PLANSPONSOR - November - December 2023 - 30

CONFERENCE COVERAGE
Check Your
Demographic Mirrors
When plan sponsors make decisions about
plan design, investment menu lineups and
financial wellness
benefits,
leveraging
demographic information and properly
collecting that data is key.
Pam Hess, the executive director
of the DCIIA [Defined Contribution
Institutional Investment Association]
Retirement Research Center, said, while
most plan sponsors have access to foundational
participant data, it is valuable to
peel back more layers to fully understand
employee demographics and attitudes.
" I think of all the data elements like
a house, " Hess said. " The first floor is like
some of the basics: age, gender, income,
tenure ... data that most employers can
access. The second floor can add in nuances
about marital status or race. Not everyone
has a second floor, but it's certainly aspirational.
The third floor is like the cobwebby
attic, and it's [considering] financial wellness.
It's so important, but maybe it's not
well understood or explored. "
Focus groups can provide more
nuanced demographics, and conducting
surveys is an effective way to gather information,
she said. Yet, she cautioned against
outright asking people to submit
development strategist at the Employee
Benefit Research Institute, said keeping
track of who attends employee resource
group meetings could also help an
employer understand workers' " psychographics " -variables
such as attitudes,
values and fears. A company may have
ERGs for military veterans or LGBTQ+
employees, for example. Tracking attendance
at these meetings can help a plan
sponsor better understand what its
employees value and how that influences
their behavior.
Demographic Personas
The panelists also discussed demographic
personas-profiles that align with the
characteristics of different categories of
participants-and how using these can
help a sponsor choose plan design features
and even investment lineups.
Personas dig into a group of individual
personalities, focusing on what
makes the people who they are and makes
them seek out certain benefit offerings.
An example of personas can be
seen in Capital Group's recent expansion
of its employee engagement program,
ICanRetire, which targets Hispanic participants.
The various program participant
personas represent different age groups,
participation rates and factors such as
financial knowledge and investing confidence.
The personas are invisible to
the participants, but inform the way
ICanRetire creates tailored content.
Developing clusters of benefit offerings
to meet the needs of different demographic
personas in this way is more cost
efficient than personalization because it
can target larger swaths of a population.
" You can have seven personas that
you do messaging for, and it doesn't have
to be [specific to] age and race, " Bearden
said. " It's a marketing exercise, at its core. "
At the same time, " It's important that
we are sensitive to the nuances of demographics
and understand where demographics
end and where identities begin, "
she said. -Remy Samuels
PLANSPONSOR Roadmap speakers
their
demographic information in a survey, as
many worry about sharing it with their
employer. Hess reminded attendees that
employers do not need to know everything
about each individual but can survey
pockets of the population instead.
Sponsors will also find it easier to
collect " anonymized data " -information
stripped of all things personally identifiable,
such as addresses, Social Security
numbers and phone numbers.
Conducting a financial wellness study
straightforward questions
that embeds
seeking demographic information is a
strategy Hess recommended. Further, the
plan sponsor needs to be transparent with
participants and communicate why it is
asking for this information, she noted.
Bridget Bearden, a research and
30 PLANSPONSOR.COM November - December 2023
Bridget Bearden,
Research and
Development Strategist,
Employee Benefit
Research Institute
Jared Butler,
Senior ERISA Consultant,
Institutional Investor
Group, Vanguard Strategic
Retirement Consulting
Summer Conley,
Partner, Faegre Drinker
Biddle & Reath
Monica De Agostino,
Manager, Benefits,
Compensation and
HRIS, MRIGlobal
Thank you, Vanguard, for supporting the event.
Catherine (Cat) Ellis,
Institutional Adviser,
CAPTRUST
Pam Hess,
Executive Director,
DCIIA Retirement
Research Center
Jeff Petrone,
Managing Director,
SageView Advisory
Group
Jake Spiegel,
Research Associate,
Employee Benefit
Research Institute
http://www.PLANSPONSOR.COM
PLANSPONSOR - November - December 2023

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