Support strong decision making
This course delivers what we’ve learned from decades of working with municipalities. It teaches writers how to create strong, usable reports for Council with the right amount of detail, strong rationale, and alignment with best practices.
We collected all the common problems that bog council reports down or lead to multiple revisions—and then built this course to solve those problems.
Effective Council Reports
Some of our clients
Alberta Municipalities
Calgary Police Service
City of Calgary
City of Edmonton
City of Red Deer
City of St. Albert
City of Vancouver
Edmonton Police Service
Local Government Administration Association of Alberta
And more
Workshop details
We customize our workshops to your organization, team, documents, templates, and style guides
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In-person—1 day (7.5 hours)
Live webinar—2, 3.5-hour sessions on Zoom (split over a few days or a week).
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The course is applicable to:
teams who want to be more effective
experienced writers who want to draft faster and deliver stronger analysis
reviewers and leaders who want strong reports and less time reviewing them
new report writers
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We meet with you to discuss your group's challenges and goals
You send us a series of representative documents
We analyze your documents
We customize our course material using excerpts from your documents
We hold the workshop
Create stronger first drafts
What you’ll learn
Give Council better analysis
Cut writing time by 50%
Understand common problems in council reports and how to resolve them
Use a step-by-step process to create reports more quickly and confidently
Identify key issues
Build clear, strong, evidence-based analysis
Structure content for readability
Include the right amount of supporting information
Differentiate between background and analysis
Write for different audiences and purposes in a single report
Communicate subject-matter expertise to non-specialist readers
Write clear, concise content and make every word count
Use a Council-friendly writing style
Reduce organizational writing and review time
Use the template effectively
Start the conversation
Wordsmith has helped our organization tremendously. We broadly trained our staff in writing reports and I’ve seen an improvement in our writing. The reports are clearer, better organized, and simply easier to read. The more staff we can get this training for, the better.
—Ray MacIntosh, CFO of the City of Red Deer
The training was beneficial and will definitely help me review documents, RFDs, and RFPs before submitting them to the SLT Team and Council.
—Municipal writer at LGAA
I found this very useful. It gave me a new way to organize my thoughts and build strong rationale. I would highly recommend.
— Writer with City of St. Albert
