Welcome to SHARPEN; a new communications consultancy dedicated to improving the way people engage with company pension schemes.
That’s the corporate line done; this news feed, or blog, or whatever you want to call it is intended to give a bit more of a personable insight into what we hope to achieve with SHARPEN. Hopefully giving you another reason to talk to us about how we can work together.
I have spent many years working in the pensions industry. There is no getting away from the fact that it is a dull enclave of the wider financial services world. It is far more involved with getting things right (both technically and legally) than it is with selling itself as something that people should engage with.
Compliance is king and communications is the peasant picking up the scraps. If the “rules” say that an individual should receive a statement, your average pensions practitioner will be more concerned about whether the statement’s small print sufficiently caveats all the information, than whether it says anything meaningful to the person reading it.
Good communications is about reflecting on the whole image of pension schemes. It’s about taking time to think about how and why we talk to people and it’s about taking a modern, open and engaging approach to delivering important information and education. That's what we can help you achieve.
It’s definitely time to SHARPEN up the way we talk to people about pensions! (Don’t worry, I will get bored of writing sharp-based puns quite quickly.)