How do you run intake for a financial empowerment center?

Use one short, validated intake assessment at every way in, the branch, the center, email, and partners, and send every answer to one data set. The intake has two jobs at once: route each person to the right help, and give you the baseline you'll need to show the board what the center changed.

Why isn't a form or a yearly survey enough?

A form built for each channel or cohort gives you separate spreadsheets that can't be added together. A yearly member survey reaches the members who choose to answer it, measures change only in those who answer twice, and says nothing about the person sitting in front of a coach today. Intake has to work at the moment someone walks in, and it has to land in the same place no matter where they started.

What should the intake ask?

• A validated core. The Financial Health Network's FinHealth Score® is eight questions across Spend, Save, Borrow, and Plan and Protect. It gives a score, a tier, and pillar results you can route on.
• A few questions of your own. What your program needs that the core doesn't cover, such as goals, financial stress, or how the person heard about the center. Keep these separate from the score.
• Where they came in. Tag each answer with its entry point, so you can see which channels bring which members.

Keep it short. Intake that takes too long gets skipped, and an incomplete baseline can't be compared with anything later.

How should intake route people?

Decide before launch what each result leads to: which tiers or pillar results go to a coach, which to education or a product conversation, and which need something urgent. Write those rules down. They are the start of a coaching logic model, and they are what lets you later ask whether the help people were routed to actually worked.

Who should see the answers?

The person, and the staff who support them. Tell members plainly who can see their answers and why, and keep individual answers out of reports that go beyond the coaching team.

What needs to be ready before the center opens?

• The intake, the same everywhere it runs, feeding one data set.
• The routing rules, written down.
• A schedule for re-checking the same people later. See how to track outcomes for financial coaching.
• Coaches trained on reading results before their first session.

How does Attune help?

Attune runs the FinHealth Score® as the intake assessment, alongside an institution's own questions, and keeps each person's results over time in the FinHealth Record™. If you're planning a center's intake against a launch date, book a call.

More on running better one-to-one conversations: Run better one-to-one financial health conversations.