In our first blog post, we talked about how our initial thoughts had changed from finding different ways to offer advice and had we were now looking at how we can best revitalise our CABmoney website.
But what is CABmoney?
CABmoney is a debt advice information guide and resource developed and maintained by Citizens Advice North East Derbyshire.
The content was developed by utilising the many years of experience and knowledge of our debt team, other bureau advisers and external advice specialists. The coding of the website was all written in-house by the bureau I.T co-ordinator.
CABmoney incorporates a unique online assisted self-help Debt Management Plan (DMP) that automatically generates letters / financial statements, does calculations and is all saved securely online. You can access and update your personal Debt Management Plan whenever you want and you are in control.
Based on an established, award winning system
Citizens Advice North East Derbyshire launched the "mymoney" debt resource in January 2012 and were awarded the IMA Money Advice Performance Award for Best New Initiative shortly afterwards. The site has evolved since (including input from Citizens Advice Specialist Support), and "mymoney" has become "CABmoney" as we have made it available to all local offices in England and Wales.
As more local offices use CABmoney, it will continue improving through their feedback and we always look forward to hearing about innovative uses of the system. It has already been used to secure funding to launch new projects, giving more people free access across their community.
Why might it need changing?
CABmoney's current form was written in 2014, which in website terms is extremely old! Technology has moved on so much in that time that there are better ways of doing things. Back then, designing for mobile devices was less important and so CABmoney today can seem "fiddly" on a smaller screen.
We designed CABmoney with both our clients and our advisers in mind, what we don't know is whether this resulted in a website with "too much information", or was too "technical". Do we need more information, or less? Can it be streamlined and made easier for those who used it independently without ever contacting us directly for advice?
These are the questions that we will try to answer through this current stage.
CABmoney by the numbers
We are able to ascertain a lot of information about the current usage of CABmoney, both from Google Analytics and its own "back end" database.
Even though we are a regional Citizens Advice office (covering the Local Authorities of North East Derbyshire and Bolsover) CABmoney has been used all over the country. We can see this on Google Analytics (though this isn't an exact science due to how the location of a user is collected).
Also in Google Analytics, we can see that device usage has changed over the last seven years. As a percentage, desktop computer usage is declining and mobile phone usage is increasing. Surprisingly, tablet use is also in decline, meaning that the current trend is for more people to be using their mobile phones than more traditional larger screens.
In the CABmoney database, we can see more details on how people use the Debt Management Plan (DMP) area of the website. This is the only part that somebody would need to set up a (free) account to use as it stores budgeting and debt details in order to generate budget plans and letters to help deal with their debts.
As of February 2021, just under 10,000 people have signed into CABmoney. As these will only be the people signing up to use the DMP it is only a fraction of total users, but it is a good indication of engagement.
The rate of users signing up to use the DMP, has increased over time with a noticeable increase across 2020 (though the largest spike was in November 2019). This shows that there is more demand than ever for people to manage their debts with an online system such as CABmoney.
Do new signed in users actually equate to more people completing the Debt Management Plan?
In order to allow people to pick up where they left off, the system tracks how far through the DMP they have progressed. In analysing this, we can see that a high percentage of people (78%) sign up for an account but then go no further.
Whether it is because they are signing up when they don't need to, or once they sign up they are having difficulties in using the system we will need to make the user journey as straightforward as possible.
Our following research and consultations will focus on these areas as we aim to improve CABmoney, not just technically in the coding, but more importantly the user interfaces and clarity of information for users.
Update (24/02/2021): We have removed a number of obvious "bot" accounts from these graphs, though there may be many more. This would at least partially explain the number of people signing up for an account but not using the resources.
