Date: July 7, 2015

Description: CFS and Asset Funders Network hosted a webinar on financial coaching.  Financial Coaching is a strategy showing success in helping people improve their financial well-being by focusing on behavior change.   The webinar highlighted a new approach for measuring the effectiveness of financial coaching:  The Financial Capability Scale. 

Within the promising and growing field of financial coaching, a significant barrier to the effective replication and scale of financial coaching remains: a lack of standardized metrics to help assess effectiveness in a consistent manner across grantees or the broader field. 

Community-based financial coaching programs have developed existing data points reflecting outcomes or outputs based on their unique interests and mission, demands from funders, and goal setting by participants. The resultant lack of uniformity in measures is a barrier to both scaling and more rigorous program assessment.  

By coalescing around a set of measures that organizations can readily integrate into their existing client tracking system, funders, policymakers, and other stakeholders will be able to better understand the outcomes and impact of the delivery of their financial coaching investments.

Speakers included:

• J. Michael Collins, Center for Financial Security, University of Wisconsin at Madison
• Regina Salliey, The Annie E. Casey Foundation