How many financial service providers make you smile? Have you ever visited a website and been thrilled by reports on tax and pensions? Have you ever opened up a PDF and gasped in delight at the 30 pages of dense text and 12 bar graphs that lay before you?
Much as it is important to us, most financial content is as dry as dog food. We know that we’re meant to take stock of our finances and save for the future, but it’s just so boring, so complicated and extremely forgettable!
This is why MicroFact takes a different approach to financial engagement, using humour and fun to engage even the most disillusioned among us. And we don’t just use it as some gimmick to lure you in. There’s real academic research that supports humour as an invaluable educational tool for significantly improving understanding and long-term retention.
Reduces resistance to tricky subjects
Research shows that when used effectively, humour can break down barriers to learning, reducing anxiety and resistance to tricky subjects. In financial education, it’s a way of dismantling daunting jargon, to make finance feel friendly and accessible.
To highlight the issue, one unnamed UK financial service provider writes:
“A pension represents a member’s pension rights accrued within a money purchase scheme such as a personal pension or stakeholder pension or an occupational money purchase scheme.”
ARH! To someone new to pensions (and this is many of us, since over a third of UK pension contributors have never checked their pension), a sentence like this can be enough to have you slam the laptop shut and not think about the whole nasty business for another 10 years. Communication is a serious problem, and sheds light on why half of UK workers are not saving enough for retirement.
At MicroFact, we make use of our quirky sense of humour to remove the anxiety associated with financial information and create a relaxed environment for knowledge building. For instance:
“You can think of your pension as a precious wee lamb, which you must nurture throughout your working life.”
Cue an adorable image of Penny the sheep.
Enhances retention and understanding
Humour also plays a key role in boosting memory retention. Indeed, research shows that the emotional response triggered by humour, actually enhances the likelihood of remembering information.
This is incredibly important when it comes to financial education, because, unless you decide to live off the land in a self-made rural yurt, money management is a lifelong task.
You might tell an employee what an Additional Voluntary Contribution (AVC) is. They might understand it at the time. But how can you ensure they remember it six-months later when they have received a bonus or a pay rise and it is time to put this knowledge into action?
While many of us wouldn’t remember the written definition of AVCs, we would remember an image of a bonkers border collie adding tennis balls into a hole in the garden, ready to dig up in later life!
Makes abstract concepts more relatable
One of the challenges facing many financial service providers is finding engaging visuals for communications. Tax tends to be represented by piles of coins, pensions by smug elderly couples and investments by small potted plants (trees if you’re lucky!). These image analogies are hardly likely to resonate with your twenty-something employee, who uses a credit card for most purchases, lives with flatmates and kills all their plants.
Research highlights cartoons to be an invaluable tool for making abstract concepts more relatable, and this is why MicroFact deploys an eclectic herd of animal characters to deliver complex financial lessons.
Each of the MicroFact characters has its own unique set of loveable quirks, to help them explain finance in a fun and memorable way. For instance, Pots the panda receives a treasure chest full of donuts as a state pension; Bubbles the cat needs to save enough to support a lavish lifestyle, while Yarn the lion has more modest retirement demands, being a keen knitter.
The method to MicroFact’s madness!
The use of humour in financial education is a severely underused strategy for engaging employees in topics like pensions and share incentive schemes.
The MicroFact method is new to the financial world, yet the impact of humour in education has been backed by research for years. By reducing resistance to daunting subjects, boosting retention and making abstract concepts far more relatable for your employees, there is a real opportunity to better engage your employees in their financial benefits.
At MicroFact we know that financial information needn’t be so scary and inaccessible. All it takes is for the use of humour to be better humoured!
Want to experience the MicroFact humour in full force? Get in touch at contact@microfact.co.uk to arrange a demo.
