Saving by Design: An Analysis of Six Strategies' Potential for Scale

We worked with six participating organizations through the Savings Innovation Learning Cluster (SILC) to go through an extensive design process to come up with ideas to help their low- and moderate-income clients to save. Though that process was extremely helpful in generating and refining their proposed savings solutions, it did not tell us for certain if the ideas would work for the organizations’ clients and if they could be scaled to other organizations. In this paper, we describe how each of the six proposed savings solutions were tested in a small-scale pilot, after which we conducted a scalability analysis to make recommendations about the potential for expanding the solutions on a larger scale through other similar organizations, a wider geographic reach or a more rigorous evaluation. Based on this assessment, we recommend two proposed savings solutions from the SILC project for scaling: ■ Stash Your Cash and Win—a prize-linked savings program that helps future Individual Development Account (IDA) participants build an emergency savings account ■ Automatic Workplace Savings—a program in which employers encourage employees to designate a portion of their paycheck to be automatically deposited into a savings account This paper describes these ideas in greater detail—including why we determined that they have potential for scale—and discusses the promise and pitfalls of the other four piloted savings solutions.