Revamped Thrift Savings website could be delayed until June

The Thrift Savings Plan board said the launch of its new website may be delayed by a few weeks and multimedia features could be added later, officials said during a meeting on Monday.

The Federal Retirement Thrift Investment Board in January announced plans to unveil a redesigned website this spring that would provide expanded features such as retirement calculators, life stage guides and Thrift Savings Plan information.

The board originally planned to launch the website by the end of May, but now expects to go live sometime in June, said TSP Executive Director Greg Long. The board must complete load tests to determine how many hits the site can manage. The tests have taken several weeks longer than expected, according to officials. "We want to make sure when we go live we're able to handle a substantially higher volume," Long said.

Officials also said the site won't be complete when it launches in June. "We've said all along the website is going to be evolutionary," said Penny Moran, TSP's director of participant services. "It's going to evolve as we go into new media types. It's going to evolve as we talk about ways of communicating [with users], and we've designed it to give us more flexibility in how to draw their attention to these new activities."

She said the site's design will incorporate elements such as video, RSS feeds and a ticker-tape feature, but the board said it doesn't want the development of the applications to delay the launch of the main site. Officials suggested the tools eventually could replace printed information or the DVD supplements sent out to encourage workers to set aside parts of their paychecks for retirement.

The board plans to promote a feature that allows participants to roll over outside investments such as IRA accounts from previous jobs into their TSP accounts as long the latter remains open. Users rolled over $66 million in March compared with $33 million during the first three months of last year in what officials called a "meaningful increase." The feature hasn't been broadly marketed, but will be promoted in the future, they said.

Renee Wilder, director of the board's Office of Research and Strategic Planning, said the launch also will kick off the development of a new marketing strategy, and the TSP plans to issue a request for proposals to develop a communications plan.

"The important thing is to reorganize ourselves as to what message gets put out there," said board Chairman Andrew Saul. "This is something we need to put a lot of effort into."

According to officials, the website is the most popular and cost-effective method of communicating with TSP users. The site receives tens of thousands of hits a day, more than a million page views a month, and it sends e-mail notifications to more than 200,000 users when new content is posted, they said.