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What Goes Into a Successful Financial Wellness Program for Public Employees? Tips from Wisconsin Strong: Your Financial Security™

More than 18,300 employees participated in the Wisconsin Strong program's online financial wellness platform, which made extensive use of personalized and interactive courses, webinars, and quizzes for Wisconsin Retirement System members to learn at their own pace.

By Lizzy Lees, NCPERS
 
In order to plan for a secure retirement, building financial knowledge is a critical first step. Yet only 57 percent of Americans are considered financially literate. As a result, employers are increasingly stepping up to help provide this much-needed education in the form of financial wellness programs.
 
If you are considering starting a member-focused education effort around financial wellness, then you'll want to study a model initiative called “Wisconsin Strong: Your Financial Security™.” This campaign was planned and carried out by the Wisconsin Department of Employee Trust Funds (ETF) in conjunction with various partners. ETF administers the Wisconsin Retirement System (WRS) and other benefit programs for approximately 692,000 current and former public employees, retirees, and their beneficiaries.
 
ETF's interest in a broad-based financial wellness program goes back to some analysis it conducted about a decade ago, when Tarna Hunter, Budget and Management Director, and Shelly Schueller, Deferred Compensation Director, found that female WRS members had, on average, 20 percent less in their 457(b) supplementary retirement savings accounts and WRS accounts than their male counterparts.
 
ETF then began to work with WRS employers to provide targeted information to female members on the 457(b) plan's advantages; this was known as ETF's “EMPOWER” campaign. EMPOWER stands for “Embracing and Promoting Options for Women to Enhance Retirement.” The Center for Financial Security at the University of Wisconsin-Madison later completed its own study of the EMPOWER effort. It found that the information shared with WRS members helped to change their behavior such that female members on average began to increase their contributions to their 457(b) accounts in amounts that actually exceeded males.
 
For members of the ETF team that spoke with NCPERS for this article, this was an “aha!” moment – sharing curated financial wellness information through the right channels with the right audience could help spark what researchers would call a positive “behavior change.”
 
Building on this success, ETF began to get more ambitious in its financial wellness education plans. It formed a partnership with Financial Fitness Group (FFG, now known as “Enrich”). FFG at the time had started to develop an online financial fitness/wellness education platform and invited ETF to collaborate on it.
 
Over the next four years through this informal partnership, ETF became more comfortable with using online tools and incorporating them into the group's work. This helped ETF network with additional partners for financial wellness education. This included the Women's Institute for a Secure Retirement (WISER) and a local credit union that was already actively serving Wisconsin's public servants (and therefore understood ETF's audience), as well as other local and national organizations.
 
Another relationship ETF leveraged for financial wellness was Wisconsin's Department of Financial Institutions, which helped ETF secure a $100,000 financial grant in support of joint member education work.
 
All this collaboration came together in a pilot financial wellness program called “Wisconsin Strong: Your Financial Security™” that ran from March 2021 to February 2022 (that is – during the COVID pandemic). The campaign was enthusiastically supported by dozens of WRS' employers—51 employers signed up as “champions,” committing to take a more proactive role in the program. Employers received toolkits with branded messaging and educational resources, which they greatly appreciated and ultimately helped drive member engagement and learning.
 
In terms of messaging, the focus wasn't on retirement security, but rather financial wellness and how life events can affect your ability to save for anything—regardless of your life stage. “We tried to keep it fun and engaging, with images focused on life events, empowerment, and financial inclusion,” said Mark Lamkins, Communications Director.
 
More than 18,300 employees participated in the Wisconsin Strong program's online financial wellness platform, which made extensive use of personalized and interactive courses, webinars, and quizzes for WRS members to learn at their own pace. It covered topics including: an online financial self-assessment and benchmarking of participants' financial knowledge; 457(b) deferred compensation plans; student loan debt assistance and college savings; plus education on WRS benefits.
 
Here are some further tips shared by ETF for any readers looking to power up their own financial wellness program or educational campaign:
 
Be Realistic about the Resources Your Financial Wellness Project Requires: Many well-done financial wellness programs are completed as part of pension administrative staff's “other duties as assigned” – that familiar catch-all. But to try to run a financial wellness program successfully, on an ad hoc basis and without dedicated staff, can mean putting a strain on your team.
 
ETF's advice: to keep your financial wellness education efforts sustainable over the long term, try to at least have a dedicated program manager in place, who can give these projects due attention and support.
 
Your Campaigns Will Produce Data. Study It for New Audience Insights: Sifting through the data generated by your campaign will help you approach your key audiences with fresh insights into their specific needs. For example, ETF studied data gathered through member interactions with the Financial Fitness platform. This revealed that for younger members, providing them information about how to obtain forgiveness for their student loans would be of higher value than practically any other finance-related topic.
 
Embrace Targeted Communications: Financial wellness is a journey, so it's important to consider when and how you're communicating with members. Mapping out personalized campaigns tied to events—such as work anniversaries or even birthdays—can help drive engagement as circumstances change. It's important to provide ongoing education and consider offering content in various formats to accommodate differing preferences.
 
In Searching for Partners, Look for Obvious Synergies: We are all familiar with online financial content that is really just a thinly-disguised sales pitch for some exotic or unusual investment product – which is the very last thing any retirement system would want to provide to their members through an “educational” program.
 
So as you try to find partners who can help make your financial wellness initiative succeed, prioritize those with some solid “synergies” or connections to the lives of people working in the public sector. That's why credit unions serving public servants were a great fit for ETF as partners – as were ETF's employer sponsors. A not-for-profit group or think-tank working on retirement issues or aging issues may similarly be a potentially good partner.
 
Make Sure to Survey Members on Their Experience: To get insight into how the campaign's content landed with members, ETF surveyed them on their experiences. The campaign garnered an average rating of 3.9 out of 5, with 87% of participants saying they would recommend the initiative to colleagues, friends and family. A solid outcome!

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Special thanks to the following ETF team members for their input on this article: Tarna Hunter, Budget and Management Director; Shelly Schueller, Deferred Compensation Director; and Mark Lamkins, Communications Director.
 
To learn more about ETF and its long-running interest in promoting financial wellness education, visit these links:

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