Putting Clarity in Charity

Christine Nyirjesy Bragale considers herself a foot soldier in the battle against nonprofit jargon. Ms. Bragale, the media-relations director at Goodwill Industries International, has been known to rear up at the very sound of foundation tag lines sprinkled with phrases like “capacity,” “sustainability,” and “objectives.”

But Ms. Bragale has spent much of the decade that she has worked for Goodwill waging a rhetorical battle against a single phrase: “barriers to employment.”

“Goodwill helps people who want to find work find work,” says Ms. Bragale, who worked as a television news producer in Washington for 10 years before joining the charity at its Rockville, Md., headquarters. “The people we help are poor, they might have a disability, they might have been on welfare, lack education or job skills.”

To describe all of these, well, barriers to employment, someone, somewhere came up with the phrase that would become Ms. Bragale’s nemesis.

“It makes sense as a technical term but not to the person who actually has a barrier to employment,” she says. “All they know is that they’re having a hard time finding a job.”

Today, when Ms. Bragale works with Goodwill’s affiliates, she encourages them to express the charity’s mission in the simplest possible language.

“Basically it boils down to the following: If someone’s having a hard time finding a job, we’re there to help,” says Ms. Bragale. “If there’s a more specific message you want to add on to that, that’s fine — but simple language is essential.”

Saying a Mouthful

Welcome to the jargon wars. On one side is a mountain of polysyllabic verbiage turning even straightforward concepts into a mouthful. On the other is a small — but growing — army of straight talkers, committed to liberating charity chatter from the scourge of meaningless buzzwords.

Of course, jargon is by no means unique to the charity world. Specialized discourse and terminology can be found in virtually every profession, providing practitioners with a kind of linguistic shorthand that enables them to cut to the chase in their internal communications.

The problem for charities, says Tony Proscio, a self-proclaimed jargon buster, is that language that makes sense when used within an organization’s boardroom often means nothing at all to the general public.

Mr. Proscio, the author of three book-length essays on philanthropy’s addiction to jargon, including In Other Words and Bad Words for Good, warns that the use of overly lofty language does more than just clutter up annual reports. It does real damage to foundations and charities, he says, often keeping them from communicating effectively with the very people they are trying to reach.

“Foundations are engaging us in a public discussion and trying to influence the way that actions play out on a public stage,” says Mr. Proscio, a communications consultant in Brooklyn, N.Y., who works with nonprofit clients. “That’s an inherently public mission, and it requires a minimum public understanding.”

The Need to Name

When Grant Oliphant assumed the helm of the Pittsburgh Foundation in March, one of his missions was to promote plain speaking at the organization.

“We’re a community foundation, and that means that we have an obligation to describe what the community looks like, what we think it should look like, and the challenges that the community and its residents face,” he says. “Our priorities should be accessible. People should be able to understand them.”

Yet it didn’t take Mr. Oliphant long to realize that combating “jargonitis” at the Pittsburgh Foundation would be tough.

A case in point: the organization’s stated goal of “reducing disparities in health outcomes.” Beneath the jargon rests a stark challenge: Black people in the Pittsburgh area get sick and die at a significantly higher rate than whites.

“Here is a very real and very important social issue that doesn’t need to be exaggerated, just described,” says Mr. Oliphant. “But at some point it gets a fancy label which ends up confusing the issue, so that you have people who have no idea what you’re talking about.”

‘What Does That Mean?’

Gerard Braud, a former television reporter who spent 15 years covering the news in Louisiana and now works as a communications consultant in New Orleans, says that at least part of the reason for such verbal obfuscation is that charities want to avoid offending the individuals that they serve.

“They don’t want to hurt the feelings of the people they’re trying to help,” he says, “so they end up inventing words that aren’t just hard to understand but don’t really mean anything.”

He routinely comes across charities that provide such basic services as food, housing, and job training, yet they cannot explain what they do without resorting to complicated language.

When dealing with clients, he says, “the first question I ask is, ‘What does that mean?’ My second question is usually, ‘And what does that mean?’”

Take the charity head, for example, who, when asked what his organization does, explained that it provides “rehabilitation services designed to enhance the lives of women.” Only after subjecting the executive to a barrage of questions did Mr. Braud discover what the group actually does: help female prisoners learn to read, acquire their high-school equivalency degrees, and wean themselves off drugs.

He urges charities to junk the jargon and to use ordinary terms whenever possible.

“Jargon to me says, ‘I’m better than you, I’m smarter than you, I’m in the club, and you’re not,’ which sadly goes against all of the tenets of diversity and political correctness,” says Mr. Braud. “Many organizations end up inadvertently excluding their constituents because of the language that they use.”

Around and Around

Many of the most popular terms that dominate today’s jargon-studded philanthropic discourse make their way to charities from other fields, including engineering, finance, even the military.

“When you look at the main sources of jargon, it’s all from fields where precision is valued,” says Mr. Proscio. “But what happens is that terms that once had a very specific meaning evolve in their nonprofit context so that they mean everything and nothing.”

Mr. Proscio points to one of his favorite current examples: “situational awareness,” an expression used by military personnel to refer to an understanding of what is happening around them. In its new nonprofit guise, the term can be used to refer to someone who knows where the office’s coffeepot is located, says Mr. Proscio: “If you have a clue what’s happening, then you have ‘situational awareness.’”

Does it matter that charities rely upon a lexicon of words with such imprecise definitions?

Absolutely, says Albert Ruesga, vice president for programs and communications at the Eugene and Agnes E. Meyer Foundation, in Washington.

Mr. Ruesga argues that the overuse of jargon can convey the impression that people in the charitable world are at best self-important and at worst muddled or confused.

He takes particular umbrage at the overuse of the word “around,” as in “the foundation is convening a meeting around world hunger.”

“The first time I heard someone say that, I imagined there being some big problem on the table and people tiptoeing around it, not wanting to address it,” he says. “That image never left me.”

Mr. Ruesga’s concern, however, is less with the way jargon affects how charities and foundations talk than it is with how it affects how they act. “Around,” he argues, reflects a tentative approach to issues or the world: “Those of us who work in this world are painfully polite, and there is something so appallingly direct about meeting to discuss an issue.”

Plain English

Even charity workers who are vigilant in the fight against jargon, however, may find it difficult to eliminate all buzzwords from their speech. While some terms can easily be replaced by more straightforward equivalents — “measurements” for “metrics,” for example — other substitutions aren’t so obvious.

Fortunately, help is available. A software program called Bullfighter, created by the authors of Why Business People Speak Like Idiots and available online for free download, works like a spelling- or grammar-checking tool to eliminate jargon from documents. And while the program searches primarily for jargony business terms, it allows users to add their own most-hated vocabulary from other professions.

For philanthropy-specific jargon, the Communications Network maintains an online database of words to avoid, including new terms that appear to have raised the eyebrows — and the ire — of the communications professionals who belong to the organization.

Recent examples include the use of “onboard” as a verb, along with terms like “granular” and “unpacking.”

Of course, one need not go high tech in an effort to combat jargon. Colleen Troy, a communications consultant in Charleston, S.C., who works with nonprofit clients, uses an old-fashioned method to minimize jargon. Following the advice that was given to her as a magazine editor, she cuts everything she writes by one-third. “It forces you to eliminate the phrases that don’t mean anything or are better served by a single word,” says Ms. Troy. “Everyone thinks it isn’t possible, but it really works.”

Spotting Buzzwords

At Blueprint Research & Design, in San Francisco, employees are encouraged to keep track of the potential buzzwords they encounter and jot the terms down on a sheet of paper that hangs on a wall. The goal isn’t to steer them clear of jargon, says Lucy Bernholz, president of the strategy consulting firm that works with nonprofit clients, but to watch for emerging trends. “Buzzwords can also be trends for which there isn’t a name yet,” she says. “By keeping track of them, we’re able to look for patterns.”

Ms. Bernholz takes credit for naming at least one trend: “embedded giving,” the practice of building a philanthropic gift into another, unrelated transaction. “It had become a ubiquitous thing, but it didn’t have a name,” says Ms. Bernholz, who also collects and reports on buzzwords on her blog, Philanthropy 2173.

Now, she and her co-workers are on a quest to identify the next big buzzword. One likely candidate: “outsourced due diligence,” a reference to the growing number of organizations that seek to document whether a charity actually does what it says it does.

“Another expression I’ve been hearing a lot of is ‘breakthrough philanthropy,’” says Ms. Bernholz. “I still have no idea what it means.”