Money Advice Service: What Works Fund
Overview
The What Works Fund will provide financial support for projects which are focused on building evidence of the types of interventions that can make a measurable difference to people’s financial capability.
Funding will be available for the evaluation of existing interventions as well as piloting and evaluating new approaches. There will also be funding available to scale up existing programmes which have already demonstrated results to test the effectiveness of the project when reaching a wider group of people.
Funding will be split across two distinct streams in 2016/17:
Stream A – ‘What works evaluation and pilot activity’
The majority of the Programme’s funding will fall under this stream and will go towards funding and evaluating interventions to identify what works well, and what works less well, in influencing people’s financial capability.
Organisations should apply for this funding if they want to:
- Evaluate an existing financial capability intervention that they are already delivering and learn what’s working and how the programme can be improved.
- Expand and evaluate an existing financial capability intervention and test its effectiveness in reaching, engaging and building the financial capability of a wider group of beneficiaries or a particularly hard to reach group.
- Test and learn from a new approach to improving financial capability through a pilot project and an evaluation of its effectiveness.
Across all these areas, organisations will be expected to share the results of their evaluation with others across the sector to boost our collective knowledge about what works well and less well – and why, when and for whom.
Stream B – Building the sector’s capacity
To complement Stream A, at least £600,000 of Programme funding will be committed to piloting different ways to help financial capability practitioners boost their capacity to deliver consistent, high quality money guidance based on evidence of what works.
Funding in Stream B will support pilot projects that aim to test ways to achieve the following objectives:
- understand more clearly what generalist knowledge and learning needs money guidance/financial capability practitioners have;
- provide a platform to identify and share generalist knowledge and learning materials among practitioners;
- enhance professional standards through accreditation of generalist practitioners and continuing professional development;
- foster more coordinated sharing of best practice, peer review and evidence of what works;
- embed good, generalist practice within key community sectors, such as social housing; and
- enable a deeper, evidence-based understanding of ‘what works’ in relation to money guidance and financial capability provision.