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.

Last Reviewed: 2022-08-11