DTUK0813

23Practice ManagementApril 1-7, 2013United Kingdom Edition Celebrating 10 years of innovation smile-on healthcarelearning inspiring better care Friday 17th and Saturday 18th May 2013 Millennium Gloucester Hotel, London Kensington BOOK NOW for early booking discount cic@healthcare-learning.com 020 7400 8989 3 Speakers include: Nasser Barghi Irfan Ahmad Louis MacKenzie Ash Parmar Ian Buckle Christmas Day. Baileys’ Blond- ie-soundtracked ad features sev- eral hues and shades. As a life- long telly addict, I can’t lie: it’s all kind of thrilling.’ Unsurprisingly, I can find no specific research that points to the effectiveness or otherwise of including black and brown people on your website (and, indeed, in your marketing gen- erally). However, The African- American Consumers: Still Vi- tal, Still Growing 2012 Report, by market research company Nielsen Holdings N.V. does pro- vide a comprehensive apprais- al of the situation in the USA. It quotes: ‘Marketers underesti- mate the opportunities missed by overlooking Black consum- ers’ frustration of not having products that meet their needs in their neighborhoods. This frustration is potentially further compounded by the low level of inclusion of Blacks in television programs, advertising messag- ing and point-of-purchase com- munication. Companies that don’t advertise using Black me- dia risk having African-Ameri- cans perceive them as being dis- missive of issues that matter to Black consumers.’ What’s the reading level of your website? If you wish to attract as wide a group of patients as possible, it’s no good if your website text demands a high level of edu- cation to be readable. Accord- ing to the News International website, The Sun newspaper reaches 7.3 million readers of which 2.6 million are in the demographic classification ABC1 – so 4.7 million must be C2 (skilled working class), D (working class) and E (eg state pensioners or widows, casual or lowest grade workers). It therefore seems reasonable to suggest that The Sun is acces- sible to a wide range of people from lower social classes. You can check the readabil- ity of text easily and at no cost – there are several websites that do so. I chose www.readability- score.com because it is one of the ones that gives scores for a number of different readability formulae (I won’t explain their differences here). For a passage from a head- line article in The Sun online the readability scores were: • Flesch-Kincaid Reading Ease – 68.7 (the range is 0 to 100 where 100 indicates easiest readability) • Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level – 8.5 (this and the scores be- low represent the number of years in education in the USA education system. Scores over 22 would mean graduate level text) • Gunning-Fog Score – 10.5 • Coleman-Liau Index – 9.6 • SMOG Index – 7.1 • Automated Readability Index – 8.6 • Average Grade Level – 8.9 I then took some text from the homepages of dental prac- tice website selected at ran- dom. The Flesch-Kincaid Read- ing Ease scores ranged from 69.5 to 43.9 and the Average Grade Level results range from 8.0 to 13.9. By way of compari- son, the scores for this article are Flesch-Kincaid Reading Ease 56.9 and Average Grade Level 10.2 – suggesting some dental practice websites re- quire a higher reading ability than what I’ve written here. I suggest you check your own website text for readability and, if necessary, make changes to make it accessible to the widest group of the population. DT About the author Amanda Atkin runs Atkinspire Ltd and offers practic- es support, train- ing and consultan- cy on information governance, CQC compliance, Na- tional Minimum Standards and HTM 01-05. Her bespoke service sup- ports practices as they embed the required standards within their daily routines – to ensure a high quality service and patient safety at all times. e amanda@atkinspire.co.uk www.atkinspire.co.uk ‘You can check the readability of text easily and at no cost – there are several websites that do so’