It’s been a good month. Making it on to the Social Enterprise 100 for the first time feels like a bit of recognition for what has been an incredible year: Twelve months, or eighteen more like, that have been tough for organisations and individuals alike, in ways many of us have never known before.
Our success, notable for the speed at which we’ve grown, was largely down to our ability to mobilise in the face of a global emergency. When a number of funders asked if we were able to respond in practical ways to the needs of people impacted by the pandemic, we were ready.
A toolkit we’d devised initially as a kind of personality quiz for Quids in! readers had been pretty much under-utilised on our website. Accessible, interactive and engaging, however, it was the right tool at the right moment. We trained staff to build a money health-check service that we could deliver remotely around it. It could identify ways to boost their budgets just when they needed it, if they’d been laid off and forced on to benefits or pushed on to furlough on reduced pay and wondering how to keep food on the table.
In late 2019, when on holiday in Canada, I’d re-read The E-Myth Revisited. It’s a One-Minute Manager-style ‘how to’ guide to growing a business. One of its core messages is that if you want to build a business, (the ‘E’ here is for entrepreneur), you need a model that can be replicated. It needs to be systematised to be delivered consistently by other people and come with a full operating manual.
Money skills and digital inclusion
The Future-Proof Finance Quiz is both the system and its own instruction booklet, accessible online and providing support workers with guidance to share with service users. All existing staff, and the 30-plus headcount who joined us since lockdown, could follow the same process but with plenty of scope to add bespoke packages of support to follow up the guidance issued by the toolkit.
With help from the Good Things Foundation, and financial support from Mastercard and Joseph Rowntree Foundation, we embellished the Quiz with digital links to further online support. We were able to join forces with online centres around the country and they too benefited from a process-driven service. The toolkit made money guiders out of digital champions – adding capacity to the emergency response.
We started to see how a service that ostensibly brought together financial inclusion and digital inclusion disciplines could become more than the sum of these two parts. Money guidance doesn’t often address digital skills and IT training rarely has much to offer on money management. But give people both sets of skills and they are empowered to access online support, deals, banking facilities and benefits, budgeting and better-off calculators 24/7. They’re also more employable, adding to the financial gains they could make that, in one case, blew up to almost £100,000 thanks to some excellent support from a Clean Slate worker using the Quiz.
A model that works
This month I was also able to take stock of all we’d learnt as I was invited to present on digital financial inclusion to the Money Guiders Network, run in England by Quaker Social Action. We ran it as a taster for a longer training session Clean Slate offers. We looked at how much worse off someone is by not being online and what motivates people to develop their skills – generally, it needs to meet an immediate need… like keeping food on the table and a roof over their head. We examined the barriers we (and they) need to overcome, how our toolkit works, and the apps and web resources available to us as money guiders. Even before the end, attendees were asking about partnerships. (If you’re interested in teaming up or maybe first attending our Digital Financial Inclusion Training sessions, contact us here.)
I’ve talked many times about what we’ve done through the pandemic but the SE100 accolade is an acknowledgement of the enterprise end of our work. We’re finishing off a restructure that means we’re in shape to grow more, working with customers, commissioners, funders and partners around the UK. We have a model that works, (see our Impact Report here), and there and hundreds of thousands of people who could benefit.
See Jeff’s previous blogs here.
