Admiral Group has used auto-enrolment as a vehicle to promote its existing pension schemes. This has resulted in the number of staff in its stakeholder pension scheme rising from 1,100 to 2,017 within three months of the plan’s launch in 2005.
Benefits administrator Lindsey Christie says: “The strategy was simple. We needed to tailor it to our young workforce, whose average age is well below 30, and we enticed them with a simple presentation that was easy for them to identify with, because pensions can be a complex topic.”
The insurer ran auto-enrolment presentations to encourage staff to think about their current spending habits and savings plans for the future. Free pens, sticky notepads and, most popular of all, free muffins, were given to staff attending a presentation, with the aim of making the event fun. Employees also had the chance to enter a draw to win an iPad 2.
Admiral made the presentations mandatory for employees who had never belonged to a pension scheme and voluntary for those who were already members of the company scheme, provided by Scottish Widows. All staff received a pension pack, including various examples of percentage contributions to help them decide how much they could afford to contribute. Tax and national insurance savings were also factored in.
“Not only did these things appeal to our workforce, but they were also the real key to the effectiveness of the campaign,” says Christie. “We personally didn’t spen anything on the campaign. It was all funded by our pension provider, [which] weighed the cost of the marketing materials against the potential future earnings and agreed to fund it all.”