Highlights

SSRS surveyed small business owners or decisions-makers about employee benefits in three states – Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Washington – to better understand how small business owners and decision-makers evaluate and plan to use statewide retirement savings programs (i.e., auto-IRAs) and what might make them more or less inclined to support the state enacting these programs.

Challenge

SSRS needed a way to target at least 500 small business owners or decision-makers in each of the three states (Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Washington). Additionally, the client was interested in obtaining at least n=200 responses from businesses that do not offer an employer-sponsored retirement plan. Given that small business owners are considered a hard-to-reach population, SSRS needed to develop a plan to obtain the sample needed.

Approach

SSRS was able to achieve the goals for this study by sampling potential respondents from the Dun & Bradstreet (D&B) database to target small business owners and decision-makers about employee benefits in Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Washington. To allow for adjustments to the sample design during fieldwork, the SSRS project team released the sample for each state in two waves. Following the first wave, SSRS reviewed the proportion of businesses that do not offer an employer sponsored retirement plan overall and determined that no adjustments were needed to the sample design for the second wave in order to reach those targets.

Results

Understanding how small business owners view and plan to use statewide retirement savings programs is essential because their support is critical to the success and adoption of these initiatives. SSRS interviewed 500 respondents in each state, which allowed the client to develop insights that might help shape policies that are practical and might expand the access to retirement savings for workers. Finally, the data from this study shed light on how small business owners or decision-makers decide whether to offer statewide retirement savings programs and the reasons why they do so.