Our ambitions We set ourselves ambitions in 5 key areas: advice, advocacy, technology, sustainability and culture, including specific Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) goals. In 2020/21, we prioritised work to: continue meeting more demand on phones and webchat make our digital advice content even easier to use build on how we deliver quality, accessible remote advice support local face-to-face services to reopen for those who need them most improve our people and learning offers with a particular focus on advancing EDI bring our design, data and digital capabilities together We describe our progress in this annual report. We have set out more detail in our full strategic framework. Moving forward with our service modernisation With our Future of Advice strategy as the blueprint, we’ve accelerated the modernisation of our services in response to the pandemic. We’re helping more people in new, innovative ways and making our services more accessible. How we met increased demand with Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) funding To help meet increased demand during the pandemic, BEIS awarded us £13.5 million of funding. Our objective with this funding was to work with local Citizens Advice to help more people navigate this difficult time and strengthen sustainable longer-term strategic aims supporting our Future of Advice ambitions. We focused the funding across 3 areas: meeting more demand remotely improving the accessibility of our advice helping more people with self-help online advice Meeting more demand We focused on helping more people by phone, webchat and email while building our capacity across our network: we provided grants to local offices to buy remote working hardware to solve the challenges of suddenly needing to work remotely we made our phone service Adviceline free for clients to call—by the end of February 2021, 244 local offices were offering freephone services and 63% of the calls we received arrived via our freephone channels we invested in and expanded all of our Adviceline channels to answer more contacts and improve reach to new client groups. We built a central phone backup service and recruited more local offices to work together to help more clients. More than 50% of the local Citizens Advice network now take out-of-area calls when they have the capacity to do so we ran our first ever bi-national recruitment campaign and recruited 500 new volunteers into the service 17 Our strategy: The Future of Advice