2022 Signature Awards - Promoting Participation

This category includes education campaigns and communications that promote employee participation – to save, or to save more, for retirement. Entries were both complete campaigns or singular one-time communications efforts focused on overall participation, increasing savings rates, or both.

1st Place – RWJBarnabas Health with Capital Group
RWJBarnabas determined that they needed to increase participation in the retirement plan by their employees who previously were not engaged. Per the Chief Human Resources Officer: "Our goal was to put retirement within everyone’s grasp and help them become the boss of their own plan — and future." They chose to attempt to reach people on their timing when they would be the most receptive: pre-shift, mid-afternoon or on the weekend. By identifying three groups, Avoider, Late Bloomer, and Motivated Millennial/GenX the messages were specifically targeted to each person’s life stage. The “MyRetirement” program was made to be personal and used animal images to determine an employee’s financial personality. The company provided testimonials by plan participants to make the messaging more relatable. The campaign used the company intranet, interviews, a survey, email, a QR code, a giveaway, and Money Minute Videos. The results were that participants who visited the ICanRetire website increased their contributions at nearly two times the rate of those who did not visit the site (16.2 vs. 8.4 percent). The Avoider group, the most difficult to reach, increased their contributions at nearly three times the rate of those who did not engage (7.9 vs. 2.8 percent). This campaign won because the creative use of financial wellness animal personalities was fun, unique, and engaging, and the testimonials were a great part of a visually exciting multimedia campaign.
 

2nd Place – Hormel Foods with Empower
For more than 125 years, Hormel Foods has brought innovation, beloved brands, and outstanding value to their consumers, customers, communities, and shareholders. There are 20,000 employees worldwide with more than 13,000 of them in the U.S. The company wanted to encourage employees saving less than 12 percent to increase their contributions, with a goal of 3-5 percent of the targeted population taking action. Many of the Hormel retirement plans have implemented plan design features like automatic enrollment, Roth contributions, and automatic annual deferral increase to drive higher enrollment and deferral rates. This has also helped increase the number of participants who have been able to receive the company match. The average participation rate across all of Hormel Foods Retirement plans is between 75-95 percent with a 4-9 percent average contribution rate. However, they strived to ensure more of their employees were set up for a successful financial future. The campaign leveraged the company’s purpose statement “Inspired People. Inspired Food.” with employee testimonials to inspire others to save more. The materials used languages other than English, such as Spanish and Somali. The following communications were provided: a video of retirees and employees allowing preferred language closed captioning, a postcard with QR code, email, a website, and social media (Facebook, Instagram). The results were good. They exceeded their goal by achieving a 15 percent response rate. The average contribution rate increased by 3.6 percent. Of those who previously opted-out of auto-enrollment, 2.5 percent contributed at an average of 6 percent. The company won because the campaign had a powerful use of testimonials from retirees, the use of three different languages reflected their diverse employee population, there was a great tag line, and the use of QR codes to easily access the videos and the social media use of Facebook and Instagram was smart.

3rd Place – Saddle Creek Logistics with Empower and OneDigital
Saddle Creek Logistics has built customized supply chain solutions for thousands of clients. Services include fulfillment, warehousing, and transportation. They have 3,700 employees. The company’s objective was to increase awareness of their provider’s app and online tools especially because no phones are allowed in warehouses. They also wanted to increase the number of beneficiaries on file and increase views of recorded Brainshark presentations made exclusively for the company. To entice engagement with the campaign they held a “Retirement Readiness Raffle” where taking action resulted in potential raffle entries. QR codes for each Brainshark presentation were provided. Flyers doubling as web content were mailed to people without an email on file. The results were that 236 people accessed the Retirement Readiness Brainshark, 90 accessed the Budgeting recording, 79 the Financial Wellness recording in English, and 21 accessed the Financial Wellness recording in Spanish. Nearly 200 different users added or updated their beneficiaries and 228 people accessed the My Financial Path section of the website. This campaign won because the use of gamification, raffles, and QR codes was engaging for their population.