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Sally BlackwellThis is a useful conversation; and part of the purpose of the pilot was always to tease this stuff out.
From my perspective the key issue is how effective the advice is (i.e. its ability to get people over what ever decision making barriers they have and prompt change and therefore a better outcome for them), and one of the key elements of that is trust. Whether the householder trusts the person giving them advice.
Independence (not being aligned – or being seen to be aligned) with a particular product is part of that.
Of course currently advisors all have different operating models. There is no govt or other funding source that make independent advice accessible to all households, therefore someone somewhere will always be selling products. Some advisors (EDAs, The HEAC when it existed) categorically won’t mention particular products, others will be selling products and services to pay for the advice (some community enterprises do this), and still others may be ‘advisors’ only as an adjunct to sales (there’s no one in this category on this site).
What a decision-making tool like Vicki is suggesting would do is provide a framework for households (and advisors) to know their decision making process is robust and the outcome will positive for them.
Maybe whether one person or another does or doesn’t mention a particular product or supplier is a separate issue (and probably one we can’t control anyway). But we could help raise the bar.
On the issue of whether people want to connect with each other through the Hub to share intell. I guess that’s another issue again and maybe one best done off line (at least for the time being).
One of the things we want from the pilot is a set of guidelines around information sharing on the site. It is proving rather difficult to facilitate this conversation through the site and we might look at another face to face meeting at some point in the future to address this and some other issues.
Norman, I do agree though that some people just want you to tell them what to do!
