West Midlands Pension Fund plans to develop its online member portal after further growth in traffic and member engagement, as digital communication becomes a mainstay of the sector.
Using online tools can be an effective way of saving costs on communicating with members and increasing engagement, with many schemes adding calculators allowing members to estimate benefits.
The fund’s website had its busiest year for traffic in 2014, with 87,804 visits for the year ended March 31 2014, compared with 32,704 for the same period the previous year, and 27,531 in the year to end-March 2012.
Annual registrations also more than doubled, as members used tools to understand the impact of changes to the Local Government Pension Scheme, as well as preparing for retirement.
Antony Ellis, communication officer for WMPF, said it will build on this in 2015 by helping staff to become more “confident” in promoting the shift to online.
He added: “We will add qualitative data to this analysis by completing customer journey mapping sessions with select members to ensure that our electronic business model is fulfilling the needs of our stakeholders.
“During the year we noticed that the portal was particularly popular for members who were approaching retirement age as they used the updated site to run retirement estimates.”
Ellis said the LGPS changes also led to members using the portal to run calculations on how career-average pension build-up differed from the previous final salary plan.
Jeff Houston, head of pensions at the Local Government Association, said online communication and tools were a growing trend within LGPS schemes.
He said: “Most of the larger ones have access and the ability for members – through secure websites – to look [at their records].”
However, Houston said schemes should not go entirely paperless as they may alienate members who work outside the traditional office environment.
WMPF held a series of roadshows to educate members on scheme changes and using the website, resulting in a 10 per cent increase in total registrations in a three-week period.
The website was redesigned last summer to make it more customer-focused and tools were added for calculating the effect of the LGPS reforms.
Ellis said all of the fund’s 430 employers “are now providing some elements of required pensions administration data with us electronically”.
WMPF has also used the portal to offer paperless annual benefit statements, which is expected to generate “considerable” savings for the scheme.
Less that 0.1 per cent of members have opted to continue receiving paper statements, meaning the scheme is no longer mailing 170,000 statements.
Karen McWilliam, head of public sector benefits at consultancy Aon Hewitt, said: “WMPF are right to give people the option for paper communication”, but added that pushing communications completely online was something to be considered on a fund-by-fund basis.
