Case Study: Tipping Point Community achieves policy changes and saves low-income residents $100,000s in fees with TIBCO Software's Data Science

Tipping Point Community Fights Poverty with Data Science

Tipping Point Community, a Bay Area nonprofit dedicated to breaking the cycle of poverty, partnered with the San Francisco Mayor’s Financial Justice Project to analyze roughly 7 million rows of citation and tow data from SFMTA. The dataset was messy—misentered license plates, VINs, and addresses—and the organization lacked tools beyond Excel and Stata to clean, merge, and normalize multiple datasets across zip codes.

With help from TIBCO Data Science and TIBCO staff, the team cleaned and integrated the data and identified that drivers with older cars—often lower income—accumulated escalating fines because unpaid tickets generated punitive late fees. Those findings helped create a city program forgiving late fees for people at or below 200% of the federal poverty line, increased ticket compliance, saved low‑income residents hundreds of thousands of dollars, and transformed Tipping Point’s ability to use data to drive policy.

Tipping Point Community

Jamie Austin

Senior Director of Impact and Learning