How Sales Language Impacts Local Democracy

Do you ever find yourself glaring at a job posting, wondering why it was ever recommended to you, and how the hell it ever got the thumbs-up from an HR department?

The algorithms that hurl these ‘opportunities’ at our online profiles rarely get it just right, but when they do, sure, it feels pretty sweet. We feel seen and our great track-record has been recognized. And about time too.

However the truth is that much of the time, these targeted ads are way off the mark and are just tedious, spammy junk.

But there's a pattern among the duds I receive. They often include language that I’m very familiar with, but it's used awkwardly and feels completely out of place. Looking at it more closely I’ve gone from being intrigued to being concerned.

Why?

It's because the terms that are being used so brightly and clumsily in these particular job postings are normally used to speak about community relations and local democracy. And they’ve been hijacked.

A precious language.

The language of community engagement was born out of the global struggle to tackle long-standing crises of local democracy.

It reflects the assertion that local knowledge must be part of any transparent and inclusive decision-making process. And it reflects the hard-won acceptance of that fact by politicians and officials.

For many, it also represents the ongoing struggle to keep their voices heard in a failing system, or in times of urgent and tragic upheaval.

I’m sensitive to all this because public involvement in local government decision-making was the focus of my doctoral research, and I have designed and reviewed engagement projects for much of the twenty years since then.

My work learned from decades of painstaking effort by community development professionals, activists, community volunteers, public administrators, academics and funding bodies around the world to bring marginalized and excluded people into the democratic process.

These skillful practitioners crafted a language that's now central to the connection between communities, their trusted advocates and their elected representatives.

This language is a toolkit that contains instruments that challenge power, pinpoint inequity, establish trust, remove opacity and throw light onto shaded agendas.

It facilitates the public’s right to speak and be heard, and when used sensitively and precisely, is one of the real jewels of local democracy.

Appropriating, not learning.

Over the last few years, I’ve noticed this language being used in entirely unrelated settings, and it has become particularly common in sales and marketing environments. These are the sources of the job postings that find their way to my inbox.

Those exciting, results-focused teams of community engagement, partnership and outreach specialists that I should join? 

Well, they’re all sales and revenue-oriented.

They sell products, manage complaints, develop business opportunities, cold-call for leads, convert them to prospects, and research wider commercial partnering opportunities.

The fact that these roles are suggested to me isn’t some wild algorithmic spasm after all. As far as these recruiters are concerned I’m a clear match because I’m a community engagement and partnership-type person. Hell, I’ve got two post-graduate degrees in it; I’m heading for the top, right?

But this isn't me. At all. So I’ll pass, thanks.

Not to cast shade on legitimate sales professionals, but it seems that somewhere along the line human resources has decided to transplant terminology from an unrelated sector into commercially-oriented job descriptions as if they were genuine sales skills. Here’s how:

Engagement and outreach are used to describe customer contact during sales and marketing activity;

Community is used to refer to the body existing or potential users of that company’s products or services;

Partner and stakeholder are used to describe facilitators, suppliers or other beneficiaries of a commercial operation (i.e., B2B sales, prospects, investors and donors).

Yes, on the face of it, some of these could be reasonable, alternative uses of the terminology in a new sector. That happens. Language evolves. However, we’re not just speaking about the occasional loan word; whole phrases, tones and concept-groupings are being used to describe a completely different discipline.

This is a blatant misrepresentation of a skillset that prioritizes objectivity, independence, democracy and transparency, not profit and revenue.

Sadly, marketing and sales may be the only context that some people will have for this language, and the problem I (and many others) have with it won't make sense to those who are now using these terms routinely in pursuit of revenue targets.

So how might this threaten local democracy exactly?

The fact that this is intensely annoying and hugely disrespectful to the sector of origin isn't the main point.

My research specifically looked at the things that influence the public’s decision whether or not to participate in any kind of local democratic initiative or community engagement exercise if the opportunity were to arise. That includes voting, attending public meetings, responding to surveys, giving feedback on services, registering complaints or just letting officials and representatives know their preferences.

Trust, perceived tokenism, the credibility of officials and politicians, the perceived likelihood of making a difference, over engagement (aka, engagement fatigue) and satisfaction with the mechanisms and processes are just a few of the things that affect those personal decisions.

In a nut-shell, we know that people choose not vote if they don’t think it will ‘make a difference’, or they may not register a complaint if they don’t trust the process, and they won’t go to a public meeting if they feel they’ve only been invited for the optics of the situation.

And these factors are heavily influenced by the language that people in authority use when they speak about connecting with citizens and voters.

The words signify their intent and understanding. A city-official bungling the way they refer to a local community, or a politician using clumsy language to describe a partnership, can kill commitment to a project stone-dead in a heartbeat and bury a whole program in the time it takes for word to get around. And in this sector, that kind of news travels at something like light speed.

There are always hugely important initiatives going on out there, attempting to establish and maintain a dialogue with communities and vulnerable people in real need. Community engagement specialists are key to initiatives in housing, public health, substance misuse, city planning, food poverty, low educational attainment, social services and many more areas.

To be very clear: misapplying the language of community engagement within a sales environment dilutes and devalues its terms and concepts, undermines the work of the specialists and programs that need to apply those concepts and techniques, and reduces the potential for those programs to benefit people.

How exactly are communities and their representatives supposed to view officials offering to engage with communities, to reach out to stakeholders, and broker meaningful partnerships, when they know someone else who does the same thing twenty times a day over the phone on a commission-only basis for a pool-cleaning company? Because that is what their job description says, right?

This may all seem abstract and unnecessary if you haven’t worked in advocacy or with community groups before.

So for those folks, as an exercise, think about the staff engagement activities that happen where you work, or maybe consider how you see local politicians connecting with voters at election time.

How do you feel when you know you're being persuaded to do something rather than being asked about something? Or when you've said 'no' but they keep asking, because your 'yes' is better for them? When you're being sold an idea rather than asked for your opinion on it? Would you trust the 'engagement' process of someone who's guiding you to take a particular position on something? Would you feel connected to its outcomes? Would you remain engaged with that process? Would you engage at all? Would you ever engage again?

I ask these things rhetorically, but professionally and academically we already know the answer: 

When trust and credibility are reduced, engagement falls away, resulting in absent voices.

Just when we need to listen.