Step 10: Market the project.
If your project has been successful, let people know about it. You’ve done important work and more people need to know about it. Here are a few ideas for marketing your plain language work:
- Celebrate the project and honor the staff participants: Your team needs to be recognized and thanked. Often, their participation has been a duty piled on top of their regular work. I sometimes organize lunches for teams and invite managers to attend. This way, information about the project gets to the executive level in a personal way and they are observing staff members being recognized. Lately, I’ve been using a director-signed Certificate of Recognition, passed out with a few personal words.If you are halfway through a promising project with a strong team, you can e-mail the team members’ supervisor(s) with a compliment and an update. After doing this recently, one manager publicly thanked members of my team at her next staff meeting and handed out gift certificates.
- If it there is a clear benefit to a specific group of your customers, let them know: Your organization may work with business, medical, or advocate groups that offer advice and track issues. You may even send newsletters or regular updates to them. This is an opportunity to market the work you are doing to make it easier for them to do business with you, via plain language.
- Let the rest of your organization know via your in-house newsletter or intranet site.
- Pitch the story to a print news reporter you trust if your success is fairly dramatic. Journalists are often interested in subjects about writing and like to post before-and-after examples in their stories. You will have better luck taking this approach than simply sending a news release out to your organization’s media list.
- Organize an awards program: Washington Governor Christine Gregoire sponsored a Plain Talk Award event in November 2007 to publicly honor agencies. The eight winners out of more than 60 entries accepted their awards at a leadership conference in front of 1000 people. Both the application process and the awards got the attention of state agency directors. It was a signal that she meant business when she signed her March 2005 Plain Talk Executive Order.
- Create a plain language section of your organization’s web site: This is where you can post the before-and-after examples, as well as any guidelines or success stories you want to share.
- Create before-and-after displays, posters or “Anti-Gobbledygook” buttons.
Push for an official plain language policy so it’s clear that plain, straightforward language is required when communicating with customers.
The plain language policy from Washington state’s Department of Labor & Industries (L&I)
