Environment Agency plans web comms overhaul to boost transparency

Employers such as FirstGroup and schemes including Lothian Pension Fund have upgraded online communications to boost interaction among members with their workplace benefits.

The agency fund’s new website is expected to launch in September, and is planned to improve “transparency and ease of access”, said Dawn Turner, head of pension fund management at the non-departmental public body.

To maximise take-up by members, the Environment Agency is ensuring the tools are suitable for the target audience prior to launch.

“At the moment our concentration is on the website,” she said. “We are seeing that the technology has to be right before you ask people to engage.”

Turner added: “We have to recognise that a lot of the people we’re engaging with are pensioners.”

A survey by the agency of the fund’s contributing members found that 73 per cent listed their pension as their most important benefit, ahead of flexible working.

“Our target with this new website… is to get 73 per cent of contributing members signed up,” Turner said, adding: “We are aware it’s a very high and ambitious target.”

The fund will use the website to promote its investment strategy to members, which will include a dedicated area for research around its responsible investing approach.

“We produced a strategy about how we’d reduce the fund’s climate risk exposure,” said Faith Ward, investment manager for the fund. “The plan is to have an area on the website demonstrating the impact that these decisions are having.”

Increasing transparency

Attempting to educate members about the inner workings of the scheme may be a good way of increasing their awareness and understanding of the scheme, experts have said.

“It’s a good way of getting people into the subject,” said Trevor Rutter, consultant at communication company Like Minds. “Investment is one of the subjects people find harder to grasp. Anything that can make it more relevant for people will help.”

The agency’s website overhaul forms part of a wider ongoing review of its communications strategy to coincide with both the introduction of the Local Government Pension Scheme reforms, as well as the introduction of government body Natural Resources Wales and back-office operators Shared Services Connected as admitted bodies to the fund.

In one of the changes, the scheme has begun using Environment Agency branding on its communications. In a summary of communications in the fund’s annual report, it states that the branding has been introduced “to better inform stakeholders, and differentiate the fund”.

Karen Partridge, chief business development officer at communications consultancy AHC, said: “What we would hope to do with branding is to say to every pensioner when it comes through the door that this is about pensions and its important.”

She added that a branding exercise was a particularly useful tool if a scheme was looking to unify its audience, making it a powerful strategy following the introduction of multiple new employers into the fund.