Delivering community service programs and measuring performance

The challenge facing Claire Lindsay-Johns was immense: enrol people on low incomes, from locations all over Australia, in a program to help them develop healthy savings habits.

With limited resources and a modest promotional budget, she knew her team would need to be very targeted in their approach.

Overview

Today, the Saver Plus program is a celebrated success. Running in 60 communities across Australia, it has helped nearly 15,000 people put away over $13.5 million in personal savings through a program of financial education, where savings over $500 were matched dollar-for-dollar by the ANZ bank.

We worked with the Saver Plus team to help them choose these 60 communities and target their promotional activities, by identifying the locations with the highest concentrations of people who met their enrollment criteria.

Demographic maps and location data was shared with the entire Saver Plus team in a customised version our demographic mapping tool.

We’ve since been approached by a number of other Community Services and Not-for-profit groups with similar problems, which led us to develop a simple version of this tool called Census Explorer, which helps these organisations target services by mapping standard demographic data from the Census, showing clusters of people based on characteristics such as income, ethnicity, education and more.

“The move to .id Placemaker has been very positive. The visual way that the information is presented enables users to easily pinpoint locations with the greatest need for Saver Plus services,” Claire said.

Background

Developed in 2003 by ANZ and the Brotherhood of St Laurence, Saver Plus is the longest running and largest matched-savings and financial education program in the world. Delivered by community organisations in 60 communities across Australia, the program is designed to help people on low incomes build their financial skills, knowledge and confidence.

The 10-month program requires participants to identify and save towards an eligible education-related savings goal and participate in at least 10 hours of the MoneyMinded financial education program offered as part of Saver Plus. Participants are supported by a Saver Plus Coordinator. At the successful completion of the program, ANZ provides the participant with $1 for every $1 saved (up to $500) for the nominated educational expense for the participant or their children.

The Business Challenge

Saver Plus is the product of a successful long-term partnership between the Brotherhood of St Laurence and ANZ. Together they designed and implemented the program and continue to co-manage its operations through the Saver Plus National Office, housed within the Brotherhood of St Laurence. National Manager, Claire Lindsay-Johns explained that, like many not-for-profit programs, Saver Plus is operating in an environment where costs are increasing and access to funding is competitive. Consequently, in order to be more effective and efficient, strategic promotion of the program is a key focus.

When Saver Plus first approached .id, they wanted to know which communities they should target – i.e. which locations has the highest proportions of people who met the program eligibility criteria. Later, they also wanted to understand if their promotional activities were effective.

The .id Solution

.id has had a long relationship with Saver Plus, providing analytics to inform the selection of the 60 Saver Plus communities (‘sites’) and then creating a visual representation of each site in 2009, 2011 and 2013. This included developing maps that showed which areas within a site had the highest proportion of potential participants as well as plotting the locations of past participants – essentially, a guide for where to focus their promotions.

Claire says the maps were used extensively. They were printed, hung on office walls and annotated to include current information like the locations of ANZ branches and schools involved in the Saver Plus program.

“The maps were incredibly helpful, however, we were keen to have them updated to ensure our activities kept up with changing trends and eligible populations,” said Claire.

Rather than update the static maps .id built a customised .id Placemaker application for Saver Plus to deliver a more responsive mapping system that brought all of the information into a dynamic environment that could be explored and analysed. The information included program office locations, catchments, participants, penetration rates, target market locations, ANZ branches and schools.

Outcomes

.id Placemaker was rolled out to program staff in 2015, and included tailored training from .id to kick-start takeup and maximise efficiency gains as quickly as possible.

The managers have used this as an opportunity to sit down with their team and review promotion plans and activities. Using the information presented in .id Placemaker as an evidence base, each site coordinator is developing a targeted promotion plan.

“At an operational level, .id Placemaker has been a really good tool to guide discussions between management and site coordinators. It has also reduced the time that it takes for my national office team to respond to requests for data and analysis. The .id Placemaker application puts the information directly into the hands of those who need it to increase efficiency and add value to our planning.” Claire said

Further Reading

If you found this article interesting, you may also like to read about our work with another Not-for-Profit, the Cancer Council. Here we helped build an evidence base to focus training and marketing efforts as well as inform site selection and network planning decisions.

Learn more about .id’s services for non-profits.