Thanks to everyone who has provided us with their thoughts and questions since we launched our new website last week! It’s been great to catch up with clients and friends!
Here are a few questions I thought I’d share:
When is the launch party?
It may not be until December, or even later, but we will find time to celebrate Scribe’s launch, and growth! Sign up for our newsletter here!
Are you really doing this now?
Yes! The work of planning and building our cities goes on, and we are seeing a renewed focus on some familiar challenges – the need for shared roadways, for example – to enhance safety. How well city builders communicate their expertise is still important.
So, is Scribe a communications firm?
No. While our work is inherently about communication, we focus on helping technical experts translate their subject matter knowledge into jargon-free documents that their target audience can understand.
Typically, technical writers work in fields like IT or manufacturing to explain complicated ideas to a customer – let’s say by helping a software developer create a user manual, or an appliance producer create instructions for the person who purchases their microwave. In bringing technical writing to city building professions for the first time, we are focused on helping city builders – like planners, engineers and developers – translate their complex, behind-the-scenes work to their key audiences.
City builders include neighbourhood residents attending a community meeting, a think tank developing public policy ideas, a government body funding new infrastructure, or a global firm competing to win a bid for a new local planning study. They all face the same challenge: to explain the value of their work in plain language. Scribe lets the experts focus on what they do best – develop their projects – while we provide the strategic advice and documents to ensure their success.
For example, we can:
- Get involved early in a project, rather than at the end. This allows us to consider the strategic purpose of the work and the intended audience right from the start, so your experts are aligning their work as they develop it. This is particularly effective for group projects with multiple staff members involved in different components of a project.
- Join you mid-way through a project to get everyone on the team re-aligned with the same understanding of the purpose, approach and value of the work. This might include providing new policies and procedures, style guides, and draft documents in a variety of formats, which can help address internal debates and confusion, and save time and money later on.
- Work with you to translate your completed projects, so they can be understood and acted on by decision makers and funders. This is a good time to translate your technical documents into plain language that isn’t “dumbed down”. Here’s a great piece on the language of city planning and how it can be improved.
I don’t totally get it – Are you a full-service [urban] planning firm?
Scribe is a technical writing and editing company, first and foremost. But urban planners are some of our favourite people! We partner with those who are leading projects in cities – that’s our strength after 20+ years in planning and policy. Our goal is to make sure that our clients in local or provincial and state governments, private practices, think tanks and community organizations can make their complex ideas clear, inform effective decision-making and have influence in the long run. We work with planning firms, and others, on the technical writing and editing, so they don’t have to!
Can you help me with some ghostwriting?
Absolutely. We’re used to being behind-the-scenes and adopting the written voice of different authors – in reports, textbooks, manuals, papers, presentations and more. The confidential nature of the projects we work on is part of the reason we can’t always provide a ton of examples of our prior work!
Are you hiring?
Scribe is growing. If you’re interested in an affiliate relationship, or if you’re a city builder with exceptional writing and editing skills, let us know!
Keep the questions coming! They only make us better.
Thank you to our clients and friends who are keeping us motivated and moving forward together to make our cities even greater places to live!