A platform to help financial coaches better serve their customers

The Financial Clinic, which helps people nationwide achieve financial security, needed a digital product to share with its many partners without having to rely on cumbersome three-ring binders of printouts.

Change Machine

Change Machine is a disruptive social enterprise that empowers front-line staff and organizations to deliver financial coaching services and results. Built for practitioners by practitioners.

change-machine.org

The organization approached Familiar, and together we built Change Machine, a branded, proprietary web app that connects financial coaches across the country and serves interactive content developed by the Financial Clinic. Its primary content areas — titled Learn, Coach, and Share — guide providers, linking them to peer support and tools that help their clients succeed. The revenue-generating platform has also garnered the Financial Clinic increased grant support.

A Transformative Platform

Developed on top of Salesforce using Angular.js for advanced interactivity, Change Machine allows the Financial Clinic to easily update its materials and collect sophisticated data. Familiar continues to develop new features and refine the platform to improve the experience of financial coaches countrywide..

Learn is a series of focused lessons and interactive quizzes designed to teach financial coaches how to better support their customers in common financial situations. Learn also includes content focused on customers who face additional challenges, such as those recovering from domestic violence or those seeking to become homeowners.

The Learn Dashboard keeps track of your progress through all the lessons.

Coach is a case management suite that allows coaches to track the progress of their customers through a series of tasks based on lessons from the Learn section. Individual coach and customer tasks are sorted on a Kanban-based task board, and data is collected through interactive worksheets with integrated charts and reporting, allowing for immediate and sophisticated feedback and encouragement.

Share is a sophisticated online community housed within the Change Machine platform and supported by the integration of Salesforce’s Chatter platform. It allows coaches to communicate with each other and with dedicated staff from the Financial Clinic to ask questions and get answers, as well as to propose new areas of study and training and get technical support .

Branding Change Machine

Meet Charles.

Charles started out as a simple “CM” monogram with a set of dots for eyes during our first round of identity development, but quickly grew into a full-fledged logo and mascot for Change Machine.

Badges for the six sections of Change Machine: Goals, Assets, Banking, Credit, Debt, and, Taxes.

Icons for the three main sections of Change Machine: Learn, Coach, and Share.

We also built a site to promote the platform. Users can sign up for a free trial and preview key interactions through simple animations, and Financial Clinic staff can edit the entire site via Craft, an easy-to-use, flexible Content Management System.

Collecting, Storing, and Leveraging Data through Salesforce

As an enterprise-level data management tool with correspondingly powerful privacy controls and substantial quarterly feature releases, Salesforce is a perfect fit for Change Machine. It allows the Financial Clinic to develop and participate in a feedback loop—using existing data to guide both policy-based advocacy as well as the future growth of the platform itself. It also provides integrated reporting for managers at all levels within the organizations including executive summary reports and details supervisor progress reports.