How the Bank of England uses layered communication to improve comprehension

By James Bell, Executive Director for Communications

“How we communicate is part of how we carry out our mission. We intend to keep trying to make our communications more inclusive and accessible for everyone”

-Andrew Bailey, Governor, Bank of England

We are pleased to support Plain Numbers and we have been a partner since the campaign was launched in December 2020. It’s important for organisations to communicate numerical information as clearly and accessibly as they can. It allows people to make more informed choices and to participate confidently in the wider economy.

Here at the Bank of England, we’ve been working hard to make our work more accessible for as many people as possible. For example, our Outreach and Education programmes help us raise awareness and understanding of what the Bank does across the UK and how it impacts everyday lives. Our KnowledgeBank helps explain economic concepts in a non-technical way.

Our Communication Style

Accessibility is also a core element of how we communicate. The text we use across most of our communication channels (such as our website) is written in Plain English. Our new visual identity – launched in March has been designed with accessibility and inclusivity in mind. For example, our new font was purposely designed to make it easier to read, including for those who have some degree of dyslexia. We advocate the Plain Numbers Approach as it embodies our principles, but with a unique and particular lens on improving the accessibility of numerical information.

Our approach to our major publications is similar. We take a ‘layered’ approach to communicating complex information. (This is a key element of the  Plain Numbers Approach too.) We started in November 2017, when we launched the first three-layered Monetary Policy Report (MPR), our quarterly summary of the state of the UK economy:

·       The first ‘layer’ consists of an announcement of the interest rate decision alongside icons explaining the decision in an abbreviated format. This can be shared on our social media channels;

·       The second ‘layer’ is a visual summary of the MPR consisting of a more in-depth, but still brief, overview of the main factors behind the Monetary Policy Committee’s (MPC) interest rate decision. The visual summary is written in plain English and is accompanied by visually engaging icons and charts;

·       The third layer consists of the full MPR including an executive summary (the ‘Monetary Policy Summary’) written in more technical language and unaccompanied by icons;

We subsequently applied a similar approach to our Financial Market Infrastructures Annual Report and Financial Stability Report (FSR), and now do this across all our publications.

Layering has proved a helpful way of preventing complex information, which not everyone we reach will be interested in, from disrupting the comprehension of the most important information by a wider audience.

The impact

Our layered communications resulted in higher rates of engagement on our digital platforms:  in 2018 we found there had been an increase in web traffic to MPR pages with layering. This is the equivalent to 3:43 minutes average time spent on MPR visual summary pages, significantly  above the website average.

We have received positive feedback on new formats and language from focus groups, and research shows that through layering, the public understood a quarter more of the MPR’s key messages compared to our traditional MPR Summary.[1]

In recognition of the work we are doing to improve the way we communicate the Plain Language Commission has awarded our website a Clear English Standard.

Although proud of what we achieved, we know that there is still much to be done. We are now working to improve and expand our use of digital channels to better serve our communication priorities and to support our aim to be more human and humble and in step with the changing world.

I hope that sharing our experience might lead you to reflect on how you communicate with your own stakeholders. If you would like to learn more about what we’ve been up to, please feel free to get in touch with us here.

We are passionate advocates of what the team at Plain Numbers are doing with their focus on making the communication of numbers more accessible and thereby improving outcomes for consumers.

[1] Bank of England Staff Working Paper No. 750