The need to communicate clearly is more important than ever, yet government faces unique challenges:
+ The vastness and diversity of government’s audience
+ The need to give all citizens equal access to information
+ The constantly changing legal, regulatory, and legislative environment
+ The misguided belief that government writing must sound “official”
+ The tendency to communicate “defensively” to protect, rather than to communicate clearly
Fundamental simplification requires rethinking the process, content, timing, media channels, writing, and design of government communications. Many government efforts have failed because historically, the focus has primarily been on:
+ Narrow improvements to forms, applications, and correspondence, instead of the holistic impact of all integrated communications across the entire life cycle of the citizen experience
+ Reductions rather than simplification
+ The use of inappropriate measures for calculating the public’s “paperwork burden”
+ Incremental, rather than comprehensive, change