I took on the IPSOS paper for the DWP in the hope of learning more about “engagement”. The DWP were talking to pension experts but I quickly recognised that these anonymous experts didn’t know much
As one expert (#3) argued, if pension providers were obligated to promote pensions dashboard systems, it would allow for ease of comparability between products and providers. It was argued that, in turn, this would show providers to be open and transparent, instilling a sense of trust, and ultimately engagement, among members:
Anyone know knows anything about how the pension dashboards will operate will understand this complete tosh. This is not how pension dashboards operate and even if it was, encouraging people to treat pensions as commoditise, simply differentiated by price knows nothing about how the public sees VFM,
Janette Weir, in her work for Tesco and other has demonstrated that the public are rather more sophisticated than Expert #3 recognises.
“You know, if you’re pension provider and you know your fees are high, you’ve got no incentive to encourage people to use a pensions dashboard because they end up switching their pension anyway. So, you would have to have a regulatory mandate to force them to promote it, promote it properly, to explain the benefits of it. I’m not sure the pensions dashboard is in the interests of the incumbent providers in many cases.”
One quickly sees that IPSOS can see through what the experts see as engagement
Engagement was typically considered a positive aspect of member interaction, but the literature reviewed did not explain direct links between members’ engagement and positive outcomes in their pensions.
If there are lessons to be learned here, it is not going to be from the experts.
I am currently engaged in writing something for a pensions regulator. I have been given a template to follow. Clearly the template was written by people who were knowledgeable in their subject but I am sure if I worked for the regulator , I would not have engaged with the paper.
..what most product providers and company pension arrangements have failed to do, is to really centre the individual, the ordinary person, in the middle of the
engagement and to think about how things are from their point of view.”
How we move away from the customer into the demi-monde of pension communications is well described by a Dutch correspondent who gets what goes wrong
“What’s happened historically is you have decision makers in financial institutions. They have a finance background, super smart. They get it. Then there’s something that needs to be communicated and then it’s set into stone and goes to the marketing department who now make something out of that. And, by the way, before we send it out, legal rewrite all of that to be on the safe side
I am fairly confident that by the time I get my document back , it will look and sound like the template I was sent. This is called “prior art” and works on the basis that the best you can do if something isn’t working, is to do it again.
The further you get away from spontaneous explanation, the less likely you are to be understood. The best communication is made face to face, after which a video can help much more than a transcript. Take this video of Terry Pullinger talking to his Facebook followers
I wager Pullinger did not have a compliance officer editing that. That was direct to camera and straight from the source. As the Dutch communications specialist affirms
“It’s got to comply with the law, but it should not be the regulation that is driving them communication and the engagement. It should be what is needed to help ordinary
men and women understand what they need to understand… Relevant, understandable, accessible.”
All that follows stems from this. The further we get from the way we speak, the harder it is for people to understand us.
The Bank of England just about get it , this is from an internal memo on how to write things down. I have written in bold all the words and phrases that I struggled with
….reducing the [amount of] information that individuals need to process
• making information relevant to individuals’ circumstances
• employing linguistic ‘involvement’. For example, increasing the use of first and second person pronouns (for example, ‘us’-/‘you’) while reducing the use of third-person abstractions (for example, ‘the Bank of England’)
• expressing financial costs in pound values instead of percentages to improve
comprehension• using ‘everyday language’, such as ‘rising prices’ rather than more technical ones such as ‘inflation’
• using visual personalisation, such as interactive charts or calculators that people can input figures or locations into that are relevant to them. An example mentioned in the working paper was “an interactive chart that invited participants to find out what unemployment was like in the region in which they reside” (reside!!!)
• ensuring narrative coherence, which means explaining things in terms of what they mean for individuals or relating them to things that are important for them or that they understand.
Even when talking about simple language, the paper uses complex language – why?
Why so complex?
My take from reading (most of) the IPSOS Paper, is that engagement is not something you learn, it’s something you do. If you are Terry Pullinger or even Henry Tapper, you just want to explain things and yourself.
But most people are frightened of themselves so they put up “abstractions” instead of themselves and hide behind language that they would not use when talking to friends and family.
This is why we do not “engage” and why papers on engagement are so- unengaging (honestly I gave up on page 28).
We need to be ourselves and have the confidence that we ourselves are good enough to influence for good. If we don’t have that confidence or don’t want to engage – we can stay schtum. But we should not allow others to put words in our mouths or put our ideas their ways.
