Railpen: Member engagement is vital for schemes’ ESG strategies

Sustainability has rapidly risen to prominence within the pensions industry, but engaging with members on their savings’ green exposures has proven challenging. 

Research by Nest found that schemes must emphasise effective communication strategies with members to ensure their views and feedback can be best represented within their savings. Yet for many schemes, this has proven to be difficult to implement successfully.

Anish Rav, director of pensions policy and UK market lead at Capita Pension Solutions, says the pensions industry must collectively improve engagement strategies.

Schemes should employ simple, personal language and focus on the ‘so what’ for members

Ross Mattingly, Ross Trustees

“Ask any marketer and they will tell you that to be successful, you have to tell a strong and coherent story with a distinct want. Unfortunately, as an industry, we very rarely do this. Instead, it’s a story of complexity and bewildering terminology, all wrapped up in pages of disclaimers,” he says.

Connecting pensions and the real world

This is the challenge being tackled by Railpen, the administrator and investment manager of the £35bn Railways Pension Scheme, which has approximately 500,000 members working in the rail industry. The team at Railpen has been increasingly reviewing how they can improve engagement with members when it comes to sustainability. 

A survey, along with several roundtables conducted with members, helped the Railpen team gauge their perspectives on its sustainable ownership work, priorities and how it talks to them about issues surrounding sustainability.

Caroline Escott, senior investment manager for sustainable ownership at Railpen, says the scheme found member engagement to be most successful when the “intangible and far-off benefits” are brought to life. There are countless approaches to help achieve this, but the key, regardless of method, is to know the “pension scheme’s audience and what resonates with them”. 

Escott says: “We provide a wide variety of benefit and lifestyle-modelling tools, education videos and animations, and online and printed literature and updates. Wherever possible, we try to connect pension matters to key life and career stages to personalise the connection."

She notes that dedicated channels, such as member representatives, pension committees and Railpen’s own sustainable ownership client forum have been used to promote dialogue between members and the scheme. 

Such channels allowed members to express their “enthusiasm and commitment to our sustainable ownership work”, she adds. 

Personalised and sophisticated 

Member-focused publications and a dedicated email address have long been points of access for Railpen, but this was expanded in 2021 with a 15-page standalone ‘Sustainable ownership member review’.  

“We create our communications with our members, and we measure everything we do. We work with social media member forums and have 1,000 members and pensioners who help us develop and test our communications,” the document states. 

The Railpen team uses web data, online polls and independent benchmarking to produce insights that are then used in member communications. The use of technology to enhance engagement is not unique to Railpen, though.

Roger Mattingly, trustee director at Ross Trustees, says schemes are increasingly leveraging mobile apps to enable members to check-in on their pensions at the touch of a button, while others are “utilising sophisticated avatars and video benefit statements to ensure more effective communications with members on complex subject areas”.

Though enhanced tech capabilities are vital when it comes to making it easier for members to engage with schemes, this alone is not enough, says Mattingly, who advocates the use of personalised communications with empathy over jargon. 

“Schemes should employ simple, personal language and focus on the ‘so what’ for members, ensuring communications clearly address the areas that members care about and want to better understand,” he adds.

Learning from experience 

Involving a scheme’s members in developing the engagement strategy and measuring the outcomes is vital to producing a successful strategy, explains Escott. 

“Great engagement involves going on a journey with your members, especially when the subject matter is complex. However, it is your members who are best placed to tell you the starting point for their journeys. In our experience, members are happy to help shape the engagement that will help them understand more about their pension and make the right decisions for their needs,” she says.

Communicating specifically on sustainability raises its own challenges, as you cannot expect the average member to understand immediately what it means for them — a factor Railpen has sought to address.

“Our sustainable ownership member engagement project sought to take members on a journey, first explaining that their pension ‘savings’ are actually investments, then describing what this means in terms of having a stake in brands and companies they have heard of and care about, before discussing our work in more detail and articulating the impact we are having on their behalf,” Escott says.

“We found that doing so enabled us to have a deeper conversation with members, particularly during the member roundtables for the third phase of the project.”

Using members to help dictate engagement strategies may seem to be counterproductive or contradictory, but there is no one better placed to understand what members want than themselves — and it may prove to be an untapped source of direction for schemes.