for the people who find foster families
The mom at the church fair who said “maybe someday.”The coworker who asked one quiet question and never brought it up again. Porchlight remembers them, stays gently in touch for years, and welcomes them back the day they're ready.
“We talk to forty people at a fair. By Monday… all forty are gone.We don't know how to capture that.”
— recruitment lead, Arizona licensing agency
the problem, plainly
Every system in child welfare wakes up when someone fills out an application. But families don't begin at a form — they begin at a table, a conversation, a maybe when my youngest is older. Porchlight is the first tool built for that tender, years-long in-between.
4,875 homes in SFY17. 1,859 in SFY25.
Arizona DCS · Monthly Operational & Outcomes Report, June 2026 · as of Jun 2026
Governor's Office via KJZZ · Arizona just raised foster care pay rates by 50%. State still needs 1,046 more homes · as of Dec 5, 2025
Arizona DCS · Semi-Annual Child Welfare Report, March 2026 · as of Dec 31, 2025
every number on this page says where it came from ♥
six little steps
Every other tool only sees the last two steps. Porchlight walks the whole path — especially the slow, quiet parts.
They're in a pew, a break room, a neighborhood group. Fostering hasn't crossed their mind — yet. We remember the places you showed up.
Porchlight's job ♥They stopped at your table for two minutes. One QR code, one field, ten seconds — and they're no longer a stranger you'll never see again.
Porchlight's job ♥Am I eligible? Can I afford it? We answer the questions people are too shy to ask out loud, gently, one at a time.
Porchlight's job ♥“Ask me in two years.” That's not a no — it's a promise. We set a wake-up date and keep the porch light on until they're ready.
Porchlight's job ♥They raise their hand. We note where their story truly began and hand them warmly to your licensing team.
A few months later, a child has a home. And you can trace it all the way back to that Saturday at the fair.
Steps 1–4 aren't a sales funnel. They're a waiting room measured in years — and we keep it warm.
what's inside
Capture
A QR code made on your phone in the parking lot. One field. Every person remembered, along with where you met them.
The waiting room
Other tools throw “not yet” in the trash. We give it a wake-up date and a quiet quarterly hello — warmth, never pressure.
Nurture
What does it cost? Do I qualify? A week in the life. Honest answers arrive right on time — and a human reply always pauses the machine.
Ambassadors
Your current foster parents are your warmest storytellers. Each gets a personal link, and every family they inspire is counted.
The ledger
Which Saturdays became homes? Cost per licensed home, by source, over years — one page your director can hold up in any board meeting.
a real Tuesday
Six screens. Ten minutes a morning. Nothing here needs training wheels or a consultant.
the table you set up
Make the fair before you go — what it cost, how many hours it will take. Print the QR code, tape it to the tablecloth. Everyone who scans it arrives stamped with that Saturday, permanently.
/eventsten seconds, standing up
A phone number or an email. That's the whole form. Name is optional and comes second, because asking for a name first makes it feel like paperwork — and paperwork is where you lose people.
/c/…where everyone stands
Curious, considering, not yet, inquiry, licensed. Move someone and it's written into a history nobody can quietly edit later — including you.
/boardone person, whole
Every call you logged, every note the system sent, every stage they moved through, in one column. Two years from now a different recruiter reads it in fifteen seconds and picks up where you stopped.
/contacts/…your first ten minutes
Wake-ups whose day has arrived. Families who wrote back — automation already stopped itself. People in “considering” who've heard nothing for thirty days. Clear it, and nobody slips.
/tasksthe board meeting page
Every source: what it cost, who it captured, how many are still warm, how many became homes, and how many months it took. Prints on one page.
/ledgerThe nightly part runs itself. The phone call is still yours — that was always the point.
worth a Saturday?
| Where we showed up | People met | Homes | Cost / home |
|---|---|---|---|
| Foster families inviting friends | 62 | 9 | $0 + 3 hrs |
| Church & community fairs | 318 | 17 | $140 |
| “Not yet” folks who came back | 86 | 6 | $12 |
| Paid social ads | 441 | 2 | $4,700 |
| Radio campaign | 73 | 0 | ∞ |
the fence, out loud
A short tool that knows its edges is worth more than a long one that doesn't. Most of these are enforced in the database, not promised in a manual.
It hands off at the inquiry.
Your licensing system stays the system of record. Porchlight never tries to become it.
It never touches child data.
There is no table for it anywhere in the database. That's an absence, not a policy someone could change.
No home study. No case management.
Binti and Casebook already do that, and do it well. We don't duplicate the parts that work.
No CSV import — on purpose.
A thousand names with no record of how any of them were reached is the exact artefact this exists to replace. Homes you licensed before Porchlight can still be recorded, attributed to the source that produced them.
Nobody is emailed without consent.
It's checked at the single path to the email provider, so there's no way to write around it — and one human reply pauses everything for that person.
Opting out is permanent.
It can't be undone by anyone, including you. A person who leaves stays left.
Families never log in.
The only two pages they ever see are a ten-second form and an unsubscribe page.
Your agency's data is walled off in the database.
Not hidden in the interface — enforced in Postgres, and tested rather than assumed.
what directors ask first
now welcoming one design partner
One Arizona agency, one recruiter, one real event — thirty people who would otherwise have evaporated. That's the whole pilot.
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