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Jeff Mitchell

Nobody in the Dark

Quids in! editor Jeff Mitchell presents why we’ve teamed up with the Good Things Foundation, Joseph Rowntree Foundation, Mastercard and community programmes around the UK to support people to cross the digital divide during lockdown

At our money skills workshops, we always start with a couple of teaser questions. ‘If you need money advice, would you turn to your bank?’ ‘Can you always trust what shop staff tell you?’ We talk around the issues. The chances that we’d be offered an overdraft – and fees. Or sold something costing more than we intended to spend. We explore the Brighthouse ‘offer’.

By the end of the day, attendees agree: ‘No wonder it’s so hard to keep control of our money.’

They always ask why no-one tells us this stuff. It feels deliberate. It’s certainly the way the (western) world works. If we’re not active consumers, we’re sitting ducks. If we don’t have our hands on our wallet, someone has got their fingers in it.

GUIDED TOWARDS THE LIGHT

In a way, it’s the inspiration behind ‘Nobody In The Dark’. This is the campaign led by a coalition of partners who want to ensure lower income consumers don’t get left behind as the world goes online, costing them more. (Because they can’t shop around, access advice, manage their banking, find work so easily, and so on.

I met Emma Stone, Director of Design, Research & Communications at the Good Things Foundation, at a Money and Pensions Service event at Toynbee Hall last summer. We instantly connected on the issues around digital inclusion and how people who remain offline are more likely to engage if they see a direct benefit. We talked about how Clean Slate integrates web-based resources into financial wellbeing programmes and how digital inclusion is kind of incidental. It’s important, vital even, but often not the primary driver for engagement.

Fast forward to the coronavirus crisis and lockdown. Emma was in discussion with funders wanting to know how we could make an emergency response to help people stuck at home and isolated without access to, or the knowhow to make use of, digital resources. What could we do to reduce isolation, connect people with help and ensure they weren’t slipping into destitution?

The Joseph Rowntree Foundation and Mastercard agreed to back a programme that provided the Good Things Foundation, and its Devices Dot Now programme, with free devices and data to distribute to people struggling. They got behind a programme, led on the ground by Clean Slate and what will become a network of eight Online Centres, to develop and utilise online resources to provide people with money guidance and the online resources to help them become better off. And, for scale, Mastercard led the charge with a publicity campaign to engage people who have limited access to digital to the best tools to help them make more (money) from the internet.

SHOWING AND DOING, NOT TEACHING

Nobody in the Dark promises to help consumers ‘see the light’. It links them to a range of courses run online by LearnMyWay, another Good Things Foundation initiative, including the so far most popular one on ways to stay safe online. It also links to our money health-check toolkit – the Quids in! ‘Future-Proof Your Finance Quiz’.

Following links from social media and the website portal, internet users can ‘self-serve’ but people local to Clean Slate’s ‘Quids In Centres’ in Bath, Glos and London, and Online Centres in the Midlands and North of England (so far), can take part in a ‘guided service’. The Quids in! Quiz is central to this. Supported remotely by phone, participants are asked a series of 25 questions that looks at all dimensions of their financial habits, attitudes and facilities. At the end, their ‘yes’ answers are totalled up as a score and the ‘no’ answers each generate a short piece of advice on possible steps to take and why they could help. To promote IT confidence and skills, if the person has a device available other than the phone they’re using for the call, they do the Quiz online at the same time. All the resulting guidance has links to further information and tools to help them follow up, say, with a benefit check, comparing savings accounts or learning how to claim Universal Credit. We invite them to take the Quiz again two months later.

REMOTE ACCESS – THE NEW NORMAL

The Quiz is so helpful to how Clean Slate has remodelled its remote working service that we will continue to work this way post-lockdown. Operating community drop-ins will now be only one part of our ‘new normal’. It has also helped us crystalise the service offer for partners like landlords and other creditors who can see customers slipping into arrears (but not yet in debt crisis). Two social housing providers have now commissioned us to deliver this service to tenants and two more are considering it.

We also use the money health-check process, using the Future-Proof Finance Quiz, for training with support workers in housing, health and employment support. Many lack the confidence to talk money with customers and a pilot in Bath in 2019 proved highly successful. This also came into its own during lockdown as we were able to train new workers to deliver the service from anywhere in the UK. We were able to join up our teams in London and the West of England, recruit someone in North Wales and induct partners at Online Centres across the country.

As with everything we do at Clean Slate and Quids in!, the tone and language of the Quiz is carefully considered. It is simple to follow, using literacy age twelve, with embedded links. (Support workers also text these to people with smartphones after taking the money health-check.) This expertise seems to have been something that was genuinely welcomed among the partners on Nobody in the Dark, which is built around practical need and simple language to help it cut through to the target audience. At the same time, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation were keen people with lived experience were included in a process of co-design to ensure it would be well-received and impactful.

In April, Martin Lewis launched a new money course in partnership with the Open University. He said: “Companies spend billions on teaching their staff to sell. Yet consumers don’t get any training.” This is exactly where Quids in! is coming from. There is a tone of righteous indignation that runs through Quids in!’s various publications that reflects the concerns of people we meet in our workshops and drop-ins.

It’s time to make sure we leave nobody in the dark.