A Year of Civic Language Explorations

Photo by Antenna on Unsplash

Let’s be honest, language doesn’t matter… except when it absolutely does. And especially over the last few years in America, it has felt like language matters more and more.

Do you ever feel like you’re talking past someone in a conversation? Or, perhaps worse, have you ever had the experience where you feel like you furthered division during a discussion because of the words you chose to use? Do you detect a disconnect between how you use words to represent your ideas, thoughts, and points related to democracy and how others use those same words?

If any of those questions resonate with you, it turns out you’re in good company. Many of us who work in the civic space–as funders and practitioners–are struggling with these challenges as well. In many ways, our civic language has become deeply coded and loaded, leaving little space for connection or productive discussion. As someone I talked to put it, “Now, when I use words like ‘democracy’ and ‘citizen’ they seem to signal something I’m not intending to others. It feels like the world shifted around me, and I have no idea what to say anymore.”

This area of learning and experimentation felt ripe for PACE to take on as a philanthropic laboratory, and over the last year, PACE created space to research, experiment, discuss, and challenge assumptions about our civic language. Building off an initial foundation of work in 2019, PACE re-launched and expanded the Civic Language Perceptions Project in the fall of 2021. Below, we recap the major highlights from the last year of our civic language explorations.

Phase 1: Data and Exploration

Fall 2021-Winter 2022

As a first step, PACE partnered with Citizen Data to field a nationally representative survey of 5000 American voters between November 21–28, 2021, which was ~3 weeks after the 2021 elections and ~10 months after the January 6th Capitol insurrection. The survey gathered information on 21 terms frequently used in “civic engagement and democracy work,” and provided insight into respondents’

• perceptions of the concepts (Do people feel positive, negative, neutral, or unfamiliar about the terms?)
• associations of the concepts (What types of people do Americans associate with using the terms?)
• sentiments of associations (Are people warm or cold towards the groups they associate with using the terms?)

The survey also captured respondents’ demographics (race, religion, educational attainment, political ideology, etc.), experiences (having civic education, voting status in 2020, news sources, etc.), and attitudes (Which civic activities are important to ensure democracy works, how do you define democracy, etc.). The result was 16,000 pages of data, which PACE and Citizen Data organized into an interactive dashboard and released along with early findings in March 2022.

With this release, we began to get an even more clear (and slightly overwhelming) indication of the significant need for this type of data resource, as well as the conversational spaces and tools leaders need. For example, for our “launch webinar” in March 2022, 530 people registered and 300 attended live. We received comments like:

• “I cannot express enough what a contribution PACE’s language project is to our efforts. It’s showing that we are making an impact by pushing for civic education, and it’s a tool to help us advocate for it more.” –a policy-oriented nonprofit staff member
• “This data is literally going to change the way we work.” — a museum leader

To date, about 500 people have requested login credentials for the dashboard. Our website traffic rose 129% and we received so many new signups for our newsletter that we had to upgrade our subscription. We have had more requests to do customized presentations for groups than we’ve been able to accommodate, but we’ve held at least 15 to date. In short, the demand for talking about and understanding civic language was high.

Phase 2: Analysis and Validation

Spring 2022 — Summer 2022

Once we had the data, PACE led an effort that invited many people and organizations to dig into the data with us. We designed, developed, and implemented a variety of programs and activities that (1) increased capacity to analyze and present the quantitative data, (2) generated additional qualitative data, and (3) democratized the analysis process and encouraged the civic field to engage with the data for their own learning and goals.

In this phase we:

• Hosted six “Deep Dive” sessions to consider the data through the lens of race, gender, religion, age, political party + ideology, and civic education.
• Conducted four focus groups, where PACE was able to ask deeper questions about Americans’ relationships with the terms and complement the quantitative data with a qualitative component. This allowed us to explore (among many things) political dynamics and cultural contexts of these words.
• Published two mini-papers, which focused analysis on two questions: (1) What do the data tell us about how media consumption might form perceptions and associations to civic language? (2) Which terms may be considered moveable, “open for branding,” transcendent of association, open to reconsideration, or very entrenched.
• Administered 19 mini-grants to anyone in the civic field who was interested in analyzing the data and creating something customized with it.
• Produced a 30+ part infographic series, including highlights on each of the 21 terms, major takeaways from each deep dive session, and headlines from oversample data.

This phase culminated with the release of America + Civic Language — an articulation of our understanding of what the data tell us after six months of interrogation. We knew coming into the project that we had some hypotheses and assumptions about what we would hear; this paper challenged us to ask ourselves:

1. What assumptions do we hear about civic language that were confirmed with our data?
2. What assumptions were challenged or complicated?
3. And perhaps most importantly, what are the hard truths our data present that we need to face and wrestle with as a field?

Even with the release of this paper (and all the activities that preceded it) we know there are still many universes we could explore through the data. We are still pursuing a couple of these for release early in 2023, including:

• Looking at urban/suburban/rural distinctions in civic language perceptions
• Looking at civic language perceptions by Census region
• Diving into the “social cohesion cluster” of words within the dataset — what words do we think imply cohesion and create cohesion. An initial foray into these questions was shared at PACE’s Winter Member Meeting in Atlanta.

Phase 3: Reflections and Considerations

Fall 2022 — Winter 2022

A major hope many people had for PACE in this project was to ultimately deliver recommendations, and we often field questions like: What do I do about the disconnect between how I use civic engagement and democracy words and how Americans use them? What should I say instead? Can you give me guidance on what language does resonate?

We still do not have answers that likely satisfy the desire for instruction and certainty that we hear in these questions; given the nuances, distinctions, and preferences of various groups, perhaps we never fully can. But we believe the guidance needed likely already exists in the wisdom of the broader civic field. So PACE hosted Civic Language Solution Sprints around five of the points raised in this report. Each sprint engaged 10–15 funders, practitioners, and thought leaders to participate in a conversation to (1) explain how the issue is impacting their work, (2) share what solutions they are deploying to address the issue, and (3) apply some of the principles of imagination to how we might move forward on the issue as a field. The goal was to democratize the process of determining what “we” (in the royal sense) might do about some of the issues raised in the data and analysis about civic language.

Over 60 people participated in the Solution Sprints, which were guided by the following prompts:

• A perception exists that young people are negative about “democracy”…what do we do about that?
• A perception exists that words are “owned” by certain people or groups…what do we do about that?
• “Civic” is not landing…what do we do about that?
• Civic terms are favored by historically “dominant” identities…what do we do about that?
• The disconnect between professional usage and public perception of civic language is real…what do we do about that?

These efforts resulted in Civic Language Guidance: Wisdom from the Field, which is a collection of 24 areas of guidance about civic language provided by civic leaders for civic leaders. This paper draws on the wisdom and insights shared from the sprints to offer suggestions about how people might engage with civic language with deeper nuance and understanding about the receptivity of potential audiences. While the guidance may not lend itself to neat and clear “say this, not that” recommendations like some might have hoped, it does provide some context and considerations to keep in mind when making language choices in specific contexts.

We recapped this journey and the major headlines from the key reports with funders on February 1, 2023. We invite you to watch that presentation below.

While PACE takes a moment to reflect on this journey and consider where it goes next, we know one thing is certain: it is abundantly clear that there is a desire for this work to continue, especially as we look ahead to 2024 and beyond. We look forward to exploring what that might look like with you and the civic field.