2018 compliance report
I. Senior agency official for plain writing
Mark McHale, Associate Administrator for Office of Strategic Communications
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
- Great Government through Technology blog
- GSA.gov webpages
- Multiple Award Schedules (MAS) letters to small business
- Multiple Award Schedules (MAS) web pages
- Insite (intranet)
III. Inform agency staff of Plain Writing Act’s requirements
- Information on the Act is posted on InSite, the agency intranet, with shortcut
- Plain Language Group on Salesforce Chatter (formed 1/3/2012) over 70 members
- articles on ITC Connect
- articles on GSA InSite
IV. Agency provided the following training sessions:
- 2/20 PL basics class - 8 people
- 3/1 FAS PL basics class - 27 people
- 3/28 Region 4 (Atlanta) PL basics class - 30 people
- 6/21 Office of Personnel Management - 10 people
- 8/1 Personal Property Management PL basics people - 13 people
- 8/23 - PL basics open to all government through DGU - 20 people
- 11/8 - FAS QP PL basics class - 40 people
- 11/13 LITE PL basics class - 26 people
- 12/13 LITE PL basics class - 7 people
- 38 new hires took the online course at GSA Online University
- Content Management Platform (CMP) Plain Language course:
- 5/29 - 43 AM session, 37 PM
- 5/30 - 45 AM session, 37 PM
- 7/31 - 33
- 8/1 - 31
- 8/2 - 31
Summit
7/20 - 95 in-person attendees to first-ever federal PL summit. Over 280 people attended via streaming video.
Office Hours
Briefings
- 5/17/18 Federal Asian Pacific American Council
- 6/13/18 Defense Threat Reduction Agency
V. Ongoing compliance/ sustaining change
Name of agency contact for compliance issues: Katherine Spivey
VI. Agency’s plain writing website
Website address: www.gsa.gov/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 2018, no one contacted us asking to clarify any GSA.gov page. We did get spam.