The team’s strategic impact, creativity, and prudent budgeting in the creation of the Destination: Retirement digital magazine earned top honors.

The Indiana Public Retirement System (INPRS) joins 13 organizations as a 2025 Pinnacle Award recipient, recognizing the best in strategic communications across the state of Indiana, presented by the Public Relations Society of America’s Hoosier Chapter.

INPRS’s winning entry celebrates the organization’s transformative digital communication project that established its digital magazine, Destination: Retirement. The project represented an enterprise-wide shift in its publication process internally and how INPRS members and employers engage with information relevant to their retirement plan, INPRS news, and financial wellness education.

The team consistently strives to provide stakeholders with timely, relevant, and impactful information regarding INPRS and the retirement plans it stewards. However, space is limited within the bounds of the quarterly newsletter process and, in analyzing member and employer feedback, there was a greater demand for content than could be contained within print and email newsletters.

The INPRS team assessed feedback from members and employers, reviewed internal priorities and initiatives, and identified goals for the project, prioritizing member and employer experience, satisfaction, and retirement outcomes.

The team met with the Indiana Office of Technology and Tyler Technologies to explore ways to improve its digital communication methods to improve the member and employee experience, increase opportunities to offer objective financial education, and facilitate discovery among its library of topics and determined that a digital magazine would meet these needs.

The strategic communications and digital user experience teams conducted a design sprint, established a tagging logic, and enhanced overall site navigation. The team collaborated with INPRS’s cross-functional editorial board to gain insight, feedback, and a fresh perspective on the design and the process that funnels content opportunities to the digital magazine. Utilizing cost savings from other projects thanks to strong budget management and print and mail efficiencies, the team was able to launch the digital magazine without additional resources.

Launched in Feb. 2024, Destination: Retirement became the primary source of content for INPRS’s newsletters, emails, and social media campaigns, serving as an informative, authoritative resource for retirement plan education, INPRS news, and financial education. Since the launch, email open rates have improved by 23.7% and the click rate of Employer Update newsletters has improved by 2.64% compared to the same period in 2023.

Visitors to the site can customize their experience by selecting their retirement plan, topics of interest, and view, based on their member or employer status. This filtered view presents the most relevant information at the forefront, enhancing the reader’s experience and opportunity to engage with their retirement plan with each visit.