Engaging with members in the most challenging of times
Over the last decade, we’ve seen financial wellbeing grow in importance. Long gone are the days where pensions existed in a silo of their own, thought of as entirely separate to people’s other savings.
Most of us would agree that we want people to feel secure and in control of their overall finances. In practice, this means people being able to put food on the table today, deal with the unexpected tomorrow, and be on course for a healthy financial future one day.
The pandemic and more recently the cost-of-living crisis has led to a heightened sense of awareness around financial wellbeing. As prices rise at rates not seen in four decades, people are facing ‘new’ challenges around affordability. It’s unchartered territory, and as communicators we need to respond accordingly otherwise we run the risk of alienating our audience altogether.
In normal times, it’s hard enough to get people to engage with their pensions. After all, people are interested in the here and now and find it hard to think about a time in the future.
In the past, we often used hard-hitting or humorous taglines and imagery within our communications to help drive better member outcomes. FOMO (fear of missing out) and herd mentality techniques were common-place and we led with headlines such as ‘Are you missing out on free pay? X% of your colleagues are benefitting from the full company contributions, why aren’t you?’. While not everyone would agree with the use of these techniques anyway, even for the advocates, they are off the table for a while!
The new world is also affecting what communications we’re being asked to deliver. With clients increasingly mindful of what they feel they can ask people to do. Just the other day, we had a conversation with one of our clients about the pros and cons of proceeding with an auto-escalation strategy. After much discussion, it was decided the strategy should go ahead (given its long-term nature), but with the caveat that messaging and calls to action should be used extremely sensitively.
When producing communications (particularly action-based ones), it’s extremely important we provide a balanced and guilt-free view. The current climate should provide an overlay across all our communications and affect:
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If we fail to recognise the very real day-to-day challenges people are facing, we run the risk of our communications not landing well and have the opposite effect that we’d hoped for.