35. How to write for maximum impact at the Capitol with guest Arianna Z. Smith

[00:00:00] Good morning Arianna Z. Smith. Thank you for joining the Blueprint for California advocates podcast. I'm very happy you took time out of your schedule to speak with the audience today. For those who don't know Arianna edited my new book and I am forever thankful to her for her brilliant editing to make sure the book was powerful and punchy.

[00:00:22] I'm really excited you're here to share your wisdom with folks who are in the advocacy community and trying to get shit done. So let's start off by having you introduce yourself and letting us know where did you start and how did you get to where you are right now?

[00:00:40] Hi, Kristina Thanks for having me on today. So, my name is Arianna Z. Smith. I am the founder and principal of Arianna Public Affairs, and I have 20 years of experience between working at the state Capitol as legislative staff as well as running my own firm.

[00:00:58] What prompted you to start focusing on communication and public relations in general?

[00:01:07] I think it's important for elected officials to, to listen to the people in their districts. Uh, and People don't all know how to interact with their elected officials and with their staffers. And when I can help bridge that gap, that's something that I'm interested in helping with.

[00:01:29] An insider's guide, right, is something that a lot of folks need and that kind of translation is important. When I was first a new legislative staffer, getting that real understanding of how important it was to use your words accurately and precisely. But also in kind of a snappy way um, I had kind of actually a, a little bit of an embarrassing thing happened to me.

[00:01:54] If revealing this embarrassing thing can help save some of your listeners that experience, I'd love to, to help do that. So, when I worked for a Southern California assembly member he had uh, ambitious legislative package and 1 of those was a bill that helps address drunk driving from repeat offenders. He assigned me to write a press release, and I had never done that before. I read the bill, I made it very accurate and very complete. And then I wrote the headline, which was Assembly member so and so introduces sweeping legislation to curb drunk driving. And I got the press release approved, posted it to all the social media, sent it out to the extensive press release list, to all the journalists in the Capitol, and waited to see if it landed. And it did. I got a Google alert an hour or two later, a veteran Capitol journalist had written something about this bill already, and I was really excited about that.

[00:03:01] That sounds it, yeah.

[00:03:02] Yeah. So then I clicked on the link to see what he had said and he wrote sweeping legislation.

[00:03:08] So we're regulating brooms now.

[00:03:11] And that was pretty much the only hit that I

[00:03:14] of mean. That seems kind of mean. Like sweeping legislature. I think we all understand what that means. That feels a little harsh.

[00:03:21] Well, so that's actually kind of a good point. We kind of understand what sweeping legislation means, right? It's kind of this shorthand. But it's also kind of like this meaningless phrase, it didn't really give you a lot of ideas about what this bill does. It was just, Something that I had seen used a lot, and so that's what I did, was I copied what I had seen done, and yeah, it was a little bit harsh, but I'll tell you what, it really got me to thinking about what is careful, yet accurate, and precise, yet snappy.

[00:03:59] When it comes to writing to Capitol insiders who you're hoping to get. That information in front of legislators, staffers, journalists who are going to write stories that are going to get in front of legislative staffers. And it really got me thinking about, like, what is the best way to do that.

[00:04:17] Why do you think it's so difficult to I use the word a lot, breakthrough the noise, but I mean, it's, it's accurate. Why is it so hard? We've all written support letters. We've all written fact sheets and we've all tried to get some press attention, but it's really hard. What's your take on that?

[00:04:33] Yeah, so there's this, this fire hose of information that legislators and staffers are getting every single day. And that's coming from all their technological devices, that's coming at them at every committing hearing they attend, every briefing they attend, every meeting they attend.

[00:04:50] The people who have a lot of resources or who use their resources wisely are going to be the ones who break through.

[00:04:58] Absolutely. So let's talk about some of the common mistakes in your opinion that people make when it comes to writing for a Capitol audience.

[00:05:07] So even when you do have the opportunity to get that information in front of legislators and staff. There's a lot of ways that it can kind of go wrong or just be ineffective. You know, we all want to do legislation that changes the world. But that kind of legislation is going to be complicated.

[00:05:27] It's going to have, it's going to be long. It's going to be probably very controversial. And it's very easy for opponents to make complexity sound scary, right? Stakeholders they, they want to fight back against that. But they're, they're experts who know so much about their subject.

[00:05:47] They don't always know how much the rest of the world knows about their subjects, including legislators.

[00:05:52] A good assumption is not very much. These are complicated issues and not everybody's an expert in everything. Especially when you've got so many of them in front of you.

[00:05:59] right. And and I've certainly been in meetings where it was very clear that the, you know, the experts, they, they recognize that the legislators, they're smart, they care and they don't want to sound like they're talking down to a legislator, right? But then they assume that maybe the legislator and staff know more than they actually do.

[00:06:18] Related to that, you know, proponents want to be accurate. So they get too technical. They don't want their words to be twisted. So they, they use language that sounds like legislative counsel.

[00:06:30] And then sometimes you have the opposite problem, kind of an overcorrection, which is What I did early on. Proponents want to sound understandable and to do that, they end up relying on cliche phrases that don't actually mean anything.

[00:06:46] Yeah. What's an example of that?

[00:06:48] So I actually have a whole list of words that I started hearing a lot over the years that have gotten devoid of meaning, right? Just because they've been used so many times. And when you do that, you risk people tuning out.

[00:07:02] Yeah.

[00:07:03] So anybody who's been in the legislature for any period of time has heard, heard these. Would you like me to kind of go through

[00:07:09] yeah. Let's do Ariana's list of words not to use. I love it. Go for it.

[00:07:14] And by the way, I If you've used these before, so have I. Don't feel, it's, it's okay. Don't berate yourself. Just try something different.

[00:07:25] So for example, think outside the box, right? what are you really saying? You're trying something new. You're doing something that hasn't been done before. You know, we gotta have people get some skin in the game. You're just saying we want everyone involved. There's a lot of ones that are, that you'll have heard, you know, don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. We're working to create a level playing field. We don't want to kick the can down the road.

[00:07:53] We know why people use these phrases in, in policy writing. We don't want to get too technical. We want to say something that everybody understands really quickly, but the problem is it's too general.

[00:08:03] It's very easy to start tuning out and you only have a short period of time to actually talk about your specific policy. Use the time to do that instead of using some of these phrases.

[00:08:17] The best writing advice that I ever got was back in college, and it sticks with me to this day. Somebody said to me write with the least amount of words necessary to communicate what you're trying to say. like, All the fluffy, descriptive, superfluous, and cliches, like just cut it down.

[00:08:35] If your sentence is 10 words long, make it five. It's still conveying the same thing.

[00:08:39] That's exactly right. and people don't always have time to do that. There's a quote that's often attributed to Mark Twain or Benjamin Franklin it's something along the lines of I didn't have time to write you a short letter, so I wrote you a long one.

[00:08:51] And it's the same with policy writing. You need to take more time to express with clarity what you're trying to say in shorter words.

[00:09:03] What's your next piece of advice for folks who want to write in a way that will get people to pay attention and change their mind on an issue?

[00:09:10] We've talked about, you know, the, the two trite side of writing. Now, kind of on the opposite end of the spectrum, which is the overcorrection is the too technical. This is where someone hands you a fact sheet or you get two paragraphs into a press release or You're looking at maybe a myth versus facts document or something like that, and it looks like the phrasing was copied directly off the legislative council summary of the bill, right?

[00:09:45] And there's a couple of reasons why this happens. We've already talked a little bit about how when someone wants to be very, very accurate and beat back incorrect claims from opposition they want to make sure that they cover every single component of their bill.

[00:10:03] I understand why people get into that mindset, but you're going to get folks to tune out very quickly. And the other reason why some, frankly, why I think this sometimes happens is folks may not fully understand exactly what their bill does and they don't want to say something wrong.

[00:10:23] So they say, okay, I'm going to use this, I'm going to use the bill language itself or very close to the bill language itself.

[00:10:29] Well, that's a number one problem. You need to know what your bill does and be

[00:10:33] well, I guess.

[00:10:34] it in normal language.

[00:10:35] It is important to know exactly what your bill does and that's going to help you explain it in plain language. So I do not recommend using this very technical language on anything except for, you know, when you're arguing before an appellate court or something like that, right? You know you know, or you're writing your amendments. That's when those technical language is appropriate.

[00:10:59] But if you're just trying to, to communicate your point, you're not going to get it across. People are going to tune out or they're just not going to understand what you're saying.

[00:11:07] What are the benefits that you see when you start to kind of incorporate this advice? Keeping it user friendly, concise. Explaining what your bill does in a way that you can if you stop somebody on the sidewalk in front of Trader Joe's, you could tell them in plain language.

[00:11:23] What what it is that you're trying to do. But at the same time, like you said, the balance of avoiding the cliches and the slogans and the canned responses. What do you see as some of the benefits when you start applying those ideas?

[00:11:37] I've spent a lot of time talking about what not to do and as I answer this, I'd like to talk about some of the things that you definitely should be doing, right? My central advice is First talk about who is the end person who's benefiting from your bill or policy. And I don't mean what it's going to do for you, the stakeholder I'm talking about. the ultimate benefit to the constituent, right?

[00:12:07] So if you're, you know a small business lender and the bill is going to make it easier for you to process your loans faster for small business companies, right? Don't start with, it's going to make it easier for me to process my loans. Say small business owners and employees Are going to get their loans faster, right?

[00:12:30] That's the end user, right?

[00:12:32] Got it.

[00:12:32] Yeah, you see this a lot in departments. We'll talk about how the bill will help them improve their administrative processes, right? And, but you really need to make sure that you're talking about the, the Californian who wins from this bill, the person in the district of the legislator who's going to have a better life or an easier time doing something because of the bill that you're providing, or is going to have a safer you know, commute, right? You know, something like that. So when you sort of shift your mindset from talking about how the bill changes Processes or something over to a, here's how specific Californians benefit you're going to have a larger consciousness of, of and also it's going to help the legislators who don't necessarily know very much about the stakeholders being represented.

[00:13:27] Are you following a formula?

[00:13:28] If you're kind of approaching this with the idea that I want this legislator or this staffer to think about this bill to, and to agree with me, I always start with, you know, Who's the end user who benefits, how this bill helps the legislators district and or constituencies that they care about.

[00:13:46] Okay.

[00:13:47] And I think it's important to have pretty clearly what it costs. To be ready to answer those questions. Not everybody agrees with me on this, but I actually don't think that you should lead with what is the problem you're trying to solve.

[00:14:04] Um, And the reason for that is you might need to go through paragraph after paragraph after paragraph of history to even get to the answer. And here's where we are now and, you know, maybe the committee analysis might be the appropriate place for that, but

[00:14:20] that's a lot of opportunity to lose people's attention

[00:14:23] that's not where you want to start.

[00:14:25] If they want to read further down, you can get to that, but that's not the best place that they're going to start.

[00:14:30] Your ultimate overarching goal is get the legislator to vote for or against the policy that you're proposing. But on the way, there's some other very clear, very specific benefits that you can get from having a really clear writing. And 1 of those things can be your position letter can be quoted in a committee analysis, right?

[00:14:51] That's 1 of the top places that a staff or a legislator is going to look to decide how to vote on a bill. You can actually have a legislator or staffer remember your point in a meeting or your talking points at a committee hearing. The clearer and more concisely that you can explain your position, a journalist is more likely to feature your explanation as opposed to somebody else's in their Uh, in their media outlet, and then, of course, just building over time, becoming a trusted source of digestible information ahead of other potential sources. Those are just some of the benefits.

[00:15:32] What are parting words of advice that you have? I like to end episodes with actionable, you know, what is something you can just start doing immediately that will have an impact?

[00:15:42] These days, many Californians, they feel alienated from policymaking decisions and politics. That's it's hard to understand. It's easy to tune out. There's a lot of things competing for their attention. And when people are alienated, they get disconnected. They stop participating and that you know, that hurts our democratic processes.

[00:16:06] So when people are fed up with what they see as kind of this insider only system, they aren't seeing the benefits, and it doesn't reflect their values. It's not really solving their problems, right?

[00:16:17] And actually there's, there's a lot of good things that legislators are doing. There's a lot of good things that policymakers are doing, but the problem is that we're not always actively, adequately, accurately communicating what we're doing and why we're taking those actions and why they benefit people.

[00:16:35] And then if people are actually tuning in to us, And all they hear is some soundbite or maybe they hear overly complicated too technical stuff That's sounds like we're trying to hide something even though that's not the case. That's why I think it's really important to be able to communicate clearly beyond just to legislators to get what you want, but also As a more democratic process as well.

[00:16:55] do you want to share your website or how can people find you online?

[00:16:59] Sure. You can find me on LinkedIn for Arianna z Smith in Sacramento, or you can go to arianna z smith.com.

[00:17:10] Thank you so much for taking the time to come on and share your wisdom, Arianna. I know there's a lot of bad writing and communication out there and it's definitely a very treasured skillset. So I appreciate you sharing your, your pearls of advice. Thank you.