Get ready for April: Financial Education 💰

‍This blog post is part of our Benefit Bites Newsletter, where we provide monthly ideas & content you can use to create engaging benefit communications. You can sign up for the newsletter here.

🌦 April Campaign Theme: Financial Education

Hi, Vlad here, Airbo's Co-founder and CEO. For April, our recommended Campaign is "Financial Education," part of our Retirement and Financial Planning benefits education pillar.

🤔 The Why

Given economic concerns and the rising cost of living, companies and employees are spending more cautiously. Financial education can improve retirement readiness, reduce financial stress, and boost job satisfaction and loyalty, even if salary increases are not feasible.

🔑  Key Topics

We recommend having the following Topics make up your Campaign. Of course, the specifics will depend on your particular benefits and priorities.

• Budgets
• Savings
• Compound Interest
• Emergency Funds
• EAP Resources Related to Financial Health
• Retirement Program Resources
• Tax Tips

✒️  Sample Content

Keep an eye out, as we'll provide sample content in another post later in the month.

In the meantime, email these topics along to your brokers, consultants and vendors to check if they have any content to share with your employees (scroll on to see a sample email you can use).

If you happen to be a broker, vendor, or consultant, you can use this list as a prompt to proactively send content to clients.

Hi [INSERT NAME]- 

In April, we'll be sending our employees resources on financial education. Do you have any resources that you could share with us on any of the following key topics? We'll be collecting these through [insert deadline].

• Budgets
• Savings
• Compound Interest
• Emergency Funds
• EAP Resources Related to Financial Health
• Retirement Program Resources
• Tax Tips

Thanks for the help, we really appreciate the partnership!

[YOUR NAME]

📆 Annual Communication Plan

Here's how April's focus on Financial Education looks within the context of a year-round benefits engagement strategy:

‍Our Free 2023 Annual Communication Plan Template lays the foundation for a successful year-round benefits engagement strategy. By taking the time to plan out your communications in advance, you'll have a roadmap for what to communicate to employees about their benefits each month of the year.

👉 Download your own copy here!

📆 The Business Case

Have colleagues that may need a little more convincing that employees need more education on this topic? Here's what we recommend explaining:

• Financial stress can harm employee well-being and productivity, impacting a company's success. HR has the opportunity to reduce financial stress by providing financial education.
  

• Jinhee Kim and E. Thomas Garman found evidence that financial stress spills into work life. Employees with higher levels of financial stress are less committed to their organization and are more frequently absent from their work (Financial Stress and Absenteeism: An Empirically Derived Model - AFCPE, 2020).
  

• Educated employees participate more in retirement savings plans, leading to better retirement outcomes and higher employee retention rates.
  

• The seminal work on the impact of financial education by Prawitz and Cohart (2014) showed that employees who participated in financial education were more than one and a half times more likely to report having increased their retirement contributions than were non-participants.

Overall, providing financial education demonstrates a company's commitment to employee wellbeing, attracts top talent, and leads to a financially secure workforce, reducing the burden on company resources.

👀 Stay Tuned!

We hope you enjoyed! We will be sharing sample content with you in a few weeks to help you effectively communicate these April Topics to your employees.

To be the first to see sample content, sign up for our newsletter here.