home >> consulation-documents

Consultation documents

Consultation is an important role for any organisation - yet, too often, consultation documents are long, abstract and dull. An effective public consultation document:

• is brief (if it's too long, readers won't even pick it up) while providing genuinely relevant content that allows readers to develop an informed view
• is balanced - it doesn't try to skew the result
• is written in plain language
• is well structured - so that readers step clearly from one issue to the next, and are introduced to new or more complex issues
• asks direct questions
• uses tangible, real world examples to illustrate the issues you're consulting on (these might be actual case studies or hypotheticals)
• directly addresses the reader's experiences
• clearly explains who will be affected by any policy under consideration, and how they will be affected
• clearly states how to respond and when responses are needed by.

We write and edit consultation documents. For a genuinely effective document, consider your communication aims from the beginning - start with your audience and what's meangingful and intelligible to them, rather than trying to repair a complex and confusing document in a last-minute rush.

Find out more

The UK Department for Business and Regulatory Reform has useful guidelines and a code of practice on consultation.

The department's report Warning: too much information can harm is about consumer information but contains useful principles about what to put in and what to leave out in other documents. Its general finding is that people want relevant information that helps them make decisions, and are poorly served by too much information, or by information that is complex or unappealing.