Why Is Communication Important for Inclusive, Accessible Member Correspondence?
Every message an organization sends to its members—a benefits notice, renewal letter, or digital alert—carries weight. When done well, these messages can strengthen the reader’s confidence; when they’re done poorly, they can confuse and frustrate the audience. For health insurance providers and government agencies alike, effective communication is crucial to building trust and enhancing the accessibility of their services.
To communicate inclusively and accessibly, organizations need to craft their message so that each member or client can understand and act on it, regardless of language, literacy, disability, or digital access. When messages are clear and considerate, members engage more fully and make better decisions.
The need for truly inclusive and accessible communication is growing. Regulatory standards such as Section 1557 and Section 508 continue to expand expectations for accessibility. At the same time, member populations are becoming more linguistically and culturally diverse, and modern technologies have reshaped the way we get our message across. These shifts make inclusion and accessibility essential to effective communication—not optional features.
In this blog post, we’ll take a look at why communication is important for organizations like health insurance providers, government agencies. We’ll also walk you through some key best practices for creating messaging campaigns that are inclusive, accessible, and culturally and linguistically appropriate for everyone who uses your services.
Table of Contents
– The Role of Clear Communication in Member Correspondence
– What Happens When Your Message Is Misrepresented?
– What Does Inclusive and Accessible Communication Look Like?
– Considerations in Healthcare and Government Settings
– Why Communication Is Important for Inclusion, Accessibility, and Equality
– Practical Steps for Organizations to Improve Member Correspondence
– Measuring Success & Continuous Improvements
– How Avantpage Is Expanding Beyond a Language Service Provider
– Frequently Asked Questions About Accessible Communication
– Your Message, Heard: Building Connections through Inclusive Communication Services
The Role of Clear Communication in Member Correspondence
Any message that you send to people who use your services—letters, emails, portal messages, voicemail, etc.—is a form of member correspondence. To maintain a strong level of trust and transparency, these messages should follow best practices for clear and engaging communication.
Many of us have received letters or messages from our insurance companies or local government agencies and scratched our heads, wondering just what exactly they’re trying to say. All too often, these messages are overly wordy and jargon-heavy, making it hard to fully understand the point of the message. This kind of messaging tends to leave us feeling uncertain and perhaps even less confident in the services that we’re receiving. When organizations obscure their message and deliver poor, confusing communications, they ultimately make it harder to access the vital services that they offer.
To ensure that people actually understand how to access your services, clear and concise communication is key. By promoting a sense of clarity and understanding in your member correspondence, you can better engage your members and improve a sense of trust.
What Happens When Your Message Is Misrepresented
At best, poor communication leads to a bit of confusion—at worst, it leads to costly malpractice suits, damaged reputations, and even death.
Research has shown that about 30% of malpractice suits in the healthcare field can be attributed to failures in communication. “Those communication failures resulted in $1.7 billion in malpractice costs and almost 2,000 preventable deaths,” reads a recent report on miscommunication from the HIPAA Journal.
This is why communication is important in fields like healthcare and government. Refining your communication strategy may seem like a challenge, but it’s ultimately a worthwhile investment that will help you avoid further—and more expensive—challenges in the long run. By implementing best practices for inclusive, accessible communication, you can save yourself the trouble of lawsuits over noncompliance.
What Does Inclusive and Accessible Communication Look Like?
When we talk about inclusive and accessible communication, we’re talking about messaging that’s easy to understand and makes people feel fully capable of taking action in response.
Inclusive communication focuses on who you’re communicating with and how your message reflects and respects their diversity. It ensures that the language, tone, and visuals are culturally sensitive and representative of the audiences you serve. Accessible communication focuses on how easily people can receive and use the information in your message, regardless of ability or circumstance.
To ensure that your communications are both inclusive and accessible, we recommend the following best practices:
- Follow plain English guidelines: Try to write at a level that anybody can easily understand—avoid using lots of long sentences and jargon, as this can needlessly confuse your readers.
- Offer translation and interpretation for individuals with limited English proficiency: Identify languages that are in high demand and make sure you have communications available in those languages so that people who don’t speak English can understand and access your services as easily as a native English speaker could.
- Offer alternative formats like braille, audio, and large print: Just as translation helps people with limited English proficiency understand your message, braille, large print, and audio enable people with impaired vision to fully engage in your message.
- Make sure to follow digital-friendly design guidelines: We live in a digital-first world—if your communications are difficult to read on a mobile or desktop device, you’re going to have trouble getting people to access and fully engage with your message.
Considerations in Healthcare and Government Settings
Agencies in healthcare and government manage complex programs—benefits enrollment, medical coverage, public assistance—often for populations that are already vulnerable or navigating significant barriers. A single unclear letter or inaccessible notice can determine whether someone receives care, loses coverage, or misses a critical deadline.
Language remains a major challenge, especially for individuals with limited English proficiency. Literacy levels also vary widely, making technical or jargon-heavy correspondence difficult to interpret. Disability adds another layer—from low vision to hearing loss to cognitive differences—that can render standard print or digital formats unusable. Cultural differences influence how information is perceived and trusted, while digital access disparities mean not everyone can rely on portals, apps, or email for essential updates.
When these barriers go unaddressed, the consequences are measurable. Misunderstood instructions can lead to missed appointments, denied claims, or incorrect benefit selections. Confusing or inaccessible notices often increase complaint rates, administrative workload, and compliance risk. As such, clear, inclusive correspondence is foundational to effective service delivery and public trust.
Why Communication Is Important for Inclusion, Accessibility and Equity
You might provide the best services in your sector—but at the end of the day, they’re no good if people don’t know how to access them. That’s why clear communication is so important: It helps your members feel seen and respected, encouraging them to actually take advantage of what you have to offer.
When members understand your message, they’re better equipped to act on it. With an effective communication strategy in place, your members won’t be left scratching their heads as they read your correspondence; instead, they’ll be taking action—perhaps they’ll call up their doctor’s office to schedule an appointment after receiving a clear and concise overview of their insurance benefits, or they’ll be filling out the paperwork to renew their driver’s license after receiving a letter letting them know that it’s on track to expire soon.
There are ripple effects here too—in healthcare, for example, effective communication is linked to improved health outcomes. This means better patient satisfaction, fewer complaints, and improved compliance with regulations.
Practical Steps for Organizations to Improve Member Correspondence
Below, we’ll outline the basic steps you need to take to improve your communication strategy and send messages that actually resonate with your members:
- Conduct an audit of current correspondence: Review all of the different correspondences you send out—letters, emails, portal messages, etc.—and look for gaps in clarity, reading level, format accessibility, and cultural relevance.
- Develop clear, efficient writing and design guidelines: Create a style guide for your organization that emphasizes plain language, friendly tone, and straightforward visual layout.
- Follow different strategies for different media and channels: Recognize that not every member engages with information in the same way, and different channels require different considerations. Use print for those who need or prefer physical copies, digital formats for those comfortable online, and ensure multilingual or alternate versions (large print, braille, audio) are available.
- Adapt your process and workflow accordingly: Integrate translation and interpretation services in your communication process, working closely with a language service provider who can help you shape your message in various languages and formats.
- Train and supervise your team on the updated guidelines: Ensure that everyone involved in member communication understands how and why these correspondences are so important. Regular training ensures that they follow communications best practices in their day-to-day activities.
Measuring Success & Continuous Improvement
As you take the necessary steps to improve your communications strategy, consider the following ways to monitor their success:
- Comprehension scores: You want your message to be easily understandable by as many people as possible—the average American reads at a seventh or eighth grade level. Use measures of text comprehensibility like the Flesch-Kincaid score to make sure that your message is written at a level that the average reader can understand.
- Member feedback: Collect feedback from the people who use your services using surveys and feedback forms; their responses can help you identify weak spots that you haven't seen before and fill in those gaps. They’ll also show you what you’ve been doing right so you know what to do more of.
- Error and complaint rates: Compare your error and complaint rates before and after implementing communications best practices—if these are lower after you implement a more effective communication strategy, it indicates that you’re doing something right.
- Delivery times: Improved communication can reduce the amount of time it takes to make a diagnosis or fill out certain paperwork.
It’s important to consider that these are things that need to be worked on continuously. Communication is an ongoing process between two parties, and there will always be room to improve and adapt, especially as our society grows more and more digitally oriented. Looking to the future, keep an eye on trends in AI chatbots and customer service platforms. As new channels emerge, it’s crucial to find ways to make them more accessible and inclusive.
How Avantpage Is Expanding Beyond a Language Service Provider
Emphasizing the importance of effective member correspondence, Avantpage has launched AvantSend, an AI-enabled platform that manages the entire lifecycle of member communications for LEP communities, from document creation and translation to printing and mailing. AvantSend allows you to support every member—across languages, channels, and systems—with a single, HIPAA-compliant partner.
Here’s a little bit more about how it works: AvantSend unifies the translation, fulfillment, and mailing processes for printed communications like benefits letters and notices of action—that’s allowed us to help more than 200 clients in the healthcare sector save an average of $36 per file. With AvantSend, your letters reach your members’ mailboxes two days faster on average.
Just like our other services, AvantSend supports up to 150 different languages. Compliance and accessibility are built into AvantSend by design—every file and every channel will be accessible, readable, and inclusive from the start.
With AvantSend, organizations can handle member communication with fewer handoffs, clearer oversight, and faster delivery. By unifying the translation, fulfillment, and mailing processes into one secure system, we’re helping you simplify compliance work and communicate with members effectively from start to finish.
Frequently Asked Questions About Accessible Communication
What is member correspondence?
Member correspondence is any message an organization sends to members—letters, outreach campaigns, voicemails, emails, portal messages, etc.
Why is communication important for healthcare systems?
Communication is important in the healthcare sector because effective communication ensures both parties understand each other fully; this allows the patient to advocate for themselves and fully understand what their healthcare team is saying to them. This ultimately improves health outcomes.
Why is communication important in the government sector?
Communication is important in the government sector because it enables people to understand and access the vital government programs and services meant to support them. Clear correspondence builds trust and helps residents take timely action on critical issues like benefits, taxes, and public health.
How is Avantpage expanding beyond a language service provider?
Avantpage has launched AvantSend, an AI-powered platform that helps healthcare organizations manage member correspondence from translation to mailing letters directly to members.
What types of technologies can improve communication?
Technologies that improve communication include translation and interpretation platforms, AI-driven correspondence tools, design software, and secure digital portals. These tools help organizations create clear, multilingual, and ADA-compliant messages that reach members quickly and in the formats they prefer.
Your Message, Heard: Building Connections through Inclusive Communication Services
If your goal is to engage more members and provide them with a clear roadmap to use your services, your first step should be to revamp your communications strategy. By refining your member correspondence using best practices for communications, you can more effectively guide members to your services and boost engagement.
Improving your communications strategy will ensure that your members experience fewer misunderstandings and feel more trust and confidence in your organization. If that sounds good to you, Avantpage is here to help you. With AvantSend and our other translation, interpretation, and alternate format services, we’re helping healthcare organizations and government agencies all across the country develop inclusive, accessible communication strategies.
Contact us today at [email protected] or (530) 750-2040 to learn more about how Avantpage can help you improve your organization’s communication strategy.
