Description of the programme

Funded by the Nationwide Building Society, MoneyActive was a three-year project that started in 2009. It was delivered by Citizens Advice Bureaux (CAB) through front line-workers and volunteers and aimed to:

• Increase the financial confidence and knowledge of front-line workers and volunteers, and ultimately end beneficiaries.
• Improve financial behaviours by teaching participants how to develop a budget, how to plan, save and borrow better (including explanations of terms such as APR) and how to differentiate between priority and non-priority debts.

Programme targets were to recruit, train and support 1,300 volunteers to deliver financial capability training and reach 100,000 beneficiaries. All targets were exceeded with 1,725 volunteers recruited and an estimated 204,900 people reached directly or through partner organisations.

The study

An independent impact evaluation of the programme was undertaken by Rocket Science. This study involved:

• Volunteers: 1,004 responses to a pre (registration) survey, 348 responses from a post online survey, focus groups;
• Front-line workers: feedback forms completed after 812 training sessions;
• Beneficiaries: 2,749 training feedback forms completed at the end of training, 45 telephone interviews one to six months after the training; and
• MoneyActive coordinators: 96 survey responses, qualitative interviews and focus groups.

What are the outcomes?

The study measured changes in outcomes for both volunteers (mindset and ability) and end-beneficiaries (mindset).

Key findings

The evaluation (which involved pre- and post-programme measurement of volunteers, and post-training measurement of beneficiaries immediately after the training) found positive results in relation to the following outcomes:

• Impact on volunteers
  • Financial capability (mindset): 84% of volunteers said they felt very or fairly confident giving advice to clients after the training compared to 44% before.
  • Financial capability (ability): Increased knowledge – 82% had a lot or quite a lot of knowledge on financial matters after the training, rising from 31% before the training.
  • Financial capability (Ability): Increased knowledge – 82% had a lot or quite a lot of knowledge on financial matters after the training, rising from 31% before the training.
• Impact on end-beneficiaries
  • Financial capability (mindset): 65% of end beneficiaries felt very or fairly confident to manage their money after the training compared to 37% before.
  • Following the training, 27% of participants planned to set up a budget, 22% intended to plan future spending differently and 23% planned to change how they save money; 18% planned to change how they would borrow money and 6% intended to look for debt advice; 16% planned to open a bank account and 46% a savings account.

The study also looked at the delivery of MoneyActive, making several recommendations for future practice:

• Add in sufficient resource for marketing.
• Maximise existing contacts and networks.
• Understand the training needs for target groups in order to pitch appropriately and be ready to vary the pitch/content.
• Provision of training in pairs helped to provide this flexibility as well as an in-built quality control mechanism.
• Working with existing groups to engage frontline workers and beneficiaries provided greater success than setting up new groups of users, which proved difficult.
• Incorporating fun, interesting & interactive exercises was important to retain attention and commitment. End users welcome the informal, non-threatening and non-judgemental delivery styles.

The study also provides a number of challenges, particularly in relation to the public funding of financial capability training. One example for instance involved the way in which financial capability training was deployed:

• Many end users were becoming more and more concerned with receiving emergency debt advice and it was proving difficult to persuade some to engage with preventative financial capability training in the face of severe personal crisis. Some bureaux had however, overcome this by insisting on beneficiaries receiving an integrated package of financial capability and debt advice.

Points to consider

• • While this evaluation is large and looks at the project outcomes for 2,749 beneficiaries of a programme that reached over 100,000 beneficiaries the findings are not generalisable outside of the project setting.
  • There was no comparison group used in the study
• • This large-scale study appears well performed using a range of research and data gathering approaches to triangulate the results found. While a significant volume of self-reporting was used, this was backed up by a good number of qualitative interviews to validate and deepen the analysis.