Financial Confidence Quarterly Pulse — Instrument Spec

6-question pulse sent to every learner in scope each quarter. Feeds the Q1 board report financial-wellbeing panel. Anonymous. Per-participant trigger 30 days after first session, then quarterly thereafter.

Why 6 questions (not 12, not 3)

• Below 5: too thin to triangulate.
• Above 8: completion rate drops below 50% in mobile-first cohorts.
• Six is the published-research sweet spot for short-form pulse surveys on financial confidence (matches the spirit of validated tools like FCAB-12 reduced, without claiming to be one).

Design rules (same as Sprint 3 day-30 pulse)

• Mobile-first, single screen on a phone.
• Anonymous by default; opt-in to be named for follow-up.
• One open-text box at the end, not throughout.
• No clinical screens (PHQ-9 etc.) — financial confidence is in scope, mental-health diagnosis is not.
• No NPS — vanity metric.

The 6 questions

Q1 — Overall financial confidence (1–5)

Right now, how confident are you about managing your money?

Scale: 1 (not confident) – 5 (very confident)

Paired with the intake baseline to give the pre→post delta that lands in the Q1 board report.

Q2 — Stress about money (1–5)

In the last 30 days, how often has money been a source of stress for you?

Scale: 1 (never) – 5 (almost every day)

Inverted scoring against Q1 — a healthy programme moves Q1 up and Q2 down.

Q3 — Behaviour: automation (yes/no)

In the last 90 days, have you set up at least one automated saving or payment?

Yes / No / Already had one / Prefer not to say

Q4 — Behaviour: action on entitlement (yes/no/multi)

In the last 90 days, have you done any of these? (Tick all that apply.)

• Pulled your credit report
• Run a benefits-entitlement calculator (Turn2us / EntitledTo)
• Spoken to StepChange, National Debtline, Citizens Advice, or MoneyHelper
• Booked or completed an IFA consultation
• Claimed an allowance or benefit you weren't claiming before
• None of these

Q5 — Programme attribution (1–5)

How much has the wellbeing programme contributed to any of the above?

Scale: 1 (not at all) – 5 (a lot) / Not applicable

Q6 — Open text (optional, 500 chars)

Anything else you want us to know? (One sentence is fine.)

Cohort variants

The pulse is the same across all financial-wellbeing cohorts. Do not branch the instrument by cohort — branching makes aggregate roll-ups noisy. The variants are in the cohort-level interpretation, not the questions.

Trigger + cadence

• First send: 30 days after the participant's first 1:1 session OR completion of Money Basics Session 3 (whichever is earlier)
• Subsequent sends: quarterly thereafter
• Reminder: one only, at day 7
• Close window: 14 days from initial send
• Channel: email primary, SMS fallback after 5 days no-response

Storage + anonymity

• Responses stored against hashed participant ID
• Open-text responses reviewed by the MEM PL within 5 working days of survey close (safeguarding scan)
• Names never joined to responses unless the participant has opted to be named

Analysis rubric

For each cohort:

What this pulse feeds in the Q1 board report

• A dedicated financial-wellbeing panel (one of the rows in the four-indicator table for financial-wellbeing cohorts)
• The named win paragraph (sourced from open text)
• Risk flag if money-stress (Q2) stays high while confidence (Q1) rises — signals a hot cohort needing depth in Strand B + C

Quality bar (MEM PL self-check before quarterly report)

• Response rate ≥ 50% of active learners. If lower, flag in the appendix and propose remediation.
• Q5 attribution mean reported honestly — if the programme can't claim attribution, the report says so.
• Open-text safeguarding scan completed and any flag escalated within 24h.
• No false precision — confidence delta to 1dp, never 3dp.

What's deliberately NOT in this instrument

• A validated clinical anxiety / depression screen (out of scope; we are not a clinical provider)
• A satisfaction-with-coach rating (handled separately in the coach feedback loop, not in cross-cohort outcome reporting)
• "How much money have you saved?" (intrusive, low-trust, easy to misinterpret in aggregate)
• A "would you recommend MEM to a friend?" (vanity)

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Cross-cutting promise Every UK employee seat funds a free seat for someone leaving prison. The same pulse runs on the justice-leaver pathway — and the comparison lands in the SROI panel of the Q1 board report. memacademy.org/corporate/financial-wellbeing-employees