The importance of financial education grows as times become less certain and balancing household budgets is more difficult to maintain. Being aware of how to save wisely and safely is valuable. And understanding that insurance is part of a stable household budget can’t be undervalued. How to make that knowledge more common? Educate, advise, explain. This is one of the most important roles of any industry organization operating in the insurance market in Europe. We are starting a series of articles in which we will show you different ideas for educational campaigns that European industry associations have. Let’s start with ourselves! What are we planning in the Polish Chamber of Insurance? What have we done recently in the insurance education area?
You’ll find lots of links in this text – feel free to use the resources we present here.
Insurance education under the pandemic
The biggest challenge at the beginning of the pandemic in 2020 was to show that insurance works remotely – that the whole market has instantly switched to such service. So, how to use this remote service, how to find the necessary information, how to buy insurance, or how to report damages remotely. We wanted to make customers aware of the fact that agents still help them buy insurance and claims settlement is carried out without any problems. For many of them, it was not at all easy and obvious. It was also important to show how insurance helps in a crisis – and that it works not only within the statutory or contractual framework. This is also an important part of education and raising insurance awareness.
After the lockdown was announced, we started working on pro-customer recommendations, ensuring that information on this subject reaches the market, public authorities, and, above all, customers as soon as possible.
We have prepared materials on how insurance works, what facilitations companies have introduced, how they have helped clients. We have shown on our blogs in subsequent publications how companies were implementing pro-client recommendations, how they’re operating remotely. We’ve opted to educate through our websites. The narrative can be found on the following websites:
The educational content material on an expert blog for the market:
Złoty Spinacz dla PIU – kampania #niezaklinaj i raport „Klimat ryzyka” docenione!
Zniknie obowiązek wożenia ze sobą prawa jazdy – co w razie stłuczki?
Insurance education: Material on the advice blog
The average cost of repairs after water damage
Can’t keep up with life insurance premiums? Here’s what to do
Do’s and Don’ts when saving money during a crisis
When the third-party liability insurance will not be extended?
Education – building a narrative
Since the launch of our expert blog, we have focused on creating articles where we collect statements from market representatives. This is a good way to tackle difficult topics. Our texts are a road map of important information for journalists, observers, and the market because it is easier to find out what someone is doing, what they are saying about a given topic, how they are shaping their offer, and what is most important to them.
At the same time, we try to translate all market issues into the plain language of guides, which we post on our advice blog. Tutorials are not only articles but also infographics. These are the ones we primarily create with agents in mind. The advice blog ‘’Nawypadekgdy.pl” (meaning ‘in case of’) is a resource for learning how to explain insurance and what to look for. Agents are a very important resource for customers. No matter the pandemic, remotely or in person, they are the best at explaining insurance and educating customers. We run an Insurance Know-How group on FB where we share our materials with over three thousand agents. The infographics and our lockdown guides have been enthusiastically received because it makes work easier, especially during a crisis when you need more ready-made materials.
Educational campaigns – only with ambassadors
We also design various campaigns with agents in mind. They are ambassadors for all our educational content. In May of last year, we launched the #nierezygnujzochrony (meaning #donotgiveuptheprotection) campaign.
And prior to that, we engaged agents in the #niezaklinaj (#donotplead) campaign in 2019.
They passed our content on and used the arguments we prepared. They also helped us to better understand what was missing in consumers’ knowledge, which made it easier for us to reach them with exactly what was needed. It’s a huge community and agents are trusted by their customers.
Content is essential, but proper targeting is also important
We have opted for adult education and targeted messages. Depending on the theme, the target audience, the situation. Does it make sense to educate everyone on how school insurance works? Would it be better to reach only parents and kids?
Campaigns on Facebook or Google allow us to precisely reach the right targets with our messages. This allows us to work in two ways. Communication with agents and supporting them with materials in their activities, which I mentioned above, is one important educational channel. The other is based on materials provided to customers directly. Our advice blog has more than a dozen article pages positioned at #1 on Google. So we know that the content we publish matches people’s queries exactly.
Awareness surveys as part of educational activities
Precision is very important to us here. We use data from many campaigns that we have already conducted in order to select target groups and prepare content well. We also do research to examine the level of awareness of Poles in important educational areas.
An example here is the survey we conducted on the basis of our climate report. We reached out to people in regions threatened by climate disasters to find out whether they know what risks they are exposed to and how they approach them. Thanks to this we found out that there is a great need to explain in plain language how to behave in case of danger.
We also researched consumers’ awareness of the need for saving for retirement. We wanted to understand their preferences and options and design communication based on this. In February last year, we conducted a survey of drivers to make them aware of what risk they are posing on the roads. We asked them how they perceived themselves as drivers and what their attitude to traffic regulations was.
Educating children
Does it make sense to start education so early? And how to do it? We conduct many activities for children and young people. We reach them directly, but also through their teachers.
For years we have been cooperating with the Association for the Promotion of Financial Education, for which we organize training for teachers. We provide ready-made lesson scenarios on insurance. We are becoming more and more active on the forum of the Working Group on Education Activities in the Financial Market, where the education of young people is one of the priorities.
Therefore, we could not fail to plan our participation in the Global Money Week.
Global Money Week – attendance is important!
GMW is an OECD initiative dedicated to the education of children and youth. In Poland, it is coordinated by the Polish Financial Supervision Authority, which has invited various institutions to cooperate. We are here as well. GMW will last from March 22 to 28. On March 25, we are planning two webinars for young people and teachers. It will be a day with insurance. We are also preparing special comics for younger children, in which we will show the idea of how insurance works with the help of superheroes.
Webinars will be open – we invite everyone who would like to hear how to talk about insurance interestingly and how to draw younger people’s attention. There will be no definitions of terms from the general terms & conditions. We promise!
