Create an editorial process that focuses on if people can use what you write
Government organizations often have distributed editorial processes that invite different stakeholders to provide input. For example:
- A subject matter expert (SME) drafts something
- The legal team reviews it
- An IT professional posts to a website
Complex organizations might have more stakeholders who want to be involved. Small organizations might move more quickly. But regardless, this kind of editorial process leaves out a critical perspective — perhaps the most critical perspective. Is what we make actually useful?
Creating useful communications is a practical investment
Creating useful webpages, documents, forms, and other communications takes extra time and resources. However, this investment pays for itself. It leads to fewer requests for your call center and support inboxes. The requests they do get will be more focused and quicker to answer. In addition, publishing things that are useful helps build trust with constituents. It communicates that you understand what they need.
On the other hand, publishing things that are hard to use confirms constituents' worst suspicions about government. It makes them irritated before they begin speaking to a member of your support team. It leads to incomplete and abandoned applications. It causes people to take their questions to social media, where someone might be able to communicate in a way they can understand.
Prioritizing good experiences requires a cultural shift for some organizations: New processes, new skills, new leadership priorities, and even new hires. The rest of this guide helps you figure out where to make changes. You don't need to transform your editorial processes overnight. Just find ways to begin prioritizing the experience of using the information you publish, not just publishing it.
Before drafting, ask, "Who is it for and why would they read it?"
These questions should be central to everything you write:
- Who is my audience?
- Why do they need this?
Every editorial process should return to these questions, even as stakeholders provide input and feedback. They help us focus on publishing things people can find, understand, and use. For example, legal teams often provide technical definitions that must be included with a draft. But you can work with lawyers to make sure your draft translates these technical definitions into something the audience can actually understand. Some organizations benefit from having executives sponsor these kinds of collaborations. This helps make sure plain language is a priority, and not just a nice-to-have.
Organizations are often tempted to start from other questions, such as "How can we tell our story?" or "How can we create something that will 'wow' people?" Projects like these are already on the wrong path. Don't tell a story unless you know why your audience cares about the story. Don't aim for something impressive. Make something that impresses because it's so useful and easy.
After drafting, ask, "Will it work?"
Once you have a full draft, your editorial process needs to evaluate if what you've written is likely to "work." That is, review and determine if anything might prevent your audience from doing what you want them to do. This is especially important when a draft has gone through multiple rounds of stakeholder review. Your editorial process needs a way to verify that the draft hasn't been reshaped to be less useful. This is another component of the process that benefits from executive sponsorship. Leaders championing constituents' experiences help center the work that improves those experiences.
Checking the grade level of a publication is a popular way to start. Aiming for an 8th grade reading level is useful. Even more useful is reducing from 12th to 9th grade.
But grade level is a blunt instrument. It focuses on things like sentence length and syllables per word. You'll eventually want to use techniques like plain language reviews and experience reviews to look for potential frictions. These focus on what interacting with writing is like.
Many organizations have also begun to invest in roles that focus on the constituent experience. A professional content strategist, for example, will be able to foresee problems and ways to improve your drafts before your audience interacts with them. They'll consider issues with accessibility, different device types, and how different communications channels support or contradict one another.
For example, imagine that someone has suggested replacing the phrase "work requirements" with "community engagement." This might seem like a gentler way to describe "work requirements." However, your audience is probably much more familiar with "work requirements." This well-intended revision could make the text less clear. Your editorial process needs to spot changes like these and work with stakeholders to fix them.
After publishing, ask, "Did it work?"
After you publish something new, prioritize learning from people's interactions with it. You can often automate this kind of data gathering. For example, you might include a link to a feedback survey. Behavioral and business analytics can be helpful, too. For example, if your program team receives lots of incomplete applications, then your instructions probably aren't working. At least one executive branch organization does 5-minute surveys with people at kiosks. Others ask their call centers and support staff what topics come up most frequently.
You can gather richer data if you invest in experience research. Experience research is a set of methods for understanding constituents’ goals, journeys, and challenges. It provides insights you can use to drive improvements. For example, you can conduct a usability study of a form. You can study whether people understand a set of instructions. You can even test if people have a positive or negative opinion of your organization based on something you've published.
First steps toward transforming your editorial processes
Small steps your teams can take right away
Transforming how you communicate requires leadership support and cross-team collaboration. This can take a lot of work and time to accomplish. However, your teams can take steps right now to begin publishing information that's easier to use and understand.
- Ask everyone who publishes to work on lowering the grade level of their writing. Even if you can't bring things down to grade 8, going from 12th to 9th grade means a lot.
- Deputize a person or team to serve as a plain language reviewer. This role can even be temporary if you're just trying to get started. For example, one organization created a "plain language committee" that did a one-time review of dozens of letters for constituents.
- Ask teams to try scenario walkthroughs. This activity is an inexpensive way to identify frictions before you publish.
- If you have a web team, make sure they're running occasional content audits to learn if anything you previously published is out of date or redundant.
These kinds of activities can make a difference. However, they generally only happen if teams are expected to do them. If they're not goals or priorities, they can be treated as nice-to-haves and only done when there's free time. And there's rarely free time!
How one organization changed its processes
Here's an example of what one organization did to start changing how it communicated.
- Hired a content strategist, someone who specializes in designing and shaping your texts for your audience
- Improved collaboration between SMEs and people who publish. SMEs collaborated with the content strategist to draft and revise webpages and letters, with both contributing to final drafts.
- Coordinated their communications across channels. For example, this organization has multiple websites, a call center, paper letters, social media, etc. Changes in one place affect other channels, which means they needed to prevent teams from working in silos.
- Secured leadership buy-in. Enough of the organization's executive team bought into the work that they were able to hire and change how teams worked.
Get support from the Constituent Experience Center of Excellence
We support state organizations who want to improve constituents' experiences and outcomes. We'll work with you on a plan to transform how your organization creates and publishes information. We can also help develop (and give) trainings for staff.