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Life Health > Life Insurance

Insurers, Agents Speak Up for Life Insurance Awareness Month

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Life Happens and its supporters are spreading the message that responsible adults need life insurance to protect their loved ones and pay their final expenses.

The National Association of Insurance and Financial Advisors affiliate will run its 21st Life Insurance Awareness Month campaign in September.

Life insurance industry marketers began developing the awareness month program as the deaths caused by the Sept. 11, 2021, terrorist attacks on New York’s World Trade Center and the Pentagon were fresh in everyone’s mind.

Now, the campaign benefits from the new awareness of mortality created by the COVID-19 pandemic, but it competes for industry attention with the new excitement about the annuity market.

What it means: This is the month to ask whether your clients, employees, colleagues and relatives have life insurance, or if their funerals and the wellbeing of their loved ones will depend on crowdfunding campaign contributions.

Life Happens’ perspective: Life Happens estimates its life awareness month campaigns and its other campaigns, such as Insure Your Love campaigns tied to Valentine’s Day, have inspired 486 pieces of media coverage and generated 4.1 billion impressions.

The social media efforts linked to the campaigns have attracted 444,000 supporters, the group says.

This year, Life Happens is making heavy use of Instagram.

A financial planning Instagram Reel by Kim Williams will go live Sept. 3, and the group is offering a live feed with Brian Haney, a financial professional and NAIFA board member, at 4 p.m. ET Sept. 10.

The group is making a library of social media posts and other content available to NAIFA members, in addition to the resources it offers the general financial services community.

Other awareness efforts: Companies like Colonial Life, Corebridge Financial, Country Life, Erie Insurance, MassMutual, Pacific Life, Protective, Sammons and State Farm continue to support Life Happens.

The new awareness campaign is also getting support from distributors like New Horizons and individual industry particpants like Casey Friedberg, the manager of Comparion Insurance Agency.

Corebridge, for example, sponsored a new online survey of 2,204 U.S. adults to find out what they knew about life insurance.

About 80% of the survey participants knew that young, healthy people have an easier time buying life insurance, but 60% said incorrectly that a term life insurance policy builds cash value.

Only 11% knew that a healthy 30-year-old would pay only about $15 per month for a 20-year, $250,000 term life policy.

Barely half of the participants had life insurance. About 25% of the participants with an annual household income over $100,000 had no life insurance.

New Horizons has posted a list of 12 ideas for making the most of the awareness month campaign, ranging from using packaged marketing campaigns from Corebridge to getting and using Life Happens’ own campaign materials.

Many other insurance distributors and retail advisors are contributing their own efforts. Friedberg, for example, has posted a LinkedIn video talking about how terrible it is to talk to the loved ones of people who have died without having life insurance.

LIMRA: The richest source of awareness month materials away from the Life Happens website may be LIMRA’s awareness month page.

The group posted a general life insurance fact sheet, a life insurance ownership graphic, a short video about workplace life insurance and other resources.

The coverage ownership graphic, for example, shows that the percentage of adults who say they have life insurance has fallen to 51% this year, from 63% in 2011.

Credit: Rido/Shutterstock.com


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