This one-hour webinar shares insights on why service design is so valuable for organizations and businesses, and what is involved in the service design process. The purpose of this webinar is to introduce you to what service design is, how it works, and what elements of service design you can take...

Amidst the COVID-19 lockdown, community service agencies across Canada have had to rapidly adapt the way they engage and support people in the community. ​ A growing number of Canadians need (or soon will need) support as they deal with the financial strain brought on by an unprecedented global...

This publication reveals the outcomes of Bridgable's work with a federal credit union, cutting through their overwhelming number of offerings to better engage with their low-income members. It also discusses why agility is a better bet than digitization when it comes to our changing financial...

Prosper Canada, Peel Children and Youth Initiative, and Bridgeable are working together to design solutions that help low-income families access and take advantage of RESP support programs, specifically the Canada Learning Bond. This report presents a summary of the project in each of its phases:...

Service design consultancy Bridgeable provides an overview of the project partnership with Prosper Canada in April 2020 to take a design sprint approach in providing remote tax-filing and benefits application service solution. Over the course of four consecutive days, Bridgeable worked with...

Social prescribing is a means of connecting people to a range of community services and activities to improve their health and well-being. These services vary based on each person’s needs and interests, and can include food subsidies, transportation, fitness classes, arts and culture engagement,...

This guidance note is intended as a practical guide to designing a monitoring and evaluation (M&E) framework for policy research projects or programmes. Its primary audience is M&E designers and managers but it can be useful for anyone involved with M&E activities. The guidance note...

Spanning over four decades, the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) is the world’s longest-running household panel survey. The resulting data archive presents research opportunities for breakthroughs in understanding the connections between economic status, health and well-being across...

This guide contains 12 recommendations on how to design pilot projects with scaling up in mind, as well as a checklist that provides a quick overview of the scalability of a project that is being planned, proposed, or in the process of implementation. Based on a combination of a comprehensive...

This brief uses the experiences of participants in a service design process called the Savings Innovation Learning Cluster (SILC) to gather key insights into client perspectives and how it can be used to better program design. Four human insights research and design methods are explored—client...

The Financial Consumer Agency of Canada (FCAC) co-hosted the 2018 National Research Symposium on Financial Literacy on November 26 and 27, 2018 at the University of Toronto, in partnership with Behavioural Economics in Action at Rotman (BEAR). This report presents the key ideas and takeaways from...

Fair By Design and Turn2Us (in the United Kingdom) commissioned this research to explore recent changes in the poverty premium landscape, to understand if they are having any impact on the cost of premiums, or the number of people who pay them. Importantly, we did this through the lens of the...

Recognizing the potential of financial coaching to improve the well-being of consumers, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) commissioned a rigorous study on the impact of financial coaching programs.1 Using a randomized controlled trial design, this study allows, for the first time, a...

The research and policy symposium on income volatility was held on March 9, 2018, in Toronto, Ontario. Speakers from Canada and the United States present on key research findings on the nature of income and expense volatility in the early 21st Century. Speakers also suggest policy solutions to...

This paper has two main goals. First, we provide a review of 38 studies on the relationship between assets and children’s educational attainment. Second, we discuss implications for Child Development Accounts (CDAs) policies. CDAs have been proposed as a potentially novel and promising asset...

In its 2016 budget, the Government of Ontario committed to conducting a basic income pilot project as part of its preparations for comprehensive reform of its social assistance programs. Taking particular note of “today’s dynamic labour market” and a need to “strengthen the attachment to...

In this video presentation Sunil Johal from the Mowat Centre explains how social policy in the 21st century could be redesigned to accommodate the changing nature of work and income in Canada.   This presentation was given at the Prosper Canada Policy Research Symposium on March 9, 2018. Read...

Surveys are a great way to answer some of the questions you have about the people you serve and their thoughts and feelings about the services you provide. Surveys can help you decide which new services will have the greatest impact on your clients and help you evaluate the impact of your existing...

In 2005 the Financial Services Authority (FSA) commissioned the Personal Finance Research Centre to undertake an exploratory, methodological study to design a baseline questionnaire that could be used to measure levels of financial capability in the UK. In this report we begin by outlining the...

The 2005 Baseline Survey of Financial Capability (BSFC) was designed by the Personal Finance Research Centre on behalf of the Financial Services Authority to measure the four domains of financial capability which we had identified in earlier exploratory work with consumers. The questions set out in...

We deployed field researchers into communities in California, Mississippi, New York, Ohio, and Kentucky to delve into the intimate financial details of approximately 200 households. Over the course of a year, field researchers visited each family once or twice a month, logging detailed information...

In general, this research highlights several ways in which confidence and knowledge may be linked with financial decision-making, and suggests that a one-size-fits-all approach to intervention is unlikely to reap dividends. Instead, interventions need to be informed by a better understanding of the...

In order to provide practitioners and researchers with a standard, reliable, and broadly available way to measure individual financial well-being, the CFPB led a rigorous research effort to develop a consumer-driven definition of financial well-being, and then tested a set of questions–a...

The Postsecondary Education Participation Survey (PEPS) is a new survey designed to collect information on three important themes in postsecondary education: access to, persistence in and financing of postsecondary education. Access looks at characteristics of and barriers faced by those who enrol...

Promotion of high school students’ access to post-secondary education is a major goal of Canadian governments, in part because of its increasingly important role in helping individuals attain social and economic success. Yet, uncertainty remains as to the best policy interventions to encourage...