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CLIENT CASE STUDY

Goodwill®: Delivering an innovative digital strategy to drive financial wellness in low-income families

Learn how Accenture helped Goodwill Industries International develop a digital strategy to drive financial wellness of low-income families in the United States.

Overview

Accenture worked with Goodwill Industries International—a nonprofit dedicated to enhancing the quality of life of individuals and families in the United States—to develop a digital strategy that would help it realize the goal of catalyzing financial wellness of at least 1 million low-income households.

Low-income households in the United States often struggle to manage their finances and rarely rely on financial services programs that are meant to help them with relevant advice and products.

Goodwill reached out to Accenture to help them address this challenge through solutions targeted at the needs of low-income households and individuals, creating stability in the area of financial wellness.

Accenture helped Goodwill develop a digital strategy that aligns with its capabilities and operating model. The solutions within the digital strategy are designed to be adaptable and customized to Goodwill’s member organizations’ services across the country. We also helped the organization identify potential partners to assist it in implementing our key recommendations.

Our solutions and recommendations have helped accelerate Goodwill on the path to high performance in implementing its core mission to enhance the quality of life of low-income households.

Opportunity

Goodwill wanted to address the challenges faced by low-income families in the area of financial wellness. More than one in three households in the United States fall in the low-income category, and although about 70 percent of those families are employed, they struggle to manage their finances.

These people find it difficult to access or even trust the plethora of financial education tools and programs offered by disparate organizations as these resources are often irrelevant to their needs.

Goodwill chose Accenture to help it remove these barriers to financial wellness knowledge and also ensure low-income households have access to relevant and secure offerings. Goodwill aimed to help at least 1 million such households achieve financial wellness stability.

Solution

As a first step toward helping Goodwill, Accenture:

  • Launched a competition—part of the 2013 Accenture Innovation Challenge—where university students were asked develop an innovative solution for the real-world issues faced by nonprofits. The winning team from the University of Michigan developed myMoney360, which provides online tools and counseling resources to help families budget and learn to manage their finances.

  • Conducted an assessment of nearly 100 existing financial wellness offerings as well as a needs analysis of the target market.The analysis helped the team identify gaps in the financial offerings available in the market.

  • Next, we developed a digital strategy that offered two key recommendations, based on the market assessment and needs analysis with insights from various Goodwill member organizations and our deep industry expertise. These include:

  • GoodCent$, a digital offering, which builds on existing infrastructure, relies on external partnerships, and allows Goodwill to act as a conduit for financial wellness information and offerings for low-income households.

  • GoodMoney360, an integrated offering, which works across digital and in-person channels operated by Goodwill and its partners. It facilitates access to information and provides customized financial wellness services to meet the needs of low-income households.

Results

Accenture believes that digital strategies can be instrumental in supporting the core mission of nonprofit organizations. With the help of our digital strategy recommendations, Goodwill has been able to:

  • Gain key insights—critical knowledge of financial offering gaps, the target markets’ different financial, emotional and channel needs, and a prioritized list of opportunities to be an even more active player in the market.

  • Develop actionable next steps to reach its goal of accelerating low-income households on their journey to financial wellness. It can now integrate online and in-person channels to help low-income households find jobs, manage income, budget money and control spending.

  • Measure the impact of its financial wellness offerings—a critical factor for long-term success of the organization’s initiatives.