Content style guide

Email and text notifications

All email and text notifications we send to Veterans should be trustworthy, actionable, and easy to understand.

General guidance for email and text notifications

Note: This notifications guidance applies to emails and texts we send to Veterans related to interactions they have with VA—like reminders or updates related to their submitted online forms, disability claims, and health appointments. We’ll be adding more guidance for text notifications soon. This guidance does not apply to outreach emails and texts that VA communications teams send for awareness and education about VA benefits and services.

Follow our content style guide and existing patterns

Email and text notifications should use plain language and follow our VA style guide wherever possible. This includes addressing the recipient as “you” and using “we” to refer to VA. Review our top 10 plain language standards
For some types of emails, VA Notify has sample templates with plain language content that’s ready to use. You’ll just need to fill in any manual variables and adjust other content as needed. This includes the emails in the form submission status pattern. Review the form submission status pattern

Protect Veterans’ personal information

Always get approval for new or updated notifications from a VA privacy officer. Find your product’s privacy officer (link only works on VA network)
Email and text notifications are not secure, so we can’t include Veterans’ personally identifiable information (PII) or protected health information (PHI).
Privacy officers may allow exceptions to the PII/PHI rule when a Veteran opts in to receive PII/PHI in their notifications. But you must work closely with the privacy office and get specific approval for any notifications that include PII/PHI.

Email notifications

Subject line

Aim for no more than 9 words and 60 characters in subject lines
If the goal of the email is to prompt the Veteran to take an action, make the subject line a CTA starting with an action verb
- Like this: Review your dependent information for VA benefits
If it’s a reminder or confirmation email, make the subject line a short phrase or statement
- Like this: VA appointment reminder
- Like this: We’ve received your VA form
If it’s a post-submission failure notification (part of the zero silent failures initiative), start the subject line with “Action needed”
- Like this: Action needed: We couldn’t process your VA form

Salutation and closing

Personalize the email with the Veteran’s first name in the salutation as “Dear ((first_name)),”—but never include both first and last name, because this counts as PII
Don’t include a closing or sign the email as “VA.gov” or “VA”

Note: Don’t say “Thank you for your service” in the closing or anywhere else in the email. Research has found that some Veterans may have negative feelings about this phrase.

Header levels

To make your email content accessible and easier to scan, use headers to chunk the content—VA Notify supports header levels 1, 2, and 3
H1 should be either exactly the same wording as the subject line, or a slightly more detailed version of the subject line (for example, using “We received your VA form” in subject line and “We received your authorization to release medical information” in H1, to keep subject line in character limits)

Feature card (also called block quote card)

Use the feature card component to display important details, like confirmation numbers or the date of an upcoming appointment
Use only one feature card in each email
If the feature card displays information from an online form confirmation screen, make sure the data field labels (like “Date submitted”) match between the feature card and the confirmation screen