Financial Wellbeing during COVID-19

ANZ bank partnered with Junkee Media to promote their Financial Wellbeing campaign in a long-form article. This campaign included a survey of the financial wellbeing of young Aussies before COVID-19, as well as interviews with affected individuals after the pandemic hit. Small Multiples created data visualisations to illustrate how different people respond to the same financial situation, allowing readers to input information about themselves to compare and contrast with others in similar circumstances.

The Challenge

The original project was set to break the stigma around talking about money and to help young people improve their financial behaviour. However as COVID-19 became a worldwide pandemic, the story had to shift focus and address the struggles of those affected by job loss, financial burdens and an uncertainty about the future.

Small Multiples was tasked with the challenge of visualising the pre-COVID survey in a way that was still relevant in today’s climate, as well as making sure that it fit within the wider context of the article.

The Solution

Using the survey as a starting point, we analysed the data to identify high correlation answers from unique question pairs. This means that a large proportion of people who gave one answer in a question also gave the same answer in another question. This allowed us to see trends and behaviours, which we eventually used in the visualisation below.

“How’s your financial wellbeing?” allows users to personalise the insights that they see by answering the following demographic questions.

These demographics are then used to visualise how people like you respond to a variety of financial situations.

Flowing from this visualisation we can start to see patterns of behaviour, which were then grouped into 3 broad types of people:

• Financial forward thinkers; those that think ahead by building resilience into their finances, through savings and investment.
• In-the-moment thinkers; those who are on top of their financial responsibilities, but don’t set goals to get ahead.
• Retrospective thinkers; those who struggle to pay debts and don’t have a safety net to fall back on.

The characteristics of each are represented using their top 3 answers from the survey, using a combination of data visualisation and illustration to convey these personas.