Nonprofits need to skip the jargon

Billie Blair | For The New Mexican

10/11/2008 - 10/9/08

The Community Grants Cycle at the Santa Fe Community Foundation — when we award money to grant applicants — has brought out the word curmudgeon in me again.

What are all these fancy labels — capacity, cultural competency, sustainability?

Can we learn to say what we do in plain English?

One of our applicants says the organization "guides youth in developing the intrinsic motivation needed to commit to creating a positive future, which leads to continuing their education, making positive choices, the building of developmental assets, individual protective factors, self-concept, self control and social responsibility." When my partner, a bright young member of Future Santa Fe, and I conducted the site visit, we learned this means they help students stay in school, avoid drugs and alcohol, stop school bullying and curb suicide attempts, teen pregnancy and youth gang activity.

There is never just "programming." It is almost always "innovative." Does that mean it has never been done before? Nonprofits don't have people they help; they have "constituents." Do their constituents know they are — almost all of them — "at risk?" At risk of what?

And, of course, it's "collaborative." That usually means nonprofits say they work with each other because they know we like that.

What makes the people who work at nonprofits think they have to use obscure words to describe very concrete benefits they provide? And the problem isn't limited to Santa Fe.

• "Barriers to employment." The new media director at Goodwill International noticed leaders using that phrase. She parsed it down. It refers to people having a hard time finding a job. They may be poor, disabled, have been on welfare, or lack education or job skills.

• "Disparities in health outcomes." The executive director of one of our fellow community foundations in Pittsburgh came on the job with this as the organization's stated mission to resolve. He learned it meant that African Americans in the Pittsburgh area got sick and died at a higher rate than whites.

• "Rehabilitation services designed to enhance the lives of women." One columnist learned that this means organizations help female prisoners learn to read, get a GED and get off drugs.

Albert Ruesga, vice president for programs and communications at the Agnew E. Meyer Foundation, said people in the charitable world (and watch out, we are one in 10 of the working population) are "at best self-important and at worst muddled and confused."

Our foundation pleads guilty. When we went to the community a few years ago to ask what people saw as needs in Northern New Mexico, the mantra was one word: "Sustainability." At long last a community planner defined that term so my pea brain could grasp it: "Meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs."

I plead personally guilty. I have begun to say "we seek to learn" when what I really mean is "we want to know." Or "convene around" when, in fact, we are not circling a problem — or maybe we are.

Experts recommend that those of us who are afflicted with this muddling disease check www.fightthebull.com/bullfighter/asp, for downloadable software created by the authors of Why Business People Speak Like Idiots. Others recommend running the Flesch Reading Ease Scale, which is available on most Microsoft toolbars.

I checked this column with Flesch, and it is at close to the 10th-grade level. Newspaper reporters are supposed to write so an eighth-grader can understand. Take out the gobbledygook, and this column ranks as readable for eighth-graders.

Jargon, get thee away!

Billie Blair, president of the Santa Fe Community Foundation, can be reached at bblair@santafecf.org.