Communications director for civil service pensions provider MyCSP brings retail tactics to one of the scariest and dullest industries around. How does his team engage people around September’s Pension Awareness Week and beyond?

What is Pension Awareness Week?
We’ll be in six cities in five days: Edinburgh, Leeds, Newcastle, Liverpool, Swansea and London. It’s a really big drive to get people onto the website to be better informed. A lot of people don’t have pensions on their radar. We’ll be in employers’ premises and we’ll be promoting what we’ve got out there in terms of information. What they get is a call to action that says, right, the thing to do today is visit the website or go and check out the scheme guide.

You’ve developed a quiz to help employees determine what they know about pensions. What does this tell people?
Where you are on the journey and what you actually need. And that’s why we’re trying to break things down into bite-sized chunks and get people to engage with something that really, as a subject matter, people think is dull, difficult, complicated.  If you take our quiz, that’s everything but. We’ll probably break it down into ‘How savvy are you?’ We know this is a big elephant and how do you eat an elephant? You eat it in chunks. Go away from Pension Awareness Week having your awareness raised in a fun engaging way and maybe do three things, but only do three things. And once you’ve got your appetite whet, start to plan for the rest of the year.

How does Pension Awareness Week help MyCSP communicate with its members throughout the year?
Hopefully we can start a dialogue. Our job will be to keep that drumbeat going throughout the year and we’ll come up with more innovative ways of keeping that whole conversation alive. If people do nothing but leave that room with, ‘I’m now going to go to a website and find out what I need to know from a standing start,’ that’s brilliant.

Why is pensions a hard topic to communicate about?
We often find that when we start talking about pensions, we start to have a bigger more philosophical debate about what people want to do with their lives. They are very compartmentalised into this is my working life and the pension is associated with work. But actually, the pension is the benefit that you can decide what you want to do with your life outside of work. What do you actually want to do when you retire? It’s surprising the number of people who we’ve met, who say, I’ve not even started thinking about it.

Within an organisation, who are key people with which to discuss pensions?
Our contacts are pension leads, HR leads, internal comms leads. So what we do is not only do we engage with members through focus groups, we do quarterly employer forums as well. We bring employers together and share with them the products that we’re creating and thinking of creating, we test what would work with them to give them information that makes their lives easier. Somebody who is an employer is actually a member of the scheme as well, so they’ve got two hats on. As an employer it really is dealing with the queries that you get.

How do you engage people with information about pensions?
We ask people when we meet them, we say how important is your pension, the average score is 9.4 [out of 10]. How well do you understand it? 5.4. There’s a big difference between knowing that it’s important and having the tools with which to get their head around it and identify what it means. What’s stopping you from getting to grips with it? The bulk of it is the terminology. There’s things like the phrase ‘trivial commutation,’ that are a barrier to people really understanding it.

How do you overcome that language barrier?
This is where I bring of the old retail therapy into it; when you know what catches people’s attention, in terms of being bold, creative, colourful. The reason we’re doing the game show, ‘Are you pension savvy?’ is because it’s an engaging way to start the conversation. If the turnoff is the word pension and if a further turnoff is the terminology within the word pension, you lose people straightaway.

Does that still comply with legal needs?
We work together with different sides of the business. You bring the legalese, I’ll bring the creative, together we’ll create something that comes out the other end that has a little bit of glitter on it that engages people but still complies with the messages you want to get across.