Helping people track down billions in lost pensions

A recent campaign we worked on was National Pension Tracing Day (NPTD), a fantastic initiative from our client Punter Southall Aspire.

We worked with them to launch the UK’s first ‘National Pension Tracing Day’ on Sunday 31st October which urged people to use the extra hour when clocks go back to trace lost or forgotten pensions. Who would have thought there was so much money just sat there waiting to be found?

The campaign encouraged people to take action over an estimated 1.6 million pots worth £19.4 billion – the equivalent of nearly £13,000 each – which has been lost or forgotten. It received industry backing from Scottish Widows, Aegon, Legal and General and Standard Life joining in and calling on the pensions industry to support the initiative.

A big factor in people losing track of pensions is changing jobs – on average 11 times – and moving house, typically eight times, but forgetting to tell their pension company. And there is a lot of unclaimed pension pots and it’s expected to get worse. The Department for Work and Pensions believes that, by 2050 , there may be as many as 50 million lost pensions.

We had a two pronged approach launching this campaign to the media. The initial announcement was made in early September, giving media plenty of time to pick up on the story.

A few weeks later we followed it up with the launch of Punter Southall Aspire’s online resource centre which offers a step-by-step, simple guidance to round up savings which may be lost or forgotten.

The media interest in this has been phenomenal and to date it has achieved 56 pieces of coverage with a mixture of national, broadcast, pension, regional and consumer press.

This campaign is a great example of how to make a ‘dry’ topic such as pensions appealing and capture the imagination of pension savers. The media were eager to promote the campaign as it had real benefit for their readers. Like with most things in PR the story will sell itself if it’s strong enough. It just needed our expertise to put it in front of the right journalists!