Enrique Suarez Presenting:
Communicating Policy Online
Source:
What does a policy look like? What are its component parts? These are questions we need to answer if we want to explain our policies consistently – so that people can easily recognise a policy when they see one, and reliably predict where to find specific bits of policy-related information.
We’ve talked to colleagues who work on Commission policies; we’ve looked at how governments deal with the issue. Most importantly, we’ve asked people who visit our websites what they want from policy content. It’s clear from this that most are interested in concrete action – legislative proposals and funding programmes, for example. But this information is easiest to find and make sense of when grouped around issues and objectives that reflect people’s own concerns, concepts and language.
In addition to the core elements – objectives, issues and action – some policies also have consultations, events, studies, impact assessments, targets and reviews.
What are the benefits?
By structuring our policy around objectives people can relate to, we hope to help them:
- identify all pieces of implementation linked by a common objective
- understand that EU action is driven by objectives that are relevant to their concerns.
Structuring content around objectives doesn’t mean we have to make those objectives prominent or long-winded. They shouldn’t stand in the way of people who want to get straight to the details of what the Commission is doing.
How we write
It’s not just about a consistent structure. We need to get the language right too. One major challenge is to write accessibly for people who have little knowledge of the EU. But there’s a large cohort that does know the EU well, people who may be scanning our content for jargon keywords that others wouldn’t understand. How best to serve both needs?
One way is to draw a clearer distinction between the overviews, that must be comprehensible to the widest possible audience, and detailed information that inevitably requires a certain amount of effort to understand. The rules of thumb are:
- stay as close as possible to the readers' perspective, using their words, for a given piece of content;
- avoid jargon and brand names that don’t say what they’re about, unless we have evidence that significant numbers of people are searching for it – and make sure there’s a clear-language glossary nearby.
Apart from making our content concise and easy to understand, we aim to strike a tone that is:
- straightforward and factual
- constructive, aiming to make a positive difference
- fair and respectful of diversity
- outward-looking
This, of course, is just a start. No doubt we’ll have more to say about policy and strategy in the months ahead, as we start to apply this basic approach to the complex reality.
Comments