Among communication challenges, stirring up interest in a web-based application that provides visitors with a response to the question "When am I going to die?" is a pretty big one—right up there with trying to get people interested in reading about getting their teeth pulled. But this was the challenge that the American Academy of Actuaries and the Society of Actuaries faced earlier this year when we released the Actuaries Longevity Illustrator, an online tool that calculates your (and your partner's) chances of living to certain ages.

Thus far, more than 120,000 users have visited the website, thanks to a rollout strategy designed to draw public attention to technical, narrow-interest content that might otherwise seem to be a turn-off.

Specialized, niche content is abundant in association land, but it can be difficult to convey to the general public why the content matters.

Associations are deep sources of specialized knowledge. They collect and disseminate the expertise of a profession, trade, or other defined group—and such knowledge often is complex, nuanced, and even superficially "negative" (like an estimate of when you might die), yet tremendously useful. For example, ask the American Subcontractors Association about "reverse auctions" of construction services, or ask the National Newspaper Association about the intricacies of calculating periodical mailing rates. Specialized, niche content is abundant in association land, but it can be difficult to convey to the general public why the content matters.

An Actuarial Example

For the actuarial profession, longevity risk, defined as the risk of outliving your life expectancy, poses a communication challenge because:

• It features complex information. With a few inputs from users, such as age, gender, and general health status, the illustrator app generates not a single number (life expectancy, which is a single average number representing the age to which you'll live with a 50th percentile chance), but rather a range of ages and the probability that you (and your partner) will live to each.


• It required expertise to develop and correctly interpret the results. Actuarial expertise was needed to construct the Illustrator's output of mathematical probabilities generated according to demographic characteristics. Actuaries bring an informed perspective to the results and explain them in a specialized terminology.


• It provides value to the public, but the value is not necessarily recognized. There's not much reason for people to think about their longevity risk every day. However, in certain circumstances, this information is critical, especially when a person is planning for retirement and considering lifetime income options such as how much to save or supplement through investments.

Rollout Strategy: Relevance Matters

The communication rollout plan for the Illustrator included traditional components, such as stories in membership newsletters, highlights of the launch on the Academy website and in our social media messages, and promotion through a media relations effort. But these components weren't enough to draw the attention the app received.

Two factors help explain our success, and both had to do with good planning. We recognized up-front that data doesn't tell its own story, and messages had to be framed to speak to an easily recognizable, even if narrow, need.

We understood that our information—actuarial analysis of raw probabilities about longevity—doesn't look the same to the public as it does to actuaries. The Illustrator had to provide plenty of FAQs, a simple and informative user experience, and automated reports—most notably a printable report that a user can share with his or her financial adviser. Interpretation of data for the user was especially important because life expectancy is easily confused with longevity.

To show the public how information from the Illustrator is applicable to their lives, the messaging directly addressed a specific, well-defined need—namely, how to better plan for retirement. The question of "When am I going to die?" was framed as "How can I better plan for retirement?" for our target audiences of retirement news reporters and people planning for retirement. The headline of our news announcement promoting the Illustrator described it as providing a "perspective on retirement planning," while only secondarily noting the key technical concept of longevity risk.

As you plan your next campaign to draw attention to your association's specialized knowledge, focus on translating your content and making it relevant. Provide context for your intended readers and plainly demonstrate how the expertise that your organization houses will help meet their needs.