NGO- Measure the impact
Training is a heavy cost and time investment. So knowing the return is crucial to:
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Get funding to organise more training and reach more people,
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Build a sustainable training programme, with dedicated and motivated trainers,
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Encourage more participants to attend financial education training.
How to measure the actual “output” of financial education training? What will participants gain from it? This is more challenging than it sounds.
- Financial education impact is more about behaviour than knowledge: knowing the difference between needs and wants is a first step… but prioritising expenses every day and saving money for emergencies or goals is another thing.
- Measuring behaviour is much more challenging than measuring pure knowledge because it is less tangible and can be more subjective too.
- It takes time to change behaviour and it may not be so easy to follow participants over months or years.
- It can be influenced by many external factors – what if one participant starts getting out of debt thanks to the training, but four months later loses his job… and has to borrow more money to pay for his daily food?
- Confidentiality must be ensured; indicators should not be ambiguous; and you need to collect enough data to make your impact study significant.
A few pieces of advice:
- Don’t be too ambitious: focus your training programme on one or two objectives (example: give tools and confidence to participants to get out of debt).
- Define what you want to measure according to your objectives (narrow down your measures).
- Measure your participants’ situation before the training. Make sure you don’t use jargon. Get a broad picture (all expenses, debt level, income and savings). This will help you analyse potential biases (example higher savings due to… a second income or a pay rise).
- If you can, get objective data (third party for example).
- Get qualitative data- organise focus groups and let participants spontaneously speak of the broad impact of the training.
- Get success stories: a few participants are likely to quickly apply what they have learned and actually change their attitude towards money and life- get their testimonies.
- Keep measuring participants’ situation and the couple of indicators you are focusing on at regular intervals (every month for at least one or two years). Following up can help you get long term imact data and keep encouraging participants implement what they have learned.
- Give an incentive but make it clear that there is no reward in “tricking” the data and only giving positive answers.
To come soon:
- listen to our webinar on the challenges of measuring Financial Education impact.
- Join our Impact Challenge
Tool box:
- follow up ideas
- impact measurement tools for low literate, literate and students
Measure impact |
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