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Pension Engagement Season adopts novel ways to get employees to pay their pension some attention.
What does Gemma Collins, TV reality star, businessperson, and social media phenomenon have to do with pensions?
Along with BBC broadcaster, financial journalist and author Iona Bain, Gemma has been spearheading this year’s industry-wide Pension Engagement Season (PES) campaign to get people more engaged with their pension. It’s a message they’ve successfully shared widely (and loudly) on national TV, radio, social media posts and in newspapers.
High-profile, relatable young women with solid social media followings, they’ve generated an impressive level of news and social media coverage and helped to reach new and younger audiences.
Tackling pension adequacy
Pension adequacy is an ongoing challenge, especially for women, as we’ve highlighted in our Women and Retirement Report for the past 20 years.
With some younger employees not engaged in saving for something so far off in their future, getting the message out during PES (and indeed all year round) needs fresh approaches like using Gemma and Iona, along with helpful tools and gamification.
We’ve proudly supported PES since it started a few years ago and we’ve broadened our approach to bring it bang up to date, collaborating with employers to support employees.
Scottish Widows’ 2024 PES campaign has a ‘Know it, Grow it’ theme to get people to download the Scottish Widows app, understand what pensions they have, and how they can take a few steps to a bigger pension.
Nearly 7,000 employees with differing levels of pension knowledge joined our PES webinars where we helped answer 2,370 of their questions (some of them live during sessions) and provided callbacks for those who wanted to talk with our experts directly. These have turbo-charged our year-round webinar programme which reaches more than 60,000 people.
We’re on all channels to engage audiences, using Tik Tok more than ever as it’s where most of the Millennials and Gen Z-ers spend their time getting bite-sized news and entertainment. This will ring true with anyone who knows a teenager, 20- or 30-something. Gen X-ers in their mid-40s to late 50s have quickly followed suit.
Spreading the message saw us take life-sized versions of our award-winning Pension Mirror to London’s Waterloo Station as part of a pension engagement ‘take-over’.
The results were phenomenal with the Pension Mirror being used every two minutes and we were able to help 2,488 commuters on the day, including helping someone find a £21,000 lost pension.
The AI-powered Pension Mirror has proved to be a bit of a game-changer when it comes to encouraging people to engage by finding out what age the mirror thinks they are, and how their pension savings compare to people of their age. It’s fun, but with a serious purpose behind it to get people to pay their pension some attention and has been used more than 600,000 times since launch last year.
Of course it’s not just about doing fun things: it’s about making a difference.
The proof is in the feedback, and we asked those who took part in the webinars for theirs. One client commented, “what a great pension week… you can learn so much and everyone should attend”.
A resounding 97% of survey respondents said they’re now more inclined to engage with their pension, some found ‘lost’ pensions and thousands of members rated us on Trust Pilot, giving us a pension industry-leading 4.3.
We know that as members use the app more, they become more engaged to find out what they have, and what they might need to save. Know it, Grow it, in action.
This is great news for employees who need to save more and make the most of their pension benefit, with that employer contribution giving them ‘free money’ for their future.
So, here’s to PES and to supporting pension members to engage all year-round. Let’s keep the momentum going.
