Budget Simulator is used by all sorts of government organisations, all over the world, to get insight into people’s priorities when they’re facing difficult decisions. No two decisions are exactly alike: sometimes, it’s about setting a budget to hit a fixed savings target. Sometimes, it’s about seeing where people make the trade-offs between tax and service level. Sometimes, it’s about getting a broad sense of people’s preferences when any resource (time, effort etc) is contested.
A simulator is supposed to be just that – a simulation, an accurate representation of the decision under consideration. So, to better support the different kinds of decisions Budget Simulator can, well, simulate, we’ve just formalised 3 main editions of the tool. So now it’s even easier to choose the configuration that suits your situation.
The three editions are:
Total budget
Users are presented with your total budget; they adjust spending in key areas until they’re happy with the overall balance of allocations.
Great for visualising your organisation’s spending, showing the scale of a budget challenge and giving people ‘the big picture’.
Personal bill/rates
Users are shown a budget expressed as a personalised bill or tax rate – tailored to their situation. They adjust spending and see how these changes will directly affect their payments.
Great for helping people to understand the effect of choices on their own pocket.
Points allocation
Perhaps you want to understand people’s priorities in a way that doesn’t directly correspond to a financial figure. In this version, users are given a number of abstract points, which they can assign to their preferred areas.
Great for exploring the trade-offs between any set of options – budgetary or otherwise.
You can see some examples of how people have used Budget Simulator in different ways in our collection of customer stories.
And if you’re interested in using Budget Simulator yourself, or just want to find out a bit more about it, you can always drop us a line.
