The Good Practice Mentors have been watching the conversations around Pension Credit take up and Winter Fuel Allowance, considering how we could step in to help and then, earlier this week, a request from a partner organisation made it clear.

Instead of delivering outreach training to support work finding older people who don’t usually connect with services on a geographical basis, a partner organisation asked Jo Stapleton – Good Practice Mentor, Outreach Specialist –  to switch it around. They’d be using that outreach training to connect with people who might be able to apply for Pension Credit, with reduction in social isolation as a side benefit. We know there’s a real value to changing your comms and outreach work around this using the learning from the Ageing Better programme so that the people you want to meet are not made to feel they are being identified or targeted as ‘vulnerable’, which for some people is a significant barrier to engagement.

Following the recent change in entitlement to winter fuel payments, there is a renewed urgency to find and engage the estimated 850,000 households (source gov.uk), that are entitled to Pension Credit and with it the Winter Fuel Allowance.

However, many of the older people we would most like to reach with information about Pension Credit, we are not in contact with, or may be reluctant to engage with formal services and support. They are often the people ‘no-one knows’ or who are hidden within their communities. The older person’s own preconceptions around what it means to be identified as a ‘vulnerable person’ or someone in need of support, alongside literacy, digital exclusion, cultural and language barriers, can also present additional barriers to engagement.

We are offering two online sessions, sharing quick wins and pick-up-and-use tools and techniques, from a successful proactive outreach approach to finding and engaging harder to reach older people, including:

• Insight from harder to reach older people about common preconceptions and barriers to engaging with services and support.
• Applying learning from ‘outreach friendly comms’, to produce materials as a tool to find and engage harder to reach older people about Pension Credit, including an outreach friendly comms template you can use and adapt.
• How and where to use your ‘outreach friendly comms’ to find and engage harder to reach older people out in the community.
• Network and share learning with peers who are also focused on finding and engaging harder to reach older people about Pension Credit.

We are hoping to follow up the online training with further training and support to upskill you and your teams, to proactively find and engage harder to reach older people out in the community via street outreach and door knocking. Keep an eye on our Eventbrite page or sign up to our newsletter for information about this – or if you think you could host some street outreach or door knocking training where people from across an area could come together to learn to do this in person – please contact the team via GPM@syha.co.uk.

The sessions will be run by Jo Stapleton – Good Practice Mentor, Outreach Specialist, and former Outreach Manager of the Lottery Community Funded Ageing Better programme based in Camden. Find out more about the outreach approach with older people that Jo and her team developed here.