It’s no secret that financial education has almost innumerable benefits. People who are financially educated are more likely to have higher earning potential, better retirement preparedness, and lower debt levels. The benefits even extend into mental health  — studies have shown that financially educated people have markedly lower levels of stress and anxiety. It’s almost a self-fulfilling prophecy, because better mental health leads to increased productivity at work, which in turn leads to higher earning potential and better financial wellness.

Given this context, it’s not surprising that financial institutions are investing in financial education programs to support the financial health of their communities. Especially given the financial stressors that are impacting the world today — high inflation, uncertainty around the economy, layoffs, resuming student loans, and many other factors — savvy financial institutions know that people are looking for guidance and direction around their finances. But to make the initiative as effective as intended, and to justify the investment of time and money into a financial education initiative, it’s important to be able to measure the program’s impact.

Aspects to Measure

The impact of financial education can be very broad, so it is important to first determine what types of things you should measure to gather insights into the value and impact of the education platform.

  • Community Reach:  The first important metric to unpack is who you’re reaching. Beyond just a total number of people or page visits, it’s helpful to be able to dig into more specific user demographic information to gain specific insights and to tailor programming accordingly. Information such as the age group and income levels of those using your financial education tools can give you detailed insight into who you’re reaching, what matters most to them, and how well you’re serving them. 
  • Changes in Financial Literacy:  Naturally, it’s essential to track knowledge growth to verify that learners are effectively improving their financial literacy from using your education materials. Generating data points around knowledge levels and tracking their progression as users spend more time with the education platforms leads to tangible metrics about user learning. At Zogo, we use pre- and post-tests, as well as gamified quizzes throughout our curriculum to track knowledge change on individual topics as well as financial literacy improvement overall. 
  • Attitudinal Shifts: People’s sentiments make a monumental difference in their financial behavior. In many cases, people may feel apprehensive or even intimidated by certain topics related to their finances, which may ultimately prevent them from making healthy financial decisions. Being able to track not only knowledge growth but also changes in the confidence and attitude of users is very valuable information. Financial education is not just about rote knowledge — it’s the courage and comfortability with this information that allows users to experience true financial wellness. Making learners more interested in or confident about financial topics is a critical step to track in the process of building long-term financial wellness. 
  • Active Learning Outcomes: Behavioral changes regarding financial actions are the purest measurements of the success of financial education. Whether tracked over a short or long-term basis, being able to monitor healthy financial actions is the true measure of whether the learnings are hitting home. Zogo recommends integrating financial education into your mobile banking experience whenever possible to make it easier and more seamless to track the active learning outcomes from your financial education offerings. 

Designing Financial Education Programs to Maximize Insights

Being able to maximize the insights that you derive from your financial education platforms depends on the education tools themselves. Education tools that are designed explicitly to generate insightful data, such as Zogo, make it simple to turn data from your customers and members into meaningful information for your institution. 

Some of the traditional forms of financial education that may be front of mind to institutions looking to introduce financial literacy programming may actually make it more difficult to capture this crucial data. While webpages, blog posts, web books, and slide decks may be easy to access and produce, it is challenging to measure their true impact. While you can trace clicks, unique visitors, and time spent on pages, this data does not show the holistic impacts of community reach, changes in attitude and confidence, changes in financial literacy, or the target learning outcomes of financially healthy behavior.

At Zogo, our education platforms are designed to maximize your ability to track these key insights. Our mobile-first approach yields more meaningful data and makes it easier to engage users where they spend the most time and reach them on a deeper level. Our platform also leverages testing throughout the education process, so we can track very granular and specific learning and growth data. We benchmark our user growth with pre- and post-tests to see exactly how they’re learning and improving as they engage with our educational material. Beyond testing, we also make frequent use of surveys of our users to track confidence and attitude and to learn what topics are most interesting and valuable to users. Additionally, our goal trackers and mobile banking integration allow you to directly see the relationship between the learning and the specific financial actions your members and clients are taking, such as refinancing a loan or opening a brokerage account.

Leveraging Data from Financial Education Programs

Once you’ve captured this valuable data, there are a lot of ways you can leverage it. The information about user engagement and growth can be critical to determining which subject matter is the most appealing to your users, where users might need additional guidance, or even what types of learning components warrant additional investment. 

The data also has external relevance as well. Numbers generated by your educational tooling make for really useful impact data that you can utilize in annual reports, on your website, on digital displays within your brick-and-mortar facilities, or on your social media accounts. 

Managing this data can be manual and time-consuming, but our friends at Kadince make it easy to track, manage, and report all community involvement data, including financial literacy events, employee volunteer hours, donations, loans, investments, and more. With Kadince, it’s easy to turn all of your education data generated in the Zogo platform into accessible insights that are attractive and easy to share. By pairing innovative education tools like Zogo with comprehensive software like Kadince, your financial institution will be able to create and measure community impact with ease.

Get Started with Your Educational Initiative Today

Financial education is the way of the future, and a crucial way to serve your existing user base and reach new customers and members. If you’re ready to learn more about how offering Zogo’s financial education tooling to your clients and members can yield valuable insights for your financial institution, schedule a demo today!