‘BEAM ME UP’: TRANSFORMING SOCIAL IMPACT TO DIGITAL
When our customers said they loved Quids in! magazine but wanted to reduce their postage costs, they expected us to offer a PDF they could email to their tenants, residents and service users. We were reluctant. Digital creates a multi-dimensional opportunity for social impact, at scale and measured. But not as a PDF dropped into an inbox.
In 2017, we published our first money email. Like others such as Martin Lewis’ moneysavingexpert.com, the daily papers like MoneyMail, and money bloggers like SkintDad, the Quids In Readers Club (QIRC) emails engage subscribers through articles, signposting and deals. Uniquely, though, ours target benefit claimants, social tenants and low income earners. Instead of 0% interest credit cards and ISAs, we talk about using benefit checkers and navigating Universal Credit. (See a recent edition here.)
This means we need a different model to those money bloggers’ to be sustainable. Those other email services might help thousands make the most of their money but they are commercial and enjoy financial kickbacks when subscribers click through and sign up. Not only does our audience have a low disposable income, they are less digitally confident and fearful of change in case they’re even worse off. Like most social enterprises, we choose the more challenging path.
RECOGNITION
In 2018, QIRC won the Mayor of London’s Civic Innovation Challenge for promoting financial inclusion and digital skills. It started a partnership with Lloyds Bank and provided us with three months’ investment to increase its reach and prove its impact. We developed a strategy to achieve the scale required to make it meaningful through licencing to landlords, authorities and other community stakeholders, enabling us to also keep it free to people in poverty who are not on anyone’s mass mailing list. We upgraded the tech used in the back office to monitor more than just open rates and now we can see how many click through to a web page on switching, say, and how many click through again to actually switch.
With ongoing support from stakeholders, we will be able to enhance content using video and other accessible formats to engage excluded communities and make sure they’re represented. Digital means we can segment and target audiences, for example, by landlord or ethnicity, with bespoke content that literally speaks to them, while maintaining our usual mix of guidance and signposting on debt, welfare, savings, spending tips, and our cornerstone content around banking, budgeting and being online. (See more on ‘The 3 Bs’ here)
CAN GET SOME… SATISFACTION
We are awaiting the updated results of our QIRC reader satisfaction results but our benchmark data was impressive in itself. Almost a third (31.4%) of respondents said they found content ‘extremely useful’. A similar number (28.6%) said articles were ‘very useful’, with slightly more (37.1%) saying it was ‘somewhat useful’. No-one found it no help at all and just 2.9 per cent said it was ‘not so useful’, although a benefit of digital is people can unsubscribe at any time if they no longer want it.
SUBSCRIBER BUY-IN
Part of our research and development process included a review of other means to engage audiences. One major landlord included ‘planted’ content (sample Quids in! articles) on its website, links to the free subscription offer and banner advertising for QIRC. There was a statistically zero response, (0.000048%, to be precise, comparing click-throughs to their tenant numbers). By contrast, one landlord who licences QIRC and sends it to their tenants achieved a reported average 15.5% click rate, driving subscribers to essential money guidance.
This reflects trends now in public policy. Workplace pensions are an example of how ‘opt-in by default’ has become the norm because people’s negative attitude to change almost always outweighs the potential benefit they would derive from changing. It is why so few people switch energy suppliers; 60 per cent are on the most expensive standard tariff but 23 per cent have never switched (Source: moneysupermarket.com). It is also why a campaign (for ‘Max and Keira’s Law’) is underway to make organ donation opt-in by default in England, catching up with Scotland and Wales.
GDPR
We have worked with stakeholders to overcome concerns about GDPR and we have conducted a Legitimate Interest Assessment in the context of customers licencing and sending QIRC emails to tenants, residents and service users. We can demonstrate compliance, essentially because no data is shared, it is 100 per cent to the benefit of the community (and not for profit), and it is central to a business relationship where financial wellbeing is to the advantage of both parties. A full explanation can be found here.
For more information or to receive a quote please email [email protected] or call 07548 627303.
