Over the past few months, everyone’s worlds have shifted and we’ve been adapting to different ways of working and living. Here at CDS, we’ve felt that shift too, and have been working with partners to develop tools to help make navigating the uncertainty a little easier.
In this issue, we highlight some of those tools we’ve helped build in response to COVID-19.
Find financial help during COVID-19
On May 7, in partnership with Service Canada, we launched the “Find Financial Help during COVID-19” online tool. By having people answer a few simple questions anonymously, the service provides them with a tailored list of financial benefits for their specific situation.
Service Canada is now managing the tool, future research, and iterations. Before we handed it off, one of our researchers wrote about the feedback component we used to improve the impact of the service.
Read the blog to learn more about how we built the benefit finder with insights from our users.
In the early days of the coronavirus outbreak, we teamed up with Health Canada to build and launch “Get Updates on COVID-19,” an email notification service to help subscribers get timely and authoritative information, right to their inboxes.
Health Canada wrote about the experience of launching an Alpha service by starting small, going live quickly, and constantly updating the service based on new data and user research.
Read the blog to learn more and subscribe to the service.
In collaboration with Code for Canada and the Canada School of Public Service, we’ve put together “Open Call,” a catalogue of open source tools that governments can use to quickly deploy and tackle common COVID-19 challenges.
