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Administration June 24, 2026
How to Gauge Participant Engagement
Experts say the most effective communications call participants to action.
Reported by
Emily Boyle
Art by Mar Hernandez
Plan sponsors may think they have the content and frequency of their participant communications down to a science, but measuring the effectiveness of the message and whether participants are actually reading what is sent to them is another story.
“I think if you asked a group of [human resources] professionals what their largest challenge is, it’d be engagement,” says Kelli Send, co-founder of and senior vice president of financial wellness services at Francis LLC. “Communications are sent, but oftentimes not read, understood or acted upon.”
The most effective communication, Send says, calls participants to action. Judging engagement based on the proportion of emails opened or on plan data alone can conceal more important trends.
Picking a Communication Method
Send advises that sponsors must first determine the best way to reach their participants, a decision based on “knowing the employee population.”
While Send says “all” communication channels work best—as a means of reinforcing information to participants—in her experience, physical mail has been more successful in recent years than blast emails. While email is the more modern method, Send has her rationale.
“If there’s something important, when you get an envelope in the mail from your employer, you’re opening it,” Send says. If other members of the participant’s household see the envelope, that could add more pressure on the participant to act on the material, she continues.
Sponsors can also ask themselves how they would deploy critical information to participants in an emergency, Send says. When she thinks back to communications she received during the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Send remembers that her employer at the time posted transportation-related alerts to an employee-wide intranet site. Employers can think strategically about their equivalent to that kind of widely accessible site.
Ensuring Comprehension
Send also suggests that on some regular cadence, perhaps every six months or annually, sponsors can deploy surveys that assess how well their participants understand the plan information communicated to them. Sponsors will have to take time to address participants’ survey responses and feedback, but doing that is “healthy,” Send says.
Getting feedback can help drive more successful outcomes than simply relying on plan data, Send says. A survey allows sponsors to ask nuanced questions such as how well participants understand their investment choices. Sponsors can also incentivize the use and consumption of financial wellness content, such as by offering casual Fridays, pizza lunches and gift cards as rewards for engagement, Send suggests.
Judy Bobilya-Feher, chief financial officer at Aunt Millie’s Bakeries, says that while reward preferences vary by person, food is often a prime motivator. When a competition is ongoing, participants’ competitive natures come out in “great force.” But the competition can foster teamwork, too, Bobilya-Feher says: Aunt Millie’s held a campaign that encouraged participants to designate their plan beneficiaries, and employees leveraged positive peer pressure by asking one another whether they had designated their beneficiaries yet.
Some campaigns may have to be repeated to yield the best results, Bobilya-Feher cautions. In industries with high turnover, it is important to keep each new generation of employees abreast of critical information and understanding of material. As a general practice, Aunt Millie’s keeps financial wellness content on its television screens in the break rooms at its plants.
Bobilya-Feher suggests that employers also strive to communicate information in digestible and comprehensible ways that people of all education levels can understand. The participant engagement will hopefully be positive, in turn, she says.
“The simpler [the communication], the better,” Bobilya-Feher says. “Speak simply—in a respectful way.”
