In 2020, National Debtline helped 94,030 people on the phone. We helped a further 28,630 people through our webchat service. In addition there were 1.4 million visits to the National Debtline website.

Business Debtline helped 26,530 small business owners and self-employed people over the phone and 12,370 via webchat. In addition there were 475,800 visits to the Business Debtline website.

In 2020, Wiseradviser provided 23,860 training places to 3,370 advisers in 920 free-to-client agencies across the UK.

Our team of vulnerability experts work across a range of sectors including financial services, water, energy and retail. In 2020, we delivered training to 3,280 staff in 30 creditor organisations to help them improve how they work with people in vulnerable circumstances.

We use what we learn from our debt advice services to bring about changes to policy and practice for the benefit of people in financial difficulty. In 2020 we made more progress on our key influencing priorities.

Our services put us in a unique position to understand why people fall into unmanageable debt and the challenges they face. Reviewing and evaluating the impact of our services is important to us. We use regular feedback from the people we help, across all our services and channels, to understand the impact we have and make improvements to our services. The framework we use to evaluate our impact is set out in our theory of change. This shows us how the Trust contributes to helping people across the UK to tackle their debts and manage their money with confidence.

It helps us to:

• show exactly how our work makes a difference; and
• demonstrate how our activities contribute to us achieving our overall vision.

Our high-level theory of change is as follows: