Gov. Gregoire announces state agency�s national award for document revision; other state entries are finalists

For Immediate Release: April 30, 2010

OLYMPIA � Gov. Chris Gregoire announced today that the Department of Labor & Industries won the 2010 national award for �Best Revised Document from a Public Agency,� a competition sponsored by the Center for Plain Language in Washington, D.C.
Three other entries from Washington state were finalists in the competition:
� L&I: clearer �quarterly report� form for employers filing workers� compensation premiums.
� Department of Licensing, two entries: An easier-to-use online application for renewing auto registrations and a clearer paper auto registration form. Project managers conducted extensive customer testing to ensure both its online and paper auto-registration processes were easy for people to use.

The winning entry for L&I�s �Best Revised Document� award was part of a project that developed clearer and more informative written explanations for citizens requesting public records. In early 2009, after L&I�s Public Records Program began using its new letters and inserts, its customer call volumes immediately dropped by more than 95 percent.

The reduced phone workload allowed the Public Records Program to:
� Handle an unexpected 300 percent increase in demand for records in 2009.
� Reduce the average time it took to respond to records requests from 12 to six days.
� Cancel its plan to add two staff members at a cost of an additional $110,000 per year.

�This achievement is especially important because it is one of Washington state�s best examples of how state employees can dramatically improve their service to citizens and reduce their costs, merely by simplifying the language of its routine documents,� said Gregoire.

In 2005, Gregoire signed a Plain Talk Executive Order, which requires government workers to write clearly for the people who must read and comply with what they write. More than 7,500 state employees have been trained in the �Plain Talk� approach, and more than 2,000 documents, Web pages and online applications have been overhauled.

The winners were selected by an independent panel of 12 judges, all plain language and design specialists from universities, companies and government agencies around the U.S. The Center for Plain Language will honor the Washington projects at an awards banquet tonight (April 29) at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. Gregoire�s Washington, D.C., representative, Mark Rupp, will accept the awards on behalf of the governor and L&I and DOL.

The Center for Plain Language is a non-profit organization that advocates for plain language use and training in government, the private sector, and academia.