The Civil Service Pension Scheme has seen a huge spike in engagement from its 1.5m members after a website relaunch and major communication campaign multiplied users of its online services.
The Whitehall scheme is the latest big name to overhaul its online portal to get more information out to members, with defence company BAE and transport operator FirstGroup recently undertaking projects to boost interaction.
The scheme’s new website was launched on July 31 of this year. The changes triggered a more than sevenfold increase in the number of visitors to its website in the month ending August 31, and a more than 20-fold increase in pages viewed.
Virginia Burke, head of business development at MyCSP, the private-public sector joint venture that administers the scheme, said: “We have had very good feedback from members on that, saying, ‘We now understand our pension for the first time.’”
The scheme – which has around 250 participating employers including HM Revenue & Customs – set goals to enhance members’ online experience, to rank alongside the best pensions websites and make use of current best practice.
Karen Heath, chief engagement officer at communication consultancy AHC, said there has been a wave of projects from large pension schemes and employers to improve access to online information and find out how members are responding.
She said: “We use a lot of website analytics to help people understand what parts of their websites members are visiting, and also to find out how hard the websites are working.”
This concept of ‘working hard’ focuses on how long people dwell on sites, how many pages they consume and what kind of content is popular, with AHC’s Heath pointing to animation and video as powerful ways of keeping scheme members online and engaged.
The scheme's strategy
The civil service scheme created a website with a responsive design to improve mobile browsing, a predictive and filtered search, reduced use of jargon, fresh branding and fewer attachments in favour of web pages.
This was communicated through a Cabinet Office email to 400,000 civil servants, working with employers to direct their staff to the website, as well as an article in the magazine of the Civil Service Pensioners’ Alliance, with the following results:
The scheme saw saw 136,000 unique visitors visit the site with 950,000 pageviews in the first month of launch, and members consuming 5 pages per visit.
This is an increase from just 18,000 unique visitors, 43,000 pageviews and 1.8 pages per visitor in the same period last year.
The bounce rate – the proportion of visitors that leave after viewing only one page – was also reduced from 65 per cent to 21 per cent.
But communication experts said such statistics are not definitive proof of success and can be misleading; a member could be spending longer on the site because they are not able to find the right material.
Matt Frost, chief executive officer at communication consultancy Shilling, said hits were meaningless unless scheme members were getting what they needed from the site, and scheme communication managers need to understand online member behaviour.
Employers are using pop-up surveys and helplines to gauge whether the audience was being well served. Frost added: “You get some really useful statistics. You get to track whether specific sections are being used a lot.”
