A notice is taped to the door of an apartment building. The notice is from the city. The notice is correct. The notice was produced by a person whose job included producing this notice. The notice was reviewed, before posting, by another person whose job included reviewing it. The notice contains the information the residents need to know about a change to the street outside their building.
A resident arrives at the door, sees the notice, and stops. The font is small. The language begins with a clause about a section of a code. The clause refers to a meeting that was held some weeks earlier. The clause refers to a vote whose outcome is described before the resident understands what was being voted on. The resident reads the notice once, does not understand it, reads it again, understands part of it, decides they will read it more carefully later, and goes inside.
The resident will not read the notice more carefully later. The notice will be there for a week. By the time the change to the street begins, the resident will have forgotten the notice and will be confused about why the street has changed. The institution that posted the notice will have, technically, communicated. The communication will not have happened.
##### What is going wrong
What is going wrong, in this small encounter and across millions of similar encounters every year, is a misalignment between the form in which civic information is produced and the form in which residents are able to receive it.
The information being communicated is not, in most cases, complicated in itself. A street is changing. A bus route is being redirected. A meeting is being scheduled. A permit is being requested. A school day is being adjusted. Each of these can be communicated in two or three sentences that any resident can absorb in seven seconds.
The form in which it usually arrives is not those two or three sentences. The form is a notice that begins with the institutional context, proceeds through the procedural history, references the legal framework, names the relevant officials, and arrives, somewhere in the second paragraph, at the sentence that contains the information the resident actually needs. By the time the resident reaches that sentence, most of them have stopped reading.
##### Why this happens
The pattern persists for reasons that are mostly structural rather than personal.
Civic communication is produced by people whose primary professional incentive is to be technically correct. The notice that is technically correct, even at the cost of being practically unreadable, will not produce a problem for the person who wrote it. The notice that is practically readable, even at the cost of leaving out some technical context, can produce a problem. The professional logic favors the first version.
Civic communication is also produced inside review processes that prioritize legal exposure over accessibility. A notice that prioritizes accessibility may be revised by reviewers whose job is to ensure the notice contains every required element. The required elements often crowd out the accessibility. The reviewers are not wrong to add the elements. The cumulative effect of adding them is a notice that contains everything and communicates nothing.
Civic communication is also produced by people who have, themselves, become so familiar with the institutional context that they no longer notice how opaque it sounds to people outside the institution. A planner reading a planning notice knows what every clause refers to. A resident reading the same notice does not. The distance between the two readers is rarely the focus of the production process.
##### What works better
What works better is straightforward to describe and harder to implement.
The most useful sentence in any civic notice is the one that tells the resident what is going to happen and when. That sentence, in the most effective notices, sits at the top, in larger type, in language that any resident can absorb without re-reading. The procedural history, the legal framework, and the institutional context follow, for the residents who want them.
The second most useful sentence, when it applies, is the one that tells the resident what they need to do, if anything. A change that requires no resident action should say so. A change that requires a permit application, an attendance, a comment, or a relocation should say so clearly, with the deadline and the contact.
The third most useful element is a contact for residents who have specific questions. A name, a phone number, an email. A resident who can reach a person to clarify a notice has a different experience of the institution than a resident who cannot.
##### The institutions that have learned this
A small number of institutions, in our reading, have learned to produce civic communication that actually communicates. They tend to share a few features.
They have, somewhere in their organization, a person whose job is the resident’s reading experience. The person is not always called a communications officer. The person is sometimes a planner, a clerk, an outreach coordinator, or simply a senior staff member who has decided that the readability of public communication is part of their work. The person reviews notices for accessibility before they are posted, and pushes back on language that, while technically correct, will not be received.
They have processes that test communication before it goes out. A short note read aloud to a colleague who is not from the relevant department will reveal, in most cases, whether the note communicates. A note posted in a working environment for a day, before the public posting, will reveal whether anyone in the environment can summarize what it says.
They treat communication as part of the operation, not as a layer added on top of it. The street change, the bus reroute, the meeting schedule, the permit decision, all include the communication as part of how the work is done. The institutions that treat communication as a separate function, often added late, often produce communication that reflects the lateness.
##### What residents can do
Residents are not powerless in this dynamic.
Residents who notice a notice they cannot understand can, in most cases, ask. The contact information, where it exists, often produces a useful conversation. The institutions that have a culture of clear communication tend to be the institutions that respond to these questions helpfully. The institutions that do not are themselves revealing something.
Residents can also ask the institution to improve its communication. The request, made calmly and without rancor, sometimes lands with the people who make these decisions. Residents who have written a courteous note to a planning office about a notice they could not decode, asking for a clearer version, sometimes receive a clearer version, and sometimes receive a small change in how the next notice is produced.
##### The honest framing
The honest framing is that civic communication is one of the categories where the gap between what institutions intend and what residents experience is largest, and where the cost of closing the gap is smaller than most institutions believe.
The notice on the door does not have to be the notice that the resident cannot read. The institution that produced the notice could, with modest effort, have produced one that worked. The reasons it did not are mostly structural and mostly fixable. The institutions that have done the fixing tend to hold public trust at a different level than the institutions that have not.
The street is changing tomorrow. The notice has been there for a week. The resident is reading it again, slowly, trying to understand what is about to happen. None of this had to be this way.
