Evaluation of the Ticket to Work Program, Implementation ...

128have accepted. But even at that success rate, it appears that TTW provides a low netfinancial incentive to ENs because the payment streams have been relatively small even forthe more successful ENs.Looking to the future and assuming no changes to the payment systems, it would take alarge change in beneficiary behavior for ENs to overcome the deficit we observed in the firsttwo years of experience. More specifically, ENs will not be able to break even unless theycan generate payments for many more of the beneficiaries they serve and generate morepayments from those beneficiaries. For example, we estimate that each beneficiary whoassigns a Ticket would have to generate 10 to 22 payments. To see the magnitude of therequired change, it is important to consider that beneficiaries who assigned their Ticketsduring the first year of TTW generated an average of only 0.86 payments in the 24 monthsfollowing assignment. In other words, fewer than 15 percent of all beneficiaries generatedany payment in the first two years after assignment; of those generating payments, theyaccounted for only about 16 payments each during the first two years.We cannot be certain whether changes of the required magnitude are feasible. Suchchanges seem unlikely based on the early experience with TTW whereby the proportion ofbeneficiaries generating payments declined during the two years following assignment.Nevertheless, there is evidence from the SVRA system that it can take 26 months or more ofassistance before many beneficiaries earn enough to move to zero-benefit status. Therefore,given that the data in this analysis reflect only the 24 months after assignment, it is possiblethat ENs may see some gains in the future.A. FRAMEWORK FOR ASSESSING EN COSTS AND REVENUESWe assigned dollar values to the activities that ENs typically perform in servingbeneficiaries (Figure VIII.1) and compared the costs we estimated with the actual revenueswe observed for beneficiaries who assigned their Ticket to an EN during the first year ofTTW rollout.EN costs stem from the five major activities shown in Figure VIII.1: (1) outreach, (2)intake, (3) initial services, (4) follow-up services, and (5) payment tracking. Outreach coversefforts to generate a flow of potentially interested clients. At the simplest level, outreachactivities may be just answering telephone calls from beneficiaries who receive Tickets andwant more information. Beyond that, ENs may develop a Web site, make presentations togroups that include or advise beneficiaries, or work with their SVRA or other possiblereferral sources. While specific outreach activities vary considerably from one EN to thenext, our general sense from the 29 ENs we interviewed is that no more than half of thebeneficiaries contacted through any of these efforts will express a concrete interest inassigning their Tickets to the EN. 22 The EN interviews are described in detail in Chapter V.VIII: EN Cost and Revenue