How improving 'readability' can step up your charity's content marketing

When looking at free content marketing tools for charities, you may have come across apps and plug-ins to test and improve ’readability’. These tools can help you refine your online content to help it better meet your goals – but what exactly is readability and why is it so crucial on the web?

In the online world, we’re bombarded with information. The human brain can only take in so much and has found ways to prioritise and pick out only what’s important. Recent studies have concluded that visitors only read about 20% of any given copy on a web page – the rest they skim read.

This is why you need to make your website, blog or social media content grab your audience’s attention quickly and deliver the information they need. Readability means making your content as clear and easy to understand as possible.

By improving readability, charities without specialist content staff can mimic the pros and improve engagement online, create a positive impression and experience for users, and improve your SEO game by helping search engines spot quality content.

Another reason why readability should be of high priority to the charity sector is that it is vital to making content accessible to a wide range of readers, including those with sight or cognitive impairments. According to the Web Accessibility Initiative’s principles, ensuring text is ’readable and understandable’:

• Helps software, including assistive technology, to process text correctly

• Helps people who have difficulty understanding more complex, phrases and vocabulary

Measuring readability

Fortunately, it’s not all up to guesswork- readability can be quantified. There are various tests that can determine the level of readability of a piece of text.

The Flesch Reading Ease Score is one of the popular ones, which scores writing based on the level of schooling a reader needs to understand it, based on a mathematical formula (using sentence length and the average number of syllables per word).

While there is more to readability than this alone, there are a few free readability tools and plug-ins out there which use the scoring method and can help you create more easily digestible content.

Some of these are:

• Readable.com

• Hemingway

• Yoast SEO

These tools can be useful guides, however strict rules around copy are made to be broken and played with, so take them with a pinch of salt and use your own judgement.