CiviForm is open-source software that helps governments bring benefit program applications online, making it easier for residents to find and apply for services, and easier for government staff to build and manage them.

Residents seeking public benefits often face a fragmented experience: Programs may be spread across multiple websites, each managed by a different agency or office, each requiring the same personal information to be entered from scratch. Or programs may not be digitized at all, leaving residents to navigate cumbersome paper forms and phone calls.

Government staff face their own version of this problem. Every program office tends to build or buy its own intake solution, or rely on paper forms that return unstructured data that’s hard to process and act on. When a form needs to change, staff are often dependent on IT or an outside vendor to make it happen. The result is duplicated effort, inconsistent data, and slow response to changing program needs.

CiviForm addresses these problems by giving governments a shared platform to build and publish digital applications in one place. Program staff can create and update forms without writing code or waiting for a deployment. And at the core of the applicant experience is a simple but powerful idea: Residents enter their information once and can reuse it across every CiviForm program they apply to.

Because CiviForm is open source, there are no fees to use the base software. Governments own their deployment and their data, with no dependency on a single vendor. When new features are released, every government on the platform benefits. Exygy, a certified B Corp, serves as product steward, maintaining the shared codebase and supporting the community of jurisdictions using the platform.