Project Overview
ASIC's Women's Money Toolkit is an interactive online resource designed to help Australian women make good financial decisions at important life stages. Women are a key audience of Australia's National Financial Literacy Strategy because they face unique structural and environmental challenges to their financial wellbeing, such as longer life expectancy, lower superannuation balances, and a greater likelihood of working part-time or taking time out of the workforce to care for others. The toolkit provides impartial financial guidance related to these circumstances and significant life events. The interactive nature of the tool allows users to tailor it to their individual circumstances.
Launched in May 2015, ASIC's Women's Money Toolkit was developed in partnership with the Department of Prime Minister & Cabinet's Office for Women. ASIC is the lead government agency in Australia with responsibility for financial literacy. The Women's Money Toolkit is available on ASIC's MoneySmart website, which provides all Australians with impartial and trusted financial guidance and tools to help them make better-informed decisions about money, and reaches more than 500,000 Australians each month.
Organisation
Team
ASIC's Financial Literacy team, in partnership with the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet's Office for Women.
Project Brief
The objective of ASIC's Women's Money Toolkit is to provide women aged between 25 and 50 with targeted financial information and tools to effectively manage their money, gain an edge on their finances, and deal with life's ups and downs.
ASIC's aim was to create an easy-to-use and intuitive resource that users could customise to their needs. We incorporated the EAST framework (i.e. easy, attractive, social and timely), which uses principles of behavioural economics, in the toolkit's development. The tool enables women to access information most relevant to their circumstances when they need it, such as when taking time out of the workforce, starting a small business, or separating from their partner.
Key stages in the toolkit's development included:
• creating new content on ASIC's MoneySmart website to address issues of particular relevance to women;
•developing functionality enabling women to select particular resources and collate these into a personalised checklist which they can email to themselves; and
• developing two new online calculators: career break super calculator, and parental leave calculator. Both resources help users work out the effect a change in work patterns can have on their immediate and longer-term finances.
Project Innovation/Need
Women face interrelated structural and societal factors that lead to inequalities in economic security and financial wellbeing. These include:
• women are more than twice as likely as men to work part-time.
• women are paid around 17.5% less than men, with this gap starting at the beginning of their career. Thus, women's superannuation balances are lower from the start of their working life.
• women's superannuation balances are, on average, 36% lower than men at retirement, while their longer life expectancy means these funds need to last longer.
• women with dependent children are more likely to be out of the labour force than men, and are more likely to take on a carer role for ageing parents.
• low financial literacy is more likely to affect women, particularly those under 35 and over 70 (source: 2011 ANZ National Financial Literacy Survey).
• women are more likely to live in poverty, and single parent households (87% of which are headed by women) are more affected by financial stress.
The Women's Money Toolkit aims to improve women's financial literacy and empower them to take action to improve their financial position regardless of their life stage or circumstances.
Design Challenge
The major challenge was always to ensure as many women as possible became aware of, and could easily use the toolkit to improve their financial circumstances.
ASIC launched the Women's Money Toolkit on 25 May 2015 and promoted it widely across stakeholder networks, the news media and our social media channels.
The toolkit was promoted to our more than 65,000 Facebook fans, 24,000 e-newsletter subscribers, and 10,200 Twitter followers. We also hosted an online interactive Q&A about women and super, created a 'Women and money' infographic, and released two videos about women and money (featuring Pauline Vamos, CEO Association of Superannuation Funds of Australia) and the Women's Money Toolkit (featuring Senator Michaelia Cash).
We actively engaged our stakeholder network to promote the toolkit in the following ways:
• Hesta member e-newsletter (300,000) and Facebook page (400,000);
• Association of Superannuation Funds of Australia's journal, ASFA Action (20,000);
• ANZ Bank's Super Bulletin (11,000)
• Women's Information and Referral Exchange (WIRE)'s Women’s Bulletin (3,000).
ASIC employed an external PR agency to help promote the toolkit, generating strong media coverage, including the Sydney Morning Herald, Australian Financial Review, and several other news outlets.
User Experience
The Women's Money Toolkit was extensively user tested by Latitude Insights with a representational sample of Australian women to obtain feedback on user experience and engagement with the resource.
The main features of the toolkit – in particular the ability to customise information and create a tailored checklist – resonated very strongly, with users reporting that this function ensured the information provided was relevant and appropriate for their needs.
Other feedback received from users was as follows:
• Navigation of the site is straightforward, intuitive and easy.
• Information is presented in "manageable chunks".
• The goal-setting aspect of the checklist is particularly appreciated, as is the functionality allowing users to email their results to themselves for future reference.
• Users find the content particularly useful when experiencing a major life change, as this is precisely when advice and guidance is most needed (i.e. "just in time" learning).
The effectiveness of the Women's Money Toolkit is evidenced by the fact that more than 40,000 users have accessed it since its launch in May 2015.
Tags
Digital Experience - Website
This award celebrates innovation and creativity in design of a unique user experience in the combination of text, audio, still images, animation, video, and interactivity content for websites. Consideration given to clarity of communication and the matching information style to audience.
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