Why public-facing writing matters for local government projects
How about authentic progress, right now, for equity, inclusion and involvement?
Here are two drafts of the same writing, following this sentence: “We heard from 50 people in the project area.”
“The ability to maintain a continual perception of safety while achieving their destinations was identified as the most important priority of this corridor.”
— Wonk/geek language: reading grade level 18, calculated in Microsoft Word using Flesch-Kincaid (roughly master’s-degree level passed off as public-facing). Yuck.
“Feeling safe on this street was most important to them.”
— Plain language: reading grade level 4 (way better for a public audience)
Why this matters
Local and state governments are required to do public involvement for projects such as planning, replacing, upgrading or adding roads and bridges, water and sewer systems, and parks. The professed aim usually is not just to tell the public or persuade the public. Rather, it’s to hear from the public and use the input in planning and executing a project.
That implies a healthy share of the public will engage with a project enough to understand it, so public input can be relevant, accurate and plentiful. But typically that doesn’t pan out. Instead:
Only a handful of attendees show up. A state-level client publicly lauded what it felt was an impressive turnout for an in-person event about three separate projects in and near a small city — a population of 50K to 70K, depending how you slice it. Yet attendance represented about one-tenth of one percent of that affected population. It’s tough to achieve representative diversity with such a small sample, so….
The skew typically is near-total in self-reported demographics and event photos, toward older, white, English-primary, abled, binary, higher-income, college-educated homeowners. Those are precisely the people with the firmest footholds in “the system” and thus the most experience in parsing the wacky dialect of wonks and geeks.
So public input for local government projects tends to come from just a few usual suspects — and even these have a basis for holding outlooks and orientations in common with those asking for the input. That’s a much better recipe for stasis than for progress.
And yes, wonks and geeks — an identity that government staffers and their prime contractors (“primes”) often proudly claim, as seen in a blog post archived on the City of Portland (Oregon) website. They have deep knowledge and enthusiasm in narrow fields such as policy or planning. That typically includes writing for peers, not for the public.
That’s one reason they hire agencies for public involvement. But public-involvement agencies tend to also function as cliques of wonks and geeks who approach public outreach and event materials in much the same way, with grim results.
What’s the motivation
If public-facing project outreach is cloaked in wonk/geek code and if the public struggles to switch to that code, it’s toxic for progress in equity, inclusion and involvement. For anyone knowingly encoding public-facing projects that way, maybe they’re even gatekeeping to prevent progress.
Whether willful or inadvertent, could that coding expose state and local governments to eventual consequences — such as lawsuits for continually violating state standards about communication access (including Washington’s, Oregon’s, and California’s, and federal ADA Section 508)? Something similar already happened with literally more concrete stuff — decades of missing and substandard curb ramps for sidewalk access.
In turn, could consequences for governments lead to perceptions of agency negligence or malpractice?
What’s lost
As a stopgap, some well funded projects include separate focus-group meetings of under-represented folks who agencies recruit through extraordinary effort. But as known at least since Brown v. Board of Education 70 years ago, separate is not equal.
Here’s an example from my own neighborhood — an attendee’s comment at a general open house where no one with a disability attended:
“I never see disabled people crossing there, so there’s no reason to change that crossing.”
City staff tallied that comment to shape public input even though it confused cause with effect. If a neighbor with a disability had been there, at the general event instead of a focus group, an instructive conversation might have led to a changed outlook and maybe just a bit of progress in equity and inclusion.
But that neighbor was absent, maybe at least partially because she’s nearly blind and relies on an audible screen reader. That makes the wonk/geek gobbledygook in failed “outreach” materials even harder to parse.
Now plug in other scenarios centered on ethnicity, gender, transportation mode, etc.
Why not do better?
Agencies’ boilerplate for marketing their public involvement services to government clients has come to read like this:
“We believe creating equitable and inclusive engagement programs is the most pressing issue facing our practice today.”
Given that belief, why not strive toward equity and inclusion by:
Writing to reach and involve more of the public — rather than just the privileged handful who are most fluent in wonk/geek-speak.
Learning and applying practices from those trained and experienced in effectively writing to engage the public — journalists, marketers, advertisers.
That’s not all the change needed, of course — but results can’t improve without it, and it’s the part I know. (I have decades in and near those fields followed by six years in public involvement.) It’s authentic progress that an agency can make right now.
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This is the first in a series about specifically how to improve public-facing writing for equity and inclusion in local government projects — one technique or tool at a time. Subscription is free, so why not follow along?
ICYMI: This time the specific how was monitoring your reading grade level in Microsoft Word.
For best results, use a full version of Word that runs on your own computer — because while the browser version says it uses Flesch-Kincaid reading grade level, it’s really the older Flesch Reading Ease scoring with scale-of-100 numbers. That’s less great for inspiring empathy that could turn on light bulbs over clients’ heads. (More about harnessing empathy next time.)