About

In 2011, the Center for Financial Security at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, with support from the Annie E. Casey Foundation, developed the Financial Capability Scale (FCS) with the intention of creating an easily integrated, standardized set of measures for tracking clients’ progress in financial capability services. The project aimed to increase coordination across organizations so the financial capability field can improve its capacity to demonstrate client impacts.

The FCS Portal is the newest step in the direction of this goal. The FCS Portal is a data tool that allows organizations to input their organization-wide average client FCS scores for up to four time points: initial, during service, ending, and follow-up. The FCS Portal then:

generates a line graph of an organization’s data history to display patterns and trends over time,
estimates an aggregate average of all registered organizations’ scores to provide a benchmark for the field.

The FCS Portal is not intended to be a precise tool and estimates are provided for informational use only. Patterns and trends in the graphs are not proof of better or worse program performance, but can serve as an initial tool to incite organizational discussion about observed trends in relation to the organizational culture, context, and mission.

For more information about the Financial Capability Scale (FCS), click here

For instructions on how to use the FCS Portal, click here