification problem for people experiencing homelessness by helping them overcome the hurdle of missing ID documentation. We are leveraging our digital platform to securely store and give documentation access to homeless clients to provide a stepping stone for them to make progress towards finding a home. 

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, this problem has become even more urgent as 20.5 million Americans lost their jobs in May 2020 due to the pandemic, according to Pew Research. Joy Moses from National Alliance to End Homelessness writes, "[There is] a total of 567,715 people experiencing homelessness to screen, test, track, socially distance, and quarantine" and as many as "250,000 new people could join this already growing population over the course of the year". 

Currently, Keep.id is looking to partner with nonprofits in the Philadelphia area which has 5,800 chronically homeless, and we are already working with Broad Street Ministry, a broad-minded Christian community that practices radical hospitality. We would eventually like to spread through the Northeast, followed by the rest of the U.S.

Keep.id's primary target population are the homeless and the nonprofits that assist the homeless. To understand the needs of the homeless, members of Team Keep have been talking directly to people in the Philadelphia area experiencing homeless to learn about how and why they became homeless and the everyday struggles they face, with a focus on problems of identification. We've also been doing extensive research online to gain knowledge about the reasons of homelessness and how or where our homeless clients will be able to gain digital access to leverage our platform.

On the nonprofit side, we've been working with Broad Street Ministry to flesh out the idea of Keep.id. We're also starting to beta test our product soon with other willing nonprofits. The beta test will give us a better idea of what features our product is currently missing and how to improve upon them.

Keep.id will fill the gaps between the homeless and nonprofits by providing an easier way to upload, store, and manage identification documents. Our end goal is to help the homeless find greater opportunities to get off the streets.

Keep.id will address the problem of the homeless being able to apply/register for an ID by working with nonprofits to upload their identification documents they already have. Keep.id will then provide our clients with a list of missing documentation for specific forms or applications they want to fill out and Keep.id will work with the nonprofits to obtain these missing documents. Once the documents are uploaded, Keep.id offers encryption of personal data as well as storing client data in secure cloud providers.

Two of Keep.id's main competitors are Google Drive and DocuSign. These platforms are very popular with document sharing and are also easy to access from any computer or cell phone. However, Keep.id takes it a step further by partnering with nonprofits to pinpoint and obtain the identification documents that are missing for specific forms. We have specific types of users in our system - clients and admins. The homeless clients only have access to their own documents, while the admins from the nonprofits can view and manage all their clients' data. We also differentiate ourselves by leveraging an auto-fill option that will speed up the application process both clients and admins can use.

While we don’t have evidence yet that our solution works, there is a clear market opportunity for our product. We have identified an area of inequity within the current solution used by nonprofits. Currently, most nonprofits use homeless client management software, called Homelessness Management Information Systems (HMIS). However, this software makes clients’ personal identification inaccessible to the clients themselves, because the HMIS is only accessible to the nonprofit organization. Thus, Keep.id is an innovative solution that provides equitable access to and storage of the IDs of those experiencing homelessness. 

• Resources/inputs: coding, maintenance, development of Keep.id; obtaining funding from donors

• Activities: Assessing needs of nonprofit organizations, strengthening the safety and security of Keep.id, hosting fundraising events, dynamically gathering feedback from users (both people experiencing homelessness and nonprofit organizations) and iterating our solution

• Outputs: individuals experiencing homelessness have convenient and secure access to identification. Relevant information is able to be securely and conveniently transferred between nonprofits. Technological features like automated form filling reduce redundancy and time spent on mundane tasks.

• Short-term impact: individuals experiencing homelessness can access their own forms of identification and use Keep.id to aid them in obtaining new forms of aid and identification as well as mitigate their struggles with homelessness and/or enable them to find housing. 

• Long-term impact: mitigating the effects of, with hopes of ending, homelessness on a large scale. Increase collaboration between Keep.id and other nonprofit organizations, so it becomes easy for individuals to obtain all forms of ID. Our end goal is for individuals to be more resilient against the struggles of homelessness. 

As described more in detail below, Keep.id can be used alongside existing identification systems used by nonprofit organizations, HMIS.

Usability is one of our core values. Because our solution deals with creating secure and convenient document access and storage for individuals struggling with homelessness, our users may have low technological literacy. Consequently, ease of use is a key component of Keep.id.

One identification management software that is widely used by nonprofits is called Homelessness Management Information Systems (HMIS). They are designed to collect information about those who are experiencing homelessness or are at risk of homelessness. 

Each geographic area in the United States has a Continuum of Care, which decides which HMIS will be used. HMIS systems are mandated by the Department of Housing and Urban Development for all agencies receiving federal money, and so all the homeless nonprofits in an area will use the same HMIS in order to receive this money.

We will be targeting these Continuums of Care to provide Keep.id, but we do not hope to replace HMIS systems, because they also track data for the purpose of the federal government. This includes data such as the number of homeless persons and other personal data, which is used in understanding the problem of homelessness by the federal government. 

The current HMIS market is monopolized, with 85 percent of the market controlled by WellSky (according to an interview we did through nonprofit OneRoof), and we do not hope to compete in this market, even though many current HMIS systems have the ability to upload documents. We are building a product to complement HMIS systems because ID storage can be seen by clients (whereas only nonprofits access HMIS systems and documents) and aid applications can be filed, so our product focuses more on helping clients apply for aid benefits rather than federal data reporting

Even if users do not have ready access to a device with Internet connection, Keep.id can be accessed from any public computer. Many nonprofits have computer labs for individuals to use. We also plan on purchasing a few laptops to provide to the nonprofits using Keep.id. This ensures that Keep.id can be accessed at local nonprofits. 

On-site nonprofit staff will be able to help those with low literacy and numeracy levels if necessary.

We have just started the beta-testing phase, and one nonprofit is planning on testing with us. In one year, we hope to serve 20 small/medium nonprofit organizations and one continuum of care (please define it here), so approximately 2,000 individuals. In five years, we hope to be serving 75 Continuums of Care, and 100,000 individuals.

Our goal for the next year is to serve ten paying nonprofit customers. Our goal within the next five years is to sign with 100 Continuums of Care to provide our services for 100 counties or other geographic regions.

This idea has no precedence in the target market, although we believe that there is a clear need for our solution. A barrier for all digital storage systems, including Keep.id, is the limited number of resources- such as computers and cell phones- that the homeless face. We are hoping that access through nonprofit and public computers will be enough to address these needs at first, but as we grow, we will also be needing an increased number of hardware for our clients experiencing homelessness.

We plan to continue to gather feedback from people experiencing homelessness and nonprofit organizations to know how we can make Keep.id more relevant and effective.

The Keep.id team is made up of five board members, all of whom work part-time. Each board member oversees a specific category of Keep.id operations.

The board members oversee teams of contractors, of which Keep.id has thirteen, and two volunteers.

Our team pays close attention to methodology. This comes partially from our team members' shared training in the principles business management (through attending the same business school or participating in the same entrepreneurship accelerator[s]), but also from our heart-deep conviction that the stakeholders involved in the day-to-day working with those experiencing homelessness are some of our most important sources of feedback.

While the product was still in the early stages, three of the founding members conducted a rigorous customer discovery effort: video conferencing with the staff members of over 20 nonprofit organizations in three weeks' time. This allowed Keep.id to hone in specific features and aspects nonprofits were looking for that we could develop.

In terms of unique skills, Keep.id blends technical capacity and down-to-earth research.

Finally, with regards to motivation, Keep.id is forward about its Christ–centered nature as a product. Though not made up exclusively of Christian team members, Keep.id has been built by a team of people who share the belief that we ought to treat others as we would like to be treated. To take a cue from Project HOME (a prominent homelessness nonprofit in Philadelphia): none of us are home until all of us are home.

Keep.id operates under the philosophy that it does not make sense to work to solve social problems without leveraging the networks, programs and supporters that already exist. Especially in homelessness services do we see potential to build upon the already-laid foundation.

Currently, Keep.id partners with Broad Street Ministry as one of the nonprofits that will be beta testing and using our product. We're also starting to beta test our product soon with other willing nonprofits.

After our free beta testing phase, Keep.id will be provided free of charge to partner organizations for three months. 

Our pricing model is $10 per client (i.e., individual experiencing homelessness) per year; this will be paid by the nonprofit organizations. 

The average Philadelphia yearly budget for each person experiencing homelessness is $2000 per year. In addition, there is a vast amount of federal funding that nonprofits receive: in Philadelphia alone, the city budget for homeless services is $13 million per year. Therefore, we believe that our nonprofit partners are financially capable of paying Keep.id’s price of $10/client/year. 

Additionally, we will be able to leverage Keep.id’s unique status as a nonprofit startup to secure donor funds as another critical revenue stream.

Currently, all of our funding comes from grants from entrepreneurship programs at the University of Pennsylvania. We have applied for nonprofit 501(3)(c) status and have started working on securing donations from individuals in our networks.

We are in the process of compiling a list of donors from our universities’ (University of Pennsylvania's) alumni databases who care about finding solutions to homelessness. With funding from competitions and early-stage donors, Keep.id will invest in a CRM in order to systematize our outreach and move to the next phase of growth. We are also growing a talented media team, to create high-quality video content that tells Keep.id’s story well. This will encourage prospective donors to give to the cause--securing the documents of modern society’s most vulnerable.

Our estimated expenses for 2020 are $19,717. This consists of Fundraising Expenses, Compensation of Officers, Directors, Trustees, Other Salaries and Wages, Occupancy, Depreciation and Depletion, Professional Fees, and Other Expenses.

We are applying for the Mission Billion Challenge Global Prize because we strongly believe Keep.id is an innovative solution to increase inclusion and access to digital platforms such as identification systems for vulnerable populations, namely, individuals experiencing homelessness.

We need financial support to continue to develop and maintain our app and website. More than anything, our commitment is to help the client, and resources are allocated to pay for dedicated designers and frontend and backend developers.

We would like to partner with local nonprofit organizations, Continuums of Care, or even local governments in the long term. We partner with nonprofit organizations by beta testing the product with them, incorporating their feedback into the product, and then selling it to them for use with their clients.

We would also like to partner with Continua of Care, both financially and socially. We would request their support by raising awareness for the issue- the lack of identity for the homeless.