Leave the Mumbo-Jumbo ICF, CHAT Needs Clean Copy
Had a nice long talk today with someone who’s argument was: the Road Home is complicated, I challenge anyone to do it right. People are upset, but you’d never please everybody.
Wow. That’s simple. I can fit that in my head.
It’s much easier to understand than Properties acquired by the Road Home Program should be reintroduced to commerce by local redevelopment entities in a manner that ensures current and future safety of the community, or be retained as open space when necessary. The disposition should follow local community input, neighborhood planning, and safety requirements. Which is only one of 18 points in the Road Home Bill of Rights.
From the CopyBlogger, who writes about effective copy-writing for blogging.
- Earnest Hemingway’s Top 5 Tips for Writing Well - We can’t all be Hemingway, but it doesn’t hurt to try.
- The 5 immutable Laws of Persuasive Blogging - Headlines, how tos, bullet lists, and anecdotes. Most of all value.
- Writing Copy Even Grandma Wil Love - Confusing copy makes a person feel dumb. Isn’t ICF already doing enough of that?
Next time you write something, read it back to yourself with an eye on the clock. When you reach two minutes, you’ve gone too far.
With that rule in mind, what’s our message? Because all I see are numbers and acronyms.
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It was a lot simpler when it started 10 or 11 , and left pretty intact by the parish councils who got it.
When the LRAturned it into a statement of principles it grew to 18 and turned out as all things do by committee, more than was needed
Kind of like OCD and ICF’s handling of what could have been a simple grant program, but for the reinventing of several wheels, the creation of a few un-needed cottage industries (fraud verification and inferior appraisals) and “how many more steps can we add to this before you get near a check?” thinking.
fas
Frank
CHAT needs to distinguish between documents used in negotiation, and messages used in outreach. The Bill of Rights/Statement of Principles has moved on. It has a new function now. It is an accomplishment. No doubt.
Can we have a number list, what we want. It needs to be about as simple as the message, “The Road Home is complicated, I challenge anyone to do it right.”
Melanie our yourself can respond to that statement, but you don’t want to make the person who says it feel stupid. (Read: “Writing Copy Even Grandma Wil Love”:http://www.copyblogger.com/writing-copy-even-grandma-will-love/.) We need to have a simple message so that the rest of us can give a simple answer, not a point by point analysis.
What is that message?
* There is no way for us to know if ICF is doing a good job, because they have absolutely no independent oversight.
That’s a simple one. The contract being a 5 year contract, paid hourly, that’s simple too.