Rural LISC and Heartland Forward Map Emergency Broadband Benefit Uptake and Target Affordable Connectivity Program Outreach

Rural LISC launched a new tool developed in collaboration with Heartland Forward that maps 2021 enrollment in the Federal Communications Commission’s Emergency Broadband Benefit (EBB) Program and helps target enrollment efforts for the new Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP) that replaced EBB at the end of 2021. The mapping tool, built by Liz Lima, a current American Connection Corps Fellow sponsored by Heartland Forward, is designed to aid Rural LISC digital navigators and other partner organizations in identifying the communities that can benefit most from outreach and awareness of the new federal discount on internet service for low-income households. The interactive map overlays enrollment data from the EBB program with data on the communities that have the highest levels of eligibility for the program in order to show where there are large proportions of households who could take advantage of the federal assistance, but haven’t yet. The eligibility feature of the map is based on Census data of households that are at or below 135 percent of the federal poverty guidelines (one of the qualifiers for EBB). According to the map’s estimate, the national average of EBB enrollment for households that were eligible was just 17 percent. In the new ACP program, eligibility increases to 200 percent of the federal poverty level.