As one of the most linguistically diverse cities in the country, the City of Seattle seeks to ensure its employees are represented when engaging in workplace benefits.
It’s why the public employer, along with its industry partner Nationwide Retirement Solutions, teamed up to ensure that its 11,100 participants would have access to its Deferred Compensation Plan and retirement plan benefits in their native language. Currently, the percentage of population within the city of Seattle who speak another language other than English is 22%.
Specifically, the plan expanded its educational outreach in 2022 by matching efforts from the City of Seattle’s Central Benefits team, whom the employer says had great success in translating critical benefits information into multiple languages, including Spanish, Traditional Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, Tagalog, Amharic, and Somali.
Michelle Ell, Deferred Compensation manager for the City of Seattle, says expanding the number of languages in the plan’s communication features demonstrates the organization’s dedication to social equity and equality. The organization’s vision meant that all participants, no matter their English proficiency would have equal access to its employee benefits.
“The City of Seattle has a commitment to social justice and to end institutional racism within City government,” said Ell. “We work toward a vision where racial disparities are eliminated, and racial equity is achieved.”
An Immersive Campaign Centered on Access
Adding these new languages meant that the City of Seattle, along with Nationwide, would need to utilize key data sources to find which idioms best identified with their workforce. Then, the plan would have to build and update retirement education and communication features.
To narrow down its focus languages, the plan utilized an analysis provided by the City of Seattle’s Office of Immigrant and Refugee Affairs (OIRA) that identified the languages mainly used by the city’s population, residents with limited English proficiency, and recent immigrants and refugees.
“The City of Seattle has a commitment to social justice and to end institutional racism within City government. We work toward a vision where racial disparities are eliminated, and racial equity is achieved.”
Michelle Ell, City of Seattle
Sources used to develop the list included the American Community Survey (ACS), a home language survey by Seattle Public Schools, patient visits requiring language assistance at Public Health-Seattle and King County, language requests on 911 Calls through the Seattle Police Department, and requests received for interpretation at the Seattle Municipal Court.
Nationwide and the City of Seattle would work together to develop outreach programs each year, so the plan leaned on its vendor for help in creating a virtual open house, plan highlights, and a frequently asked questions (FAQ) sheet in the languages highlighted over the course of 11 months. Nationwide also created the Spanish website for the plan.
“These initiatives supported our shared goals of reaching employees at different stages of their retirement planning and helping them secure their future,” added Jim Keeler, executive relationship manager at Nationwide Retirement Solutions, and who worked directly with the City of Seattle on the project.
The virtual open house, launched in February 2022, had two versions in English and Spanish, with the goal of providing education on the City of Seattle Deferred Compensation Plan in either language. The open house hosted features like webinars, representative consultations with education consultants, interactive tools, and videos to deepen employees’ retirement knowledge in Spanish.
Nationwide then collaborated with the City of Seattle to update its plan FAQ and Seattle Plan Highlights brochure—key educational tools used for plan enrollment and participation education. That included consulting with multiple companies to align with the plan’s vision to create educational materials in the preferred languages.
Both organizations ended up partnering with Language Link, an online provider of language services, who had previously worked with the city on a benefit campaign.
Lastly, Nationwide created the plan’s end-to-end Spanish web experience, first rolled out in January 2022 for the pre-authorization portion and then in November 2022 for the post-login portion. The experience includes access to financial wellness education, tools to project participants’ retirement savings needs, and full online access to enrolling and monitoring their retirement accounts.
The City of Seattle notes that in its partnership with Nationwide, it was able to create a better solution for Seattle Spanish-speaking participants.
Impactful Results
Along with its goal of enhancing employee knowledge and providing retirement planning access for all participants, the City of Seattle also hoped its updates would increase account participation and raise retirement readiness among workers.
Plan data shows its enhancements did just that—the online campaign with Nationwide and other vendors resulted in increased web traffic and a 10% increase in enrollments.
Additionally, the plan saw strong results throughout 2023. Twenty percent of downloads to its FAQ and Seattle Plan Highlights brochure have been in another language, web traffic volume has increased by 318%, and unique users to the site grew by 282% while new users flourished 216%.
“Throughout our collaboration, the City of Seattle Plan Staff have proposed innovative solutions to engage their employees in retirement planning,” Keeler said. “The In-Language campaign is just one of the many initiatives that have helped thousands of city employees plan and enjoy their retirement. Nationwide is excited to continue working with such a trustworthy and dependable partner like the City of Seattle in the future.”