Annual Review 2020 Results

By Joanne Davies, Charityworks graduate and Meike Beckford, Lead Director

The results are in for the Dosh Annual Review 2020 and they are excellent!

We asked all of the people we support, their support staff and families to complete a survey telling Dosh how we did this year. Almost 200 people replied with their thoughts and what they would like to see in future from Dosh. We asked you to tell us what you think about Dosh as a whole as well as lots of different parts of our service to see where our strengths lie and where more work needs to be put in to make sure you are getting the most out of Dosh.

The Annual Review results (which you can download here) show an overview of what you thought of Dosh’s work this past year. Here are some of the highlights:

• 92% of people who responded were either Happy or Very Happy with the support Dosh offers.
• 94% said Dosh kept their money safe.
• 87% of people who responded said they were able to use their money to do the things they want.

“Manager xxx offers and recommends Dosh to all new clients and believes it offers best possible way for vulnerable people to have and look after money”

“I feel like [my advocate] knows me and understands me. But she will make sure I am not wasting my money unnecessarily which means my money is safe.”

“[My advocate] is amazing, she is very involved and makes people’s dreams come true”

• 85% said their money plan included all the things they enjoy doing.
• 85% of people who responded said Dosh sent them their money and paid their bills on time.
• 85% agreed or strongly agreed that their advocates know them, their likes and dislikes

Learning from the review and what we do now

We also want to get better based on your feedback from the review.

“Bills paid and managed, budgets adaptive and person centred and maximising income means [the people we support] have money to enjoy life”

We know that payments and communication are working really well for most people, but we don’t get it right all the time so we could still get better. We have already increased the number of people working in our finance team, so they have time for everyone’s requests and we are reviewing our processes to help us make payments processes as smooth as possible.

We will keep working with you to make the Money Plan easier to understand and enable you to use it between visits and ensure you have access to this even when we can’t visit in person.

Our experience from the Coronavirus lockdown has shown how important online and card payments are and we are looking at new ways to enable more online payments and give people access to cards where needed if they can’t do this themselves. Our aim is to enable people to be as independent as possible with their money and be able to use money for the things they want. This means we will still support you to look at what options are already out there from banks etc. that would give you your own account. For those people that can’t manage this, we are piloting a debit card through the Dosh account and hope to be able to roll this out in 2021.

“[Our advocates] are lovely, they know [this person’s] likes and dislikes, speak to her with respect and never rush her”

As we have not been able to visit most people in person for a while, we wanted to ask how you had found remote support and what you would like going forward. Most people said they would like a mixture of in-person and remote visits. We will work with you in 2021 to test this and think about how we can still be financial advocates for everyone we support without seeing them so often.

You can download the full results here or read about our Dosh Promise to understand the standards we are working to.