The Disability Smart Inclusive Communication Award is given to organisations that have worked to make their internal and external communications work better for disabled people.

HSBC developed an extensive accessible communications programme to improve accessibility in every area of the bank’s communication. This includes training for all HSBC staff and external agencies. They also introduced an inclusive communication benchmark to measure customer and employee engagement.

In addition to ensuring their website and documents are accessible to all, HSBC set to provide accessibility training for all their staff involved with communication.

• They trained over 600 staff involved with campaign creation all over the world: HSBC Campaign Managers, Account Managers and creatives, as well as external agency staff.
• They went on to train all HSBC communications staff creating internal and external communications who report to the UK Chief Communications Officer – another 400 people.
• They trained customer-service managers across three of the bank’s brands to understand the communication preferences and styles of people with disabilities, the different ways they bank physically and digitally, and the challenges they might contact each bank about.
• Included in the training is Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), accessibility in brand design guidelines and guidance on how to create digital content for neurodiverse audiences.

To measure the impact of the training, they established the Accessible Communications Benchmark scoring that checks for accessibility in language style, content, structure and multimedia. A random selection of internal and external communications is assessed every quarter, and the scoring is now included in the Chief Communications Officer’s personal scorecard.

Scores of the accessibility of communications have seen significant improvement of between 5% and 16% across the different asset type categories. In Q3-22, the lowest accessibility score was 64% and the highest was 90%.

HSBC continues assessing which types of assets are improving well in accessibility, and which need more support. They’re also gathering feedback from internal staff with disabilities to see how they are finding the communications the programme is delivering.

Judges’ comments:

“Judges were pleased to see that the programme also addressed often overlooked communication needs. The team have carried out specific work around neurodiversity, for example. They also involved customers with a wide range of disabilities in training on inclusive language.”

The finalists in this category were:

• HSBC
• Schuh
• Unilever