Plain Writing Act Compliance Report 2014

General Services Administration
Plain Writing Act Compliance Report
March 15, 2015

 

I. Senior Agency Official for Plain Writing:

Name of Senior Agency Official responsible for Plain Writing
Denise T. Roth, Deputy Administrator, denise.roth@gsa.gov

Names of Plain Language coordinators within the agency
Katherine Spivey, Plain Language Launcher, katherine.spivey@gsa.gov and plainlanguage@gsa.gov

II. Explain what specific types of agency communications have you released by making them available in a format that is consistent with the Plain Writing guidelines.

• Press releases
• GSA blog

III. Inform agency staff of Plain Writing Act’s requirements:

• Information on the Act is posted on the agency intranet with shortcut.
• Plain Language Group on Salesforce Chatter (formed 1/3/2012) over 60 members.
• The Office of Communications and Marketing produced a plain language poster and an e-poster for our lobby monitors.

IV. Agency provided the following trainings:

Classes for the Office of Communication and Marketing: 1/8, 1/9, 1/16

Held quarterly office hours: 5/15, 7/31, 8/27
Held brownbag: 3/6

Digital Gov University (open to GSA and other federal agencies)

Types of Training	# of Attendees	Date
in-person (basics)	25	1/15
webinar (web writing)	557	2/26
webinar (q/a)	70	3/20
in-person (basics)	21	6/26
in-person (basics)	18	10/2
webinar (web writing)	616	10/28

Plain Language Basics:

• 638 new hires took the online course at Online University
• 6/2 class to the USA.gov content team
• 9/15 class to Office of Financial Policy and Operations on plain language

Briefings

• CIO’s Office, Jedi team
• Office of Administrative Services
• GSA, Northeast and Caribbean Region

Bootcamp/train-the-trainer classes for PLAIN: 1/19, 5/22, 9/18

V. Ongoing compliance/ sustaining change
Name of agency contact for compliance issues: Denise T. Roth

VI.  Agency’s plain writing website
Website address: /plainlanguage

VII. Customer Satisfaction Evaluation after Experiencing Plain Writing Communications
In July 2011, we created and posted an email address, plainlanguage@gsa.gov, published on our plain language page, www.gsa.gov/plainlanguage. In 2014, no one contacted us asking to clarify any GSA.gov page. We did get spam.