Project Description
DI worked with the Financial Empowerment Center (FEC) at the City of Gaithersburg, MD, to strengthen a monitoring, evaluation, and learning framework for the free one-on-one financial coaching the city provides for local residents to support their financial stability. Drawing on social and behavioral insights, we worked to enhance the project’s logic model by articulating how the project increases people’s motivation, not just their capacity and opportunity, to adopt healthier financial behaviors. Building upon this conceptual work, we developed indicators to measure key psychological pathways of change, including improvements in beneficiaries’ intrinsic motivation, self-efficacy, perceived accountability, and internal locus of control over their financial wellbeing. To integrate this work into the team’s existing monitoring, evaluation, and learning efforts, we helped craft a strategy and schedule for collecting and analyzing data on the newly developed indicators and how to deal with challenges like survey nonresponse and participant drop-out across survey waves.
In reviewing DI’s work, the FEC Program Manager said “I greatly appreciated their unique expertise in the behavioral sciences. The success of my program hinges on our participants adopting new beliefs and behaviors, but no one in the program could pin down exactly how this behavior change occurs or how we might go about evaluating the program’s ability to bring about behavior change. DI was able to synthesize and explain a great body of research literature on this topic and apply it to my context. I am excited to use what I have learned not just in my Monitoring, Evaluation, and Learning efforts but also in new staff training.”