Can Generation Y be engaged with their pensions?

We have all seen figures that show that despite the best efforts of auto-enrolment to get young people into pensions, people are still not saving enough for retirement. I covered some of the background figures to this in my blog a few months ago – Sometimes you are lucky to be in the older generation. So having thought about this a bit I wondered if part of the answer is that we, as an industry, are not engaging with them in the right way.

Engaging. That’s a word that I have heard a lot when people have been talking about communication. My experience in this area has caused me to formulate Crowe’s Law (well, if its good enough for Murphy), which states that the chances of a communication to pension scheme members being firstly, read and secondly, understood are both in inverse proportion to the communication’s length. Rather than attempting to kill a small dog when a small forest of papers drop through a letterbox we need to make communications shorter, to the point, relevant and attractive to read. In other words engaging. With average attention spans getting shorter and shorter can we aspire to engaging younger people in media they are comfortable with? Can we hook them in with targeted messages in twitter, Facebook, in game messages and apps that they can access on a smartphone? Could we have the ultimate in proof that people have engaged – the emergence of the Pensions Meme? Memes are everywhere and evidence that something has entered the consciousness of Generation Y. When our social media feeds start to fill up with pensions related content from Generation Y maybe we will have succeeded.

Finally, unlike my normal blogs this one is under 300 words. Short and hopefully engaging.