Rural Reconnect: How USDA Is Bringing Broadband to Communities Across America

When the COVID-19 pandemic forced American citizens to transition to remote working and learning, many did so seamlessly. Companies and organizations that once operated in an office entered a new world of Zoom meetings, while K-12 students went from in- person learning to the online classroom, at least partially. However, for many families and communities across America, a smooth transition is a luxury they simply didn’t have. According to a recent report from the Federal Communications Commission, only 65% of people in rural areas and 60% of people on tribal lands have access to high speed internet, compared to 97% of Americans in urban communities. That’s 30 million Americans that are falling behind because they can’t effectively telework or access the virtual classroom. “Connectivity is key. It’s the cornerstone to being able to participate in the U.S. economy and the jobs of the future and educational opportunities. And that access hasn't been equal across the whole country,” says Rob Streiker, Salesforce senior manager at Deloitte. 

Narrowing the Digital Divide

The digital divide is a challenge the United States Department of Agriculture is working to solve. Through its Broadband ReConnect program, the department provides funding vehicles that cover some or all of the costs required to provide broadband service to eligible rural areas. Accessing these loans, however, proved difficult without a central repository to house information about funding eligibility and the application process. That's where Streiker’s team comes into the picture. “USDA has a bunch of different grant and loan programs that it offers to everything from municipalities and local governments to actual telecom companies — mom-and-pops up to the big players — to incentivize and make it possible to actually build-out infrastructure. What they needed from us was help building a platform to facilitate a lot of those applications for loans and grants,” Streiker says. The team at Deloitte has spent the last year assisting USDA in the build out of a platform to manage information on these loans — and they’ve done so using the Salesforce cloud.

Bringing Scalability and Automation to the Grants and Loans Process

Over the course of the program, USDA’s needs have evolved and so has Deloitte’s role in the program. “When we first came in, we worked with USDA to shore up the actual application process,” Streiker says. “We also worked directly with communities, including the State of Montana and the Chippewa Cree Tribe, to build out their applications for loans and grants and get them better access to the internet.” Now, the Deloitte team is focused on helping USDA take advantage of Salesforce’s reporting and compliance capabilities. “The pieces of the loan and grant life cycle — review and underwriting, as well as managing servicing after a customer has already received their funding — those pieces were completely manual or using very legacy systems that desperately needed to be decommissioned,” explains Genna Schrage, technology manager at Deloitte Digital. “We built a scalable reporting and compliance system that enabled USDA to communicate with customers and receive regular status, reporting both about their financials, as well as the actual progress of their project.”

A Human-centered Approach

At the center of the grant and loans management process, of course, is people. After all, the platform is only successful if it effectively delivers broadband internet to the communities who need it most. With this in mind, Deloitte embraced the practice of human-centered design throughout its partnership with USDA. “We can build awesome software on our own, but if the users in the end don't find it valuable or it's not really built with them in mind, they're not going to use it,” says Streiker. Throughout the development process, the Deloitte team maintained frequent interaction with its user communities. “It was critical for us on day one to sit with the customers, learn who they were, understand exactly what they do on a daily basis,” Schrage explains. “What's going to enable them to do their job better? What is paining them about the current processes? We never wanted to wait until the end to show them a working product. We got our customers in there early and often from the design piece of it before software was actually created all the way through the agile development process, where they came in and tested the technology along the way and gave us real time feedback.” This strategy has paid off. To date, ReConnect has facilitated the distribution of $744 million in funding to 82 applicants across 34 states and serviced nearly 200,000 households that can now access high-speed internet. “It’s a huge amount of progress in a very short amount of time,” Streiker says. “And it’s been incredible to see all of this success.”

Learn more about how agencies are improving the citizen experience at the Salesforce Public Sector Transformation Summit. Sign up here: https://publicsectorsummit.com/register.