Quids in! has always been about making a connection. From the way we focus on engagement through a tabloid style, familiar to many of our readers. To how we offer a call to action at the end of our articles, so readers can engage with the support they could use. But it’s also been about building a unique kind of bridge between our paying customers, like landlords, authorities, healthcare services, and our audience, their tenants, residents and patients.

Tentative as our steps out of lockdown are, now is the time to focus on the theme of re-connecting. Magazine to reader. Landlord to tenant. Authority to resident. Doctor to patient. Charity to service user. Whether just re-establishing old links or ‘building back better’, the time is now to reconnect with the parts of our communities that are struggling most.

The pandemic and the lockdown have been cruel in many ways. Forced back into our burrows and told to sit tight, not only were the most vulnerable left isolated and dependent on neighbours for delivery of groceries and prescriptions, many also lost their incomes. And many, myself included, lost close friends and relatives. Higher rates of digital exclusion than we choose to acknowledge also left millions of lower-income households without access to support, jobs and social contacts. The very current risk is that as lockdown lifts, and the safeguards like eviction and debt-collection moratoria end, the most vulnerable face even greater hardship than before. It is on all of us to re-connect and re-instigate those supports.

PAUSING CONTACT

Quids in! magazine itself faced practical challenges that could easily have wiped us out. Our contacts among landlords and authorities, who make up the majority of buyers of Quids In’s printed products, were working from home and cut off from the means of taking delivery. And even if we could sell them in, no-one wanted anything that might carry the bug through their doors.

(As an aside, we do have a digital offer that’s quietly thriving among a handful of customers. The Quids In Readers Club’s monthly emails reach around 25,000 social tenants each month. But a major barrier to connection remained the ranging interpretations of GDPR rules, stifling expansion along this channel, even when the alternative was isolation.)

Instead, we turned our attention to an online toolkit we’d launched for our 10th anniversary in 2018. By early 2020, we had already piloted a service built around the Future-Proof Finance Quiz and now was its moment. From the start of lockdown, we made it central to our remote offer and our team of support workers hit the phones and maintained contact that way. We started to pick up referrals from landlords who had never taken up the Quids in! offer before, then local authorities, then DWP. We’re on track to have provided support to around 2,000 people this way.

TRANSFORMATIVE IMPACT

We’re just about to publish an Impact Report and the results are astonishing. (No spoilers here just yet.) We built vital connections with struggling communities we’d never met before, transforming how hundreds of people managed their money and boosted their budgets by hundreds, if not thousands of pounds. (Yes, really! Here’s one case study.) Now we’re looking at how to re-connect this service with Quids in! as ‘normal’ service resumes and customers can start posting our magazines and guides to low-income households. 

Our work with the Good Things Foundation meant we built in digital tools to encourage those we made contact with to take advantage of online resources. Supported by Mastercard, we joined forces for the Nobody in the Dark campaign designed to connect people left behind by being offline with the support to get them engaged with the Internet. Everything has been about building connections. Like the internet, one link should lead to another until we’re connected to all we need or might need in the future.

For our part as a social enterprise, Clean Slate and Quids in! have to re-establish contact with stakeholders and help them see we can help them re-connect with people who have felt alone during lockdown. Not only them, but those exposed to potential crises as those financial protections are removed. It’s time to rebuild those bridges through Quids in! magazine but also through the Readers Club emails. It’s also time to integrate new innovations in how we engage people and help them become better off. Together, we have to reach out. There has never been a more critical time.