As I write, it’s Get Online Week. It’s also Advice Week. And on the 3rd November, Talk Money Week begins. So many awareness weeks, so little time.
This year, we’re launching a new initiative that straddles all three of these themes. We’ve opted to make it part of Talk Money Week with a launch event in Bristol. There’s no particular reason, but it’s given us a couple of extra weeks to get a few things in place.
Our CashPointers programme will see us install devices into physical spaces for people from deprived communities to access our digital money health-check service. Each one looks like a cross between a musical score stand and a menu screen in McDonalds. Users can click the screen, take a quiz, and receive an action plan to help boost their financial wellbeing and resilience.
It’s a resource to make money guiders of high footfall organisations without financial advice services of their own. Host spaces can bring their incredible community engagement to bear by putting local people in touch with the highly accessible information Quids in! has grown its reputation around.
Guidance, Gamified
For those who don’t know, our money health-check asks people in or at risk of financial hardship 25 non-intrusive, yes/no questions. To game-ify the process, it’s presented as a quiz and each ‘yes’ scores a point. Each ‘no’ triggers some guidance about putting something in place to make participants better off. They receive an automated email with the guidance against each of the things they might be missing out on. This includes links to benefits calculators, expert advice from Citizens Advice, and access to specialist help with debt, housing or mental health. The idea is that participants then revisit the quiz after around three months to see how their score – and their financial wellbeing and resilience – has increased.
Our challenge now is to make the public-facing quiz, accessed through CashPointers at community spaces, as impactful as our guided service. Across a range of services, taking referrals from landlords, local authorities and support agencies, participants generally increase their score by over 33 per cent. Our in-house quiz allows money coaches to ask supplementary questions to record the steps people take and the financial gains they achieve. In 2024-25, the average financial gains we helped people enjoy was £1,091 per person on our 5-6 week programme. This excludes debts moved into plans or written off and savings pots people started to grow, which are not a ‘gain’ the same way, but undoubtedly move people forward. Most impactfully, they report a sense of independence, control and hope for the future. In turn, this unlocks doors to their prospects for employment, health, family life and housing security.
YOU CAN TAKE A HORSE TO WATER…
We know you can take a horse to water but you can’t make it drink. As we launch the CashPointers, though, we want to see if it helps to take the water to them. The ‘test and learn’ phase will look at critical success factors. How proactive do host organisations need to be? Do we need to put in staff of our own – or train up and post peer workers from the area to deliver community engagement? Is the tech accessible? Does it matter where the unit is stationed – we need people to see them but do people want to be seen using them? Are the rewards immediate enough?
We chose to launch the scheme in Bristol because we have some additional capacity to offer call-backs to users. This means our Quids in! money coaches can work with participants over six weeks to guide them through putting their plan into action. This won’t always be possible, though, and we want to know the level to which self-serve participants will engage with the follow-up emails. We need to learn how to inspire them to re-take the quiz after a number of weeks and show how they get on without the direct support of a money coach.
JOIN THE CLUB
Our Quids in! Readers Club is the first step towards creating a community of people who sign up to the aspiration to become better off. Or, as our strapline has it, ‘more than better off’, because with increased financial resilience comes the stability and headspace to think about everything else. It is hard enough to get people to think about the steps they might take when it comes to the daunting prospect of dealing with our cash. Encouraging people to tell us how they got on? Well, ask any debt advisor how often people stay in touch. Anyway, the Readers Club has been running for a while now and reaches around 30,000 subscribers who have either subscribed directly or are connected through their housing provider.
Impact is important, though. CashPointers aren’t free. The kit costs money. So does the back office support and the continuous development of the information people access. So, how can we demonstrate a return on the investment – both time and money – if we cannot show how people benefited? We have to develop successful means to capture data, and stories, that show the difference this all makes. So we are also ready to learn whatever it takes to not only engage, to not only inspire action, but to also maintain engagement. Like with a club.
The potential to scale is only limited by the resources available to invest. In principle, we can turn every community space, every pharmacy, every village store, into a space for people who are struggling to start to get on top of their finances. CashPointers will be easy to access and, potentially, in any language – in text or, one day, in video format. The benefits will be huge and organising a personal finance plan will be as quick and simple as ordering a burger. If only the gratification could be as instant, then we’d all be laughing.
Jeff Mitchell is the founder and managing director of Clean Slate Training & Employment CIC, which runs the Quids in! Money Guidance initiative. Read more of his blogs here.
Image: PeopleImages / Shutterstock