The question of standardizing financial coaching practices and outcomes has been a central one during The Financial Clinic’s (the Clinic’s) 10 years. As practitioners providing these services and as a nonprofit participating in field discussions, there is tremendous interest in how to formalize a financial coaching program to establish, execute and sustain exceptional financial outcomes. The Clinic’s program, which has already served 15,000 customers, has been a major strategy to fulfill its mission of building financial security for working poor Americans. Its 54 financial coaches have supported these customers to achieve 4,400 outcomes, including achieving financial goals, building saving habits, reducing financial transaction costs, improving credit scores, reducing debt, and leveraging tax refunds for financial goals.

 

One of the most challenging aspects of sustaining a financial coaching program is balancing the tension between the efficiencies inherent of a single financial coaching model and the reality that the programs contend with an intricate web of community, demographic, funding and stakeholder priorities. Often, programs can expend more effort on navigating these factors and creative workarounds, than the actual services themselves. In 2011, the Clinic began building a new online financial coaching platform – Change Machine – that sought to mitigate these tensions and unify a growing field of professionals with tools to standardize the delivery of financial coaching services based on these themes:

• Practitioners are in the best position to determine how to improve their customers’ financial coaching outcomes because they deliver services in diverse contexts;
• Program resources are wasted by using multiple sources for materials, information and data collection in a dynamic environment; and
• Data is hard to collect, and even harder to manage, without support.

 

This essay will explore our experiences and the challenges along the way that helped galvanize certain strategies to create professional development and service delivery standards within the platform.

 

Consistency in the delivery of financial coaching services is challenging to achieve because programs face competing priorities, but practitioners are in the best position to balance fixed destinations and flexible paths.

One of the primary reasons that the Clinic built Change Machine is that it knew firsthand how difficult it is to manage a fixed model that could work for all customers and organizations. The Clinic’s history of direct services and capacity building work made clear that a flexible and supportive framework, with a diverse menu of financial security topics, best bridges these divides.

 

Change Machine strikes a delicate balance that is designed around a core set of financial security outcomes and delivers them in a flexible framework. The platform appreciates, while there are common elements to financial stress—a low credit score has a myriad of housing, employment, economic resilience and financial transaction costs consequences—it is up to the coach and customer to decide how working on credit best achieves his or her financial goal. Programs that use Change Machine are encouraged to address financial security holistically, but they can prioritize what best supports their own organization’s mission.

 

Technology helps support consistent, high-quality, professional coaching standards.

The breadth of financial security topics is broad and, in the Internet age, rapidly changing. Financial coaches are expected to combine expertise in technical areas like credit building and statutes of limitation, with soft skills like active listening. When the Clinic first began coaching, it had several support resources: hard-copy training lessons and financial coaching materials, ongoing supports like a list of favorite websites for specific topics, and in-person staff meetings to discuss and surmount coaching challenges.

 

One of the critical factors that drove Change Machine’s design and scope was to offer a consistent, comprehensive and replicable financial coaching model. Providing financial coaching resources in a centralized hub advances programs’ efficiency and effectiveness, and sets practice standards for new professionals, so that staff can hit the ground running with minimal costs to training for initial or sustained use. Many programs face staff turnover at a clip that increases training costs and slows progress during case transfers between coaches. A turn-key software platform, with professional development tools and a peer-to-peer network, helps alleviate these realities by shifting labor costs to technology and ensures programs maintain high quality standards in delivering services.

 

Finally, online software provides the most expedient method for standardization of materials and professional tools, while still allowing for frequent updates and collaboration. This is critical since financial security strategies and tools have to be dynamic enough to keep up with field changes, including emerging best practices and regulatory changes. Change Machine constantly evolves to uphold highest quality professional supports, always informed by its community of practice, where its users prioritize new materials and what topics need expert attention. In addition, one of Change Machine’s main supportive features is a listserv forum for coaches from across the country to get their questions answered in real time and exchange the field’s most promising practices.

 

Good financial coaching is shaped by data, but coaches and managers need support in how to leverage data for results.

Strong financial coaching programs are data-driven and outcomes-oriented, but there are two significant challenges: (i) collecting data accurately and efficiently; and (ii) creating the methodologies and supporting systems to analyze it, typically beyond reporting to funders. Without providing coaches and managers professional supports to address both, organizations may be collecting data for data collection’s sake.

 

A good data collection system is more than a spreadsheet, it incorporates ease of use and nudges to make sure data is correctly and universally entered. Also, well-designed technology can streamline processes and eliminate duplicative data collection. Change Machine users benefit from a data collection platform that is intentionally designed to be used throughout the coaching session to leverage the information that arises and add simplicity and efficiency to the session.

 

While data collection is critical for meeting contract or grant goals, managers frequently struggle incorporating data into daily performance management. Change Machine creates a level of accessibility and transparency for both coaches and managers that encourages a culture of inquiry for higher performance: slicing an individual coach’s performance against other coaches’, historical performance, dates, geographies, and across organizations’ programs. With this level of granularity, managers can isolate their own best practices, convey information in digestible short reports that arm them for staff evaluations, and still meet external stakeholders’ needs.

In conclusion, software brings standardization to a whole new level. Given the highly dynamic nature of financial security strategies and financial coaching techniques, a software platform makes the latest best practices readily accessible to the entire field and sets a new bar for how coaches and managers deliver and evaluate their services. High-quality financial coaching services require a sharpened professional skill set that includes more critical thinking and analysis. Change Machine is a platform built for practitioners by practitioners: providing flexibility within a structured software environment, easing program implementation, empowering staff to lead inquiries and achieve outcomes, and inviting organizations to embrace continuous quality improvement to advance an organization’s mission.