Doing Good by Rejecting Gibberish

Not too long ago, an American foundation proudly declared that it had managed to lower the incidence of “negative health outcomes” among a group of poor people. Fewer of the people, it seems, had died. (The boast may prove overhasty. Sooner or later, all of us have pretty much the same “health outcome,” against which even very large endowments have been known to fail.)

Death and disease naturally leave people groping for euphemisms, but how are we to explain the minced words in another foundation memo, this one about education reform: “These grants will incentivize administrators and educators to apply relevant metrics to assess achievement in the competencies they seek to develop.”

The writer was evidently embarrassed by his mercenary view of American educators (who seem to need “incentivizing” before they will consent to administer a test) and his disdain for ordinary learning, compared with which “achieving competencies” offers young people a more refined and elevating experience.

Most foundations don’t set out to intimidate, overwhelm, or befuddle their readers. Yet all too often, their buzzwords, jargon, clichés, and other vague or impenetrable expressions make it all but impossible to understand what these institutions do, or to demonstrate why anyone should care.

Garbled language is taking its toll on the effectiveness of American philanthropy in a way few seem to recognize. Opinion polls over the years suggest that social causes in the United States — the sorts of humanitarian work favored by foundations, churches, nonprofit groups, civic associations, the whole altruistic establishment, left and right — no longer enjoy the respect or trust they did in decades past. Some of that surely lies at the doorstep of a few celebrated frauds who made off with charitable millions. But those are rare. The more insidious and persistent culprit behind the civic world’s loss of stature may be the way it sounds.

The result is not just a poor public image. The sadder consequence is that good ideas die unnoticed, imprisoned in a dungeon of muddled language. Most often, the problem is not muddy thinking, but the timidity of a philanthropic culture that is embarrassed by its own beliefs and terrified of giving offense. Foundations seem determined to avoid ideological taint at all costs, to speak with the detached, antiseptic certainty of science, not the heat of zealotry.

It is no coincidence that the great majority of off-putting words and stilted phrases sprang from fields known for their cucumber-cool precision: engineering, the natural sciences, finance, the military. You don’t get sports metaphors very often in philanthropy — at least not in the official writing — nor do you get those of art or cuisine or even religion (“faith-based” being a perfect illustration: It’s a description of religion that is unknown in the actual practice of spirituality). Those fields are all too instinctive, subjective, or creative. In philanthropy, it seems, the main impulse is to make everything seem like a law of physics or math, beyond shades of interpretation or traps of dispute, all strictly QED.

From that impulse come the likes of targeting, metrics, and infrastructure.

Such things turn up in the writing of people with rich, versatile vocabularies, including a few who are not at all afraid to say what they believe. So what happens to these people?

A grantee of several major foundations told me bluntly, “If I wrote the way you suggest, I would be discounted in half the foundations I now depend on. Give me a choice between a grant and a reputation as a lively raconteur, and I’ll take the money, thank you very much.”

Touché. Grantees aren’t alone in that belief. Here is a similar quote (likewise off the record) from a program officer at a major national foundation:

“Any grant I write up has to pass muster with [an academic scholar in top management] and then with our general counsel, who is looking for exact correspondences between the foundation’s program priorities and my write-up. If I don’t use the right words, [the general counsel] won’t see the correspondences, and [the senior manager] won’t feel there’s academic rigor here. Then there are the board members, who expect to see ‘tough business thinking’ in these grants — by which they generally mean banker-speak. How much trouble am I willing to put myself to, avoiding the very terms that all my bosses seem to want? I’m not in this for martyrdom. I’d write it in Flemish, if that got my grants approved.”

When foundation writers and scholars deal only with one another, and by extension with their ideological brethren, the hallowed old expressions probably do serve a purpose — especially if the author isn’t trying to say anything particularly new. But those expressions, precisely because they are so enthusiastically received among the faithful, quickly become habit-forming. In time, through overuse, the popular words come not to express serious thinking, but to replace it. Using the terms becomes an acceptable substitute for thinking the thoughts, and eventually the terms line up like the facades of a Potemkin village, grandly adorning intellectual empty space, to the unwitting delight of gullible passers-by.

So when a foundation officer writes — as one actually did — that a “geographically targeted effort will benefit from synergies,” the writer evidently wants the initiated to envision the careful process that adepts understand as targeting, and to expect the calculated chain reactions that social scientists like to call synergy.

The implied meaning comes off looking quite grand, really: We will pick such ingenious locations for our grants that all the healthful vapors will gather like clouds of angels about our cause. Yet what the sentence actually says is so vague as to defy paraphrase. Incredibly, the writer never goes on to describe what synergies might be involved, or how they would bestow their benefits. It’s all incantation with no point.

The writer no doubt had a point. But because of the soothing, almost narcotic effect of the jargon, she or he was evidently unaware that the point was never made. Even the old hands who know these words well will gain no insight from reading this sentence (though they may glide right past it, mollified by the murmur of reassuring sounds). Yet in fact, it was written for publication far beyond the philanthropic cloister. Those helpless lay readers who don’t spend their days talking about synergies and targets could only be baffled.

The risk of making such obscure points in vague and self-important language is that it makes the reader suspicious. People who can’t puzzle out the real meaning will soon draw their own inferences about it.

“Various institutions are creating tools to successfully advance this field within a civic-minded framework,” says a paper meant for a wide audience. It is easy to infer from that sentence that other “frameworks” are to be regarded as less “civic-minded,” and that other people’s “tools” have unsuccessfully advanced the field (a neat trick). At least overtly, the sentence is intended to point toward good news and promising work. But it practically begs people to read between the lines for more shadowy meanings.

Why? Because there is too little bright meaning shining from the lines themselves.

Of course, the easiest response to impenetrable writing is simply to cast it aside, and that is, in fact, what most people do with it.

But an unlucky minority have no choice but to read some of the denser material, because their jobs or their passions require that they follow what people are writing in a given field. Among those readers, the stilted or pompous writer will encounter something worse than indifference: distrust. Whether the listeners are grant seekers, grant makers, trustees, scholars, or ordinary citizens, they are likely to conclude, over time, that the words don’t mean as much as they seem to. Or worse, they may come to suspect some contraband of inscrutable hidden meaning secreted behind every comma, traps of sophistry set for the unsuspecting. Either way, any hope of informing or persuading people has been defeated.

In the skeptical world in which most nonprofit groups and foundations ply their trade, writing nowadays is an act of salesmanship. Sometimes the sales job is aimed at particular executives or trustees whose chimes are rung by terms like operationalize and value added. Far more often, the prospect is some weary block-association leader, civic activist, or congressional staff member, old enough to have been chastened by Model Cities and “maximum feasible participation,” serial school and welfare reforms of no lasting consequence, and the occasional charitable chimera or even outright scam.

For today’s philanthropic message, every customer is a tough customer, to whom tortured and alien language from any public-interest type is just one more signal to pull on the rubber boots. In this atmosphere, the penalty for the self-flattering double talk and empty stock phrases popular in too many foundations, universities, and nonprofit groups will sooner or later be dismay, then ridicule, and finally contempt.

Foundations and their allies owe themselves a better fate.

Tony Proscio is author of Bad Words for Good: How Foundations Garble Their Message and Lose Their Audience, from which this article has been adapted. The book is being released this month by the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation, which also distributed his essay In Other Words: A Plea for Plain Speaking in Foundations.