The United Nations is reporting that barely anybody reads its reports.
The UN's Secretary-General launched a taskforce to fix this, with other mandates including how to increase engagement, how to review thousands of UN reports, and how to reduce administrative workload.
So why does practically no one read their reports? They’re tough to read.
It's important to write in plain language if you want to efficiently convey information to the public. However, UN reports default to the language of the peers of those who wrote them.
They read something like this:
In accordance with the UN80 Reform Initiative’s mandate to optimize organizational efficacy, rationalize resource allocation, and ensure mandate delivery within the parameters of fiscal sustainability, the Secretariat undertook a diagnostic assessment of reporting and convening practices across all subsidiary bodies.
Preliminary analytics indicate the volumetric escalation of mandated outputs, exemplified by the production of approximately 1,100 reports in the previous calendar year, represent a 20 per cent increase relative to 1990 baselines; and facilitation of in excess of 27,000 formal intergovernmental engagements, has exceeded absorptive capacities of both Secretariat and Member State stakeholders.
Findings also indicate that, notwithstanding the proliferation of digital dissemination channels, substantive engagement metrics remain suboptimal.
But isn't that just exhausting to read?
I'm pretty comfortable writing in a formal academic format, but I still had to pull up a thesaurus and skim through a few UN reports just to write that up after having been conditioned to write in such a way that I convey information and messages to the public as efficiently as possible.
That's not to say UN reports should default to reporting with overly dramatic headlines just to get some clicks. But they could be clearer in their messaging.
If the world’s most important reports can’t be understood by the people whose lives they are meant to affect, what good are they?
It’s encouraging though that the UN is aware of this, and actively working to fix it, because I wouldn't have known that only a few thousand read even the topmost UN reports, if the UN itself did not admit nobody reads their reports.
