BACKGROUND
At Capital One, we’re one of the UK’s top credit card providers, with values strongly rooted in social responsibility and commitment to promoting better social mobility from school-aged children to struggling adults.
National Numeracy (NN) – a charity whose mission is to support Money Management, Numeracy for Work and Children’s Numeracy – conducted eye-opening research which showed almost half the working-age population have the expected numeracy level of a primary school child, which can negatively impact individuals, workplaces and society as a whole.
ON A MISSION TO CHANGE PERCEPTIONS
Recognising this challenge, and its alignment to both of our missions and values, we formed a partnership which set out to drive public awareness and engagement with a topic people had already made up their minds about – something most considered boring and difficult: numbers.
OBJECTIVES
Together, we aimed to:
• Raise public awareness about the importance of numeracy skills.
• Increase number confidence/numeracy skills significantly by expanding NN’s key campaigns:
o Increase 40,602 actions for Number Confidence Week (2021)
o Increase 86,783 actions for Numeracy Day (2021)
• Ensure brighter futures for both children and adults alike – developing an effective, high impact programme for schools was paramount to reach thousands of school children across the UK, securing their confidence with numbers and guiding their future-relationship with maths.
• Serve disadvantaged individuals: The partnership wanted to emphasise helping women/individuals from disadvantaged communities, ensuring our support is accessible to everyone, but especially those in need.
MAKING IT HAPPEN
Our strategy for success included:
• Boosting national campaigns – National Numeracy Day and Number Confidence Week were crucial for the charity’s success.
• Kickstarting NN’s Corporate Volunteering Programme, which targeted primary school students/parents, to help them to grow confidence/skills in mathematics.
• Tackling gender and the number confidence gap, a research study published by the partnership in July-23 highlighted a notable gap in gender confidence in numeracy and maths: 59% of women experienced a negative impact on earnings due to low numeracy, compared to 21% of men. We’re now actively focusing on closing this confidence gap. CEO Lucy-Marie Hagues now leads NN’s first Gender Taskforce, taking substantial action based on the findings. For example, the partners conducted a joint launch event and webinar series to bring attention to this gender difference within mathematics.
• Harnessing expert insight from our CEO Lucy-Marie Hague, who sits on NN’s leadership council.
• Developing/publishing industry-wide research on numeracy and launching creative/informative events.
DELIVERING RESULTS
With an enormous task and modest budget, it was the strength of this partnership that aided our successes, including:
• Taking action to significantly impact both National Numeracy Day and Number Confidence Week: Over 830,000 actions taken to improve numeracy (an 80% increase from the previous year).
• Increasing engagement: Over 103,000 individuals engaged in the National Numeracy Challenge, nearly doubling the 2021 participation.
• Reaching broader audiences: With 28 media appearances, reaching 40.5million people, and recorded 108,713 actions, Number Confidence Week saw a much wider audience – 25% increase from 2021.
• Encouraging positive attitudes towards maths beyond school: With 55 Capital One employees trained to deliver this programme, we conducted nearly 100 ‘My Maths Story’ and ‘Maths in the Real World’ classroom sessions and assemblies from October-2022 to July-2023 -reaching 8,400 children. Additionally, of the 36 teachers surveyed 100% agreed that the sessions inspired children to see maths in life beyond school! This demonstrated that with the help of the programme, the children were able to gain confidence with numbers and appreciate the real-world application of mathematics.
It’s perhaps not surprising that the 2023 campaigns became NN’s most successful to date, with more actions taken than in all the previous years put together!
