Plain English Awards

celebrate New Zealand's clearest communicators

Finalist: Plain English Champion — Best Organisation 2014

ANZ


Judges’ comment

The judges were impressed by your commitment to being good corporate citizens by producing documents your customers can understand. Support from the company’s senior leadership sets an expectation for all staff to adopt better writing standards. With so many documents produced by ANZ, your strategy of prioritising which documents to review based on those most used means your plain English strategy benefits the greatest number of your clients. We commend ANZ for its sustained and continuing impressive effort in plain English.


Media statement

ANZ is delighted to be a finalist for Plain English Champion — Best Organisation. We want to make life easier for our customers and help them reach their financial goals. ANZ has a relationship with over 2 million New Zealanders and we want to communicate with them in a way that’s clear, simple, and effective. Our documents contain important information and need to be delivered in a format that’s easy to read and understand.

Since 2012, ANZ has worked hard to consolidate and build on our plain English efforts by embedding plain English throughout our organisation. We do this on an ongoing and continuous basis by understanding our customers’ needs, training our staff, and supporting their use of plain English by providing them with effective tools and resources, and rewriting documents so they are simple, clear, and concise.

The WriteMark Awards are a fantastic way to promote plain English standards throughout New Zealand. We’d like to thank WriteMark and the sponsors for encouraging organisations across the public and private sector to use plain English.

Melanie Biss
General Manager Governance, Assurance and Business Support