While financial and digital inclusion initiatives sometimes failed to engage, how did the innovation of a ‘digital financial inclusion’ response to Covid hit the sweet spot?
As a social enterprise, Clean Slate is as interested in the business news as it is in public policy and social reporting in the media. It seems that the companies best able to thrive during lockdown were those with, or able to create, a strong online offer. So what happens to community enterprises whose customers are not online?
Prior to lockdown, Clean Slate and its money skills initiative, Quids in!, were a pretty analogue affair. Although our money and employment support offers revolve around online access, drop-ins at community cafes and libraries, and workshops in training spaces, required us to meet in the real world. Although we had our monthly Quids In Readers Club money emails, the money tips magazine and guide remained stubbornly on the printed page. How then did we double in size between March and September, and double again by the end of December?
For its tenth anniversary edition in 2018, Quids in! had published its Future-Proof Finance Quiz. It was part-personality test, part-financial resilience checklist. We asked 25 yes/no questions to help readers identify the facilities, habits and attitudes they might want to change to protect themselves from financial setbacks. Online we utilised an off-the-shelf quiz platform to create a digital, self-serve option.
At a Money Advice Service event in 2019, I met Emma Stone, Director of Design, Research and Communications at the Good Things Foundation (GTF). We were a meeting of minds when it came to how digital exclusion compounds the ‘poverty premium’. Not only does it cost more to be poor, (think pre-pay gas meters and only being able to buy one tin of beans at a time, for starters), people lose out by hundreds if they’re not online because they either cannot afford it or don’t see the point. I suggested that maybe the answer was simple: Don’t teach them how to be online, help them learn how to be better off… by being online. Who doesn’t want to be better off? People learn best by doing.
Come 2020, it was only days after I’d had the conversation with my team about ‘What the hell are we going to do during lockdown?’ when Emma got back in touch. The Joseph Rowntree Foundation and Mastercard were keen to fund an emergency response and recognised GTF’s digital inclusion agenda could be instrumental. I fed back that Clean Slate was about to dust off the Future-Proof Finance Quiz and make it central to a phone-based money health-check offer for anyone affected financially by the pandemic.
As Emma and I talked, we saw the opportunity for the Quiz to do more than guide advisors through a process. We could embellish it with hyperlinks to further digital tools and resources like benefit calculators, switching services and specialist advice services. Even over the phone, we could help participants take the Quiz online at their end, so long as they had a device. What’s more, through GTF’s national network of online centres, we could scale up. Clean Slate could train and support digital champion teams anywhere to deliver the money health-check service using the toolkit too.
And that’s what we did. Along the way, we began to define a new area of work – digital financial inclusion. It sounds like a subset of financial inclusion and digital inclusion but I’m not sure that does it justice. Financial exclusion is usually about a lack of access to banking-related products and services and doesn’t encompass switching processes, benefit calculators and jobs boards. Digital inclusion usually focuses on personal skills and access and is hardly ever directly linked to the immediate financial incentives.
It was not that before lockdown, each piece of work had put the cart before the horse. They were just two carts. But when we put the two together, we were shocked to find both were fully motorised. After six months, digital champions with little prior experience in delivering financial guidance were demanding we did more to help people organise their finances. They were revving their engines and it was on GTF and Clean Slate to find the fuel.
Mastercard’s support was more than financial. They invested in and invited us aboard a campaign we called Nobody In The Dark. Supported by a large-scale social media drive, a web portal was devised to take light consumers of digital to our Quiz and GTF’s LearnMyWay online training courses. We learnt people were concerned about online safety but also had trust issues when it came to discussing their finances. Not only was digital financial inclusion a new field of work, it came with exponentially heightened challenges and we continue to pioneer the best responses.
Our aspiration is to take Nobody In The Dark to the next level this year. Having discovered the power of digital financial inclusion, our work begins in earnest to fully understand its potential. We know that applied to the needs of people in poverty, it is transformative. This could also be true when applied to the needs of tenants slipping into arrears, vulnerable banking customers and people forced onto benefits on account of the pandemic. Our vision is to rise to this challenge through partnerships across the UK, so if you want to join this motorised bandwagon, raise your hand (or better still, email me).
