To engage with people in hardship it’s best to employ people who’ve been there
I always thought that if there’s one thing the third sector could learn from businesses, it’s how to engage target customers. A few years ago, however, Clean Slate won a Mayor of London award for our work taking money guidance to people on low incomes digitally. Our prize included support from one of the ‘big four’ banks. While the Quids In Readers Club has gone on to success since, it turns out the bank – its staff, its culture – just didn’t know where to start when it came to the people we speak to.
Last year, Clean Slate made a promise to people across the UK who are on low incomes. We told them: We see you. We hear you. We are you. We understand they seem invisible to decision-makers and we see how they are under-served. We actively listen to individuals’ requirements and we hear their collective needs. We also recruit people with lived experience. We train and employ them to deliver our services, recognising no one engages people in hardship better than those who have been there. Given our experience with the bank, we could do worse than turn the tables and ask those who have no marketing degrees but all the insights to tell us what’s going on, how to do better and what will engage and impact more people in need.
Sick of being invisible
In December, Quids in! magazine launched its latest Cost of Living Survey. Every two years since 2010, (except 2020 due to the pandemic), we have published a reader survey. Given Quids in! is a money guidance initiative, the questionnaire is a de facto financial resilience gauge. More than 1,000 responded, more than to any other survey we have run. More on this will be published later, but the emerging picture is, unsurprisingly, that things have got harder and harder.
We wondered why so many more people responded this year. Maybe our readers are so sick of being invisible and unheard, they want to take the chance to have their say. More than 500 respondents also said they’d be willing to take part in further research. We’re only just testing whether this will translate into active engagement, like a consumer research panel made up only of people who are likely to have much less disposable income. If it does, we can dramatically improve the quality of intel available to policy-makers and service-designers by giving voice to people whose lived experience is their expertise.
This is on the rest of us to stop treating ‘them’ as them but as part of our own community that ‘we’ have failed
Imagine if this had happened while Universal Credit was being dreamt up. Would the system have assumed people could wait weeks for a payment or manage their claim online? Our audience is not hard to reach, they are under-served. It is no more on them to make themselves reachable to policy-makers than mobility-disabled people must answer for the fact they can’t get up a flight of stairs. This is on the rest of us. It is on policy-makers to meet ‘them’ on their terms, understand what’s in it for ‘them’ to engage, and to stop treating ‘them’ as them but as a part of our own community that ‘we’ have failed.
The Quids in! People’s Panel, and other community research programmes putting lived experience at their heart, can broker intelligence that makes public policy and services delivered by all sectors better. We can also provide visibility. People know they’re not being taken seriously. There’s a lot of frustration brewing into anger and it’s not just going to play out in how people vote – or don’t vote. People always find a way to be heard eventually and it’s often a shock to, literally, ‘the system’. We plan to build a community of our Quids in! readers and low-income service-users. It is the logical thing to want to do, harnessing the largest untapped asset – people themselves.
Take the blinkers off
Like government at all levels, many businesses seem to be failing this growing cohort of low-income households. That’s why they’re best described as ‘under- served’. But some are getting things right and seeing that, if made the right offer, engaging these millions could bring dividends. As reported in the lead article in our Quids In Pro newsletter, Greggs and Timpson for starters have recognised how this market can boost sales and fill vacancies. All of us, in all sectors, could achieve our organisational goals much better if we just took our blinkers off.
We sometimes say Clean Slate is ending poverty one person at a time. This can sound futile until you think of the 13+ million people as a force for change in their own right. It’s hard to generate word-of-mouth recommendations to read, watch, get in touch. It could be inauthentic, even. But if an organisation that sees its richest asset to be the poorest people it aims to bring on board can’t do it, I struggle to see who can. These experts extend our reach and can deepen our impact. Not only does this give them voice, all parts of the system join forces to bring down poverty.
Image: Mabel Amber / Pexels
