How the University of Pittsburgh’s Communications Campaign Drove Retirement Savings

In an effort to motivate participants to “take an ownership stake in their future” and proactively save for retirement, the University of Pittsburgh joined forces with TIAA and embarked on a communications campaign to educate employees and simplify their retirement savings journey.

The collaboration began in 2017, when Pitt introduced new options to its retirement savings plan and streamlined its investment menu. Since then, the university has continued to work with TIAA on the “Write Your Own Financial Story” campaign in order to help more staff and faculty save for retirement.

Simplifying the Plan

Pitt froze its defined benefit plan in 2016, barring any new participants from joining, says Jay Mahoney, a relationship manager at TIAA. He says the pension plan was “creating bad outcomes” for employees, causing the university to switch to a defined contribution 403(b) plan.

“It was not uncommon in the past for institutions like Pitt to have multiple recordkeepers which administer to one plan or a couple of plans,” Mahoney says. “What happened was: Employees started to identify with the recordkeepers [or] the vendors. So here Pitt is sponsoring this very attractive plan … but the employees are identifying with the vendors.”

As a result, a massive consolidation took place so that the university could move to a single vendor that could provide all the services needed, while also allowing participants to identify the retirement plan more with the institution, as opposed to the numerous recordkeepers.

“Because Pitt itself is ranked as one of the top research institutions in the country, it has a history of innovation, both on the medical side and the technology side,” Mahoney says. “We really wanted folks to identify with Pitt and the decisions they were making within the plan.”

Once the consolidation was complete, TIAA helped Pitt streamline its investment menu and implement automatic enrollment.

Around the same time, the university established a retirement oversight committee with fiduciary partner CAPTRUST. The committee consisted of representatives of faculty and staff retirees, as well as fiduciary advisers who facilitated the meetings on a quarterly basis.

As part of the university’s due diligence review, Melissa Kluchurosky, the current director of benefits at Pitt, says the committee reviewed how the plan’s actively managed funds were performing. Kluchurosky was Pitt’s benefits supervisor at this time, focusing on health and welfare benefits, and John Kozar was the assistant vice chancellor of benefits. Kozar has since retired; Kluchurosky became the head of benefits in May 2022.

“As part of that [due diligence review], we had way too many funds that far exceeded the ability to have a strong, fiduciary responsibility …” Kluchurosky says. “So we cut the [number of] funds in half, basically to streamline and to ensure that we have eliminated duplicate funds or things along those lines.”

Mahoney says that before the review, there were four money market funds in the menu, which he describes as “unwieldy.” The simplification provided an opportunity to encourage employees to be active in their choice of retirement saving strategy, he says.

Megan Yost, a senior vice president and engagement strategist at Segal Benz, says moving to a streamlined menu of investment options that provides fewer choices for participants has become a popular strategy among plan sponsors.

“This has been a trend for many years in the retirement industry, because all of the research has shown that people are generally more overwhelmed when there are more options, and it leads to inertia and inaction,” Yost says.

In addition to the streamlined investment menu, the collaboration with TIAA provided new options like a self-directed brokerage account and a 457(b) plan that offers employees the flexibility to save more, with fewer penalties for early withdrawals.

Communicating to Diverse Employees

The communication campaign to educate employees about these changes included new website content and educational programming in the form of webinars, seminars and on-campus workshops with TIAA financial advisers.

The HR website now provides three tiers of investing strategies depending on the participant’s comfort level. The first tier provides advice for those who prefer a hands-off approach. The second is for those comfortable with choosing their investments. The third is for active, experienced investors.

Kluchurosky says the website content was an important facet to improve because it needed to reach a broad range of employees at the university. Pitt’s faculty includes research professors and clinicians at the school of medicine, as well as information technology staff, groundskeepers, maintenance workers, food service providers, janitorial staff and more.

Pitt employs about 15,000 people (52% women, 48% men), all at different phases of life. For example, Kluchurosky says one participant may be a recent graduate starting their first job at the university and coping with significant student loan debt. At the same time, another participant could be mid-career and looking to purchase a house or save for their children’s college education.

“Being able to make sure that we touch people … where they are in life was important to us with any of these campaigns and any of the communications that we do,” Kluchurosky says.

Given differences in access among employees—some may be comfortable going online, whereas others are more comfortable going to an in-person information session—Kluchurosky says that through the partnership with TIAA, the university is able to address the diverse needs of its employee population.

Pitt’s Office of Human Resources’ website also includes various employee stories that  highlight the retirement savings journeys of employees from the Millennial generation through the Baby Boomer generation. This is similar to the idea of providing employees a variety of personas as examples that allow participants to see people they can relate to and use as an example when exploring retirement savings strategies.

“It’s similar to the concept when you are a consumer shopping on a site like Amazon, and it says, ‘People like me are also reading these books,’” Yost says. “It helps people relate to the persona and determine whether the benefits they’re choosing or the savings rate [they’re choosing] are outlined by that persona. … It helps break down what can be really complex information.”

Targeted Communications

Out of Pitt’s nearly 15,000 employees, Kluchurosky says only about 200 are not contributing to the retirement plan. She says this could be because some are still in the frozen DB plan or there are new hires who have not had the opportunity to enroll yet.

“We do try to target that group and do additional outreach to them at least once, if not twice, a year to remind them [of] the opportunity and the match that we have,” Kluchurosky says.

The university matches employee contributions between 3% and 8%, and after a 2 1/2-year vesting period, an employee can receive an additional match that can bring the total employer contribution as high as 12%.

Kluchurosky says the university also tries to vary the ways in which it communicates information, using mailings, postcards, webinars, social media, on-campus events during open enrollment and more.

Going into 2024, Kluchurosky says Pitt will continue to work with TIAA and take a “deep dive” into the plan’s data to establish and recognize areas in which improved communication is needed to reach employees not maximizing their benefits.

How to Measure Success

As a result of the campaign, the university saw more employees taking a more active role in managing their retirement savings. Pitt’s communications strategy and education initiative were awarded PLANSPONSOR’s 2019 Plan Sponsor of the Year award in the “Public Defined Contribution” category.

While the university historically has a high savings rate because of the generous matching program, Kluchurosky says the benefits team is constantly looking at participant data and analyzing individual savings rates.

About 50% of employees are defaulting into a custom target-date fund, a new investment option added to the plan in November 2022. Kluchurosky says the addition of the TDF also helped to increase savings rates, showing the educational campaign to support the addition was successful.

“I think measuring the participation and ensuring that individuals are taking advantage of what they’re eligible for is a big data point,” Kluchurosky says.

Mahoney adds that TIAA also measures income replacement rates to understand if people are coming up short of reaching lifetime-income goals.

“We do a lot of measuring of where we expect them to end up and try to focus on those groups that, for one reason or another, are coming up short,” Mahoney says. “That continues to be a big focus because we don’t know, for example, where Social Security is going to be going in the coming years, so there could be more pressure on these plans to increase income replacement.”

With any sort of change or enhancement to a plan, Kluchurosky says there is “never enough communication.” She advises other plan sponsors to outline of a communications campaign as a part of the strategic planning process. For example, she said her team outlined exactly when email notifications or postcards would go out throughout the coming year.

“That communication strategy that you have is going to be critical to the program,” she says. “Engage a lot. It’s never bad to overcommunicate and make sure [you’re] being transparent in your education and awareness.”

If you work for or know of a great plan sponsor, the nomination period for the 2024 Plan Sponsor of the Year awards is now open.