Carter Elliott’s 10 Key Elements for Successful Tax Credit Outreach

1. Organizational support. My Executive Director and the Board of Directors fully support the APC, understand its value, and are committed to its success.

2. Strong relationships with the IRS and VITA site hosts. We established memoranda of understanding with the IRS and each VITA site to clearly define roles, responsibilities, and expectations.

3. Familiar VITA site locations. We locate our VITA sites in places that our clients already visit and feel safe.  Sites include community-based organizations, churches, and libraries – each located in high-need communities.

4. Strategic Partnerships.  It is important to identify partnerships that can help you achieve your program objectives.  For example, partners have helped our VITA sites build technological capacity.  Working with our local United Way, we have received 60 laptops from IBM to use for the VITA program and through the United Way, we have received 40 printers.  We have also received several computers from the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. We lend this equipment out to VITA sites to help them improve their service.  In addition, we have partnered with AT&T to provide cell phones for our site coordinators, as well as DSL lines for some of our VITA sites, so that they could switch to TaxWise On-Line.

5. VITA site adoption. We’ve encouraged corporations and non-profits to “adopt” a VITA site, meaning they commit to providing volunteers and tech support on specific days throughout the tax season.

6. Technological support. We’ve contracted with a technology consultant to provide IT support to maintain equipment at all VITA sites.

7. Online volunteer registration. We centralized our volunteer registration using an online program that keeps track of volunteers’ training dates and shifts.  The program can automatically send volunteers email reminders about their schedules.

8. Toll-free answering service. We’ve set up an answering service to schedule tax-filer appointments for the VITA sites that require them.  Each day the site receives a list of the day’s appointments.

9. Data collection. We have a Relational EFIN (Electronic Filer’s Identification Number), which allows us to collect demographic information from each of our VITA sites and in turn easily provide information to funders and other partners in the community.  After the tax season, we share these data with the VITA site so that they can identify ways to improve their services to better meet the needs of their clients. 

10. Services beyond tax preparation. While we focused solely on filing tax returns in our first year to develop baseline measurements, in Year Two we began to integrate other services into our VITA site model.  We plan to continue expanding our asset-building and savings initiatives each year.  Our objective is to make the VITA site a portal for working families to access a wide-range of economic supports and asset-building services.

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