2020 Signature Award Winners: Promoting Participation – Small Company

This category includes education campaigns and communications that promote employee participation – to save, or to save more for retirement, in plans with 5,000 or fewer employees. Entries could be either complete campaigns or singular one-time communications efforts focused on overall participation, or increasing savings rates, or both, and for a specific plan sponsor only. 

1st Place – NFL Player Benefits Office
The NFL Player Benefits Office was established by the NFL and the National Football League Players Association, the labor organization representing the professional football players in the NFL to assist in the administration of the NFL Player Retirement Plan and has 12,600 employees.
The objective was to use the annual rookie campaign to educate and provide guidance regarding the 401(k) plan, learning from the prior year what worked and what didn’t. This year they decided to encourage maxing-out contributions because new players may not be able to focus on managing such a large amount of money. The organization used a printed guidebook, digital materials, and personal touchpoints. They created an eight-minute animated video and streamlined the beneficiary designation process. The outcome was that rookie enrollment increased by 13 percent over the prior year, the personal session enrollment went up eight percent, and online enrollment went up 18 percent. Sixty percent of enrollees maxed out their contributions. Beneficiary designations increased by 43 percent from the prior year. They won because the material was clearly written and did an excellent job comparing hypothetical players who maximized their contributions against players who did not. They did a great job of explaining what a 401(k) is, the video really spoke to the young adult audience and they had impressive results.

2nd Place – Ryan Specialty Group with Empower Retirement
Ryan Specialty Group is an international specialty insurance organization with 2,400 employees.
The goal was to educate employees on resources available through Empower Retirement and remind employees they can, and should, review their investments even though they are automatically enrolled in the plan. The company sent quarterly emails to targeted groups with unique messages such as, “Now is a good time: See if your investments fit,” with an image of a giraffe breaking through a room’s ceiling. The emails included screenshots of website areas most pertinent to users with step-by-step instructions. The campaign garnered email open rates of 42-78 percent with click rates of 4-22 percent. Nearly all employees (95 percent) logged into the website and there were 550 new users. Three-fourths of the participants diversified their investments. This company won because they used targeting effectively and the key takeaways provided to participants were highlighted, brief, and well written.

3rd Place – Red Wing Shoe Company with Transamerica
Red Wing Shoe Company, Inc. is a privately-held company headquartered in Red Wing, MN that owns and operates two manufacturing plants in the United States with 2,000 total employees.
This campaign was created to promote the non-qualified deferred compensation plan to eligible employees. Emails, a plan highlights brochure, and live and recorded presentations were used. The materials included imagery of the company’s shoe products. The results were that more than 25 percent of those employees targeted enrolled in the plan – a 47 percent increase from the prior year. Email open rates ranged from 25.6-38.7 percent with click through rates of 7.0-13.3 percent. This was a winning campaign because they captured the feel of the company with the images used and it contained well written, brief messages with links to take action. It achieved good employee response rates.