Everything a government communicator needs — in one place

Writing Holding Statements That Buy You Time Without Making Things Worse

What to Do When the Comments Section Becomes the Story

It's Time for Government to Take a Fresh Look at Social Media Strategy

What We're Watching This Week: September 23, 2026

Building a Spokesperson Bench That Survives Turnover

When the Story Breaks on Social Media Before It Reaches You

The Accessibility Check You Should Run Before Publishing Anything

What We're Watching This Week: September 1, 2026

The 30-Day Comms Audit: What to Check Before Year-End

AI in the PIO's Office: Using It Well, Writing the Policy, Keeping Public Trust

A practical, self-paced course on using generative AI in a government communications office without losing the public's trust — and on writing the policy your agency almost certainly needs.Somebody in your organization used AI this week. Possibly to draft a media release, possibly to summarize a report, possibly to clean up a photo before it went on Facebook. In most agencies nobody wrote that down, nobody approved it, and nobody told the public. The tools arrived years before the rules did, and communications is where the gap shows first, because communications is the work that goes out in public with the agency's name on it.This course is not a warning against AI, and it is not a sales pitch for it. It is a working guide for the person who has to decide what the office will and will not use these tools for, put that decision in writing, defend it to leadership, and answer the reporter who asks whether a statement was written by a machine.It covers what AI is genuinely good at in a communications shop and where it must never go; the records, confidentiality, and disclosure rules that already apply to every prompt typed into a chat window; how to write an agency AI use policy that staff will actually follow; and how to handle disclosure so that transparency builds trust rather than costing it.Everything here is grounded in what has already happened to real agencies — the departments caught publishing AI-altered evidence photos, the cities whose ChatGPT logs were released under public records law, the states that now require AI disclosure by statute.Who This Course Is For:PIOs and government communicators at any level of technical confidenceCommunications managers who have been asked "what's our policy on this?" and did not have an answerSolo PIOs who are, by default, the agency's AI policyPublic safety communicators whose agencies are adopting AI report writing, transcription, or translation toolsAnyone who needs to bring a written policy to a chief, manager, or council

Getting Found by AI: Making Your Content the Answer AI Reaches For

A practical, self-paced course on making your official information the answer residents get when they ask an AI assistant about your community.A resident opens their phone and asks an AI assistant a question: is the water safe, when does the office close, how do I apply for a permit. The assistant gives them one answer, stitched together from the sources it has decided to use. Too often those sources are someone else's: an old news story, a third-party site, a forum thread, or a page on your own website that should have been taken down last year.This course is a practical introduction to Generative Engine Optimization (GEO), grounded in the published research and in what Google, OpenAI and Perplexity themselves say about how their tools find sources. It covers how AI assistants choose what to quote and why that differs from search ranking, three writing moves that make a page easier to find an answer in and safer to quote, how to test what assistants are telling residents about you right now, and how to diagnose why an answer went wrong, including old pages and website settings that quietly keep AI tools out.Most of the work is clear thinking and clear writing, not code. You'll finish with a ranked list of the pages that matter most, a repeatable checklist, a simple way to measure progress, and honest answers for the colleagues and leaders who ask whether any of this guarantees results. It doesn't, and the course says so.Who This Course Is For:Government communicators at any level of technical confidenceAnyone responsible for service, eligibility or emergency information on a public websiteSolo and small communications teams with no budget for vendorsCommunicators who want the official version to be the one residents receive

Public Information 101: The Role, the Reality, and the First 90 Days

An honest, practical foundation for anyone doing public information work in government, whether you were hired for the role, voluntold into it, or are covering communications on top of an entirely different job.Nobody tells you what you're actually walking into. The job description lists media releases and social media. The reality is a reporter's call about something you've never heard of, a leader who wants a statement in twenty minutes on facts nobody has checked, a comment thread at 10 p.m., and a quiet question from a colleague about whether Thursday's announcement is a good idea. This course starts from that reality.Drawing on Christine Townsend's book The Frontline Communicator and on real cases, from Minneapolis and Maui to Flint and Uvalde, it covers what the role really involves, the human skills that matter more than any technical one, and how to use listening and empathy as working tools. It gives solo and part-time communicators the systems that protect them, and shows you how to make the unseen parts of the job visible in a way leadership understands.It closes with a practical plan for your first 90 days, built to be used alongside the First 90 Days checklist and the Communication Strategy worksheet included with the course. Every lesson has a hands-on exercise, and the exercises build on each other, so by the end you'll have an honest description of your role, a listening routine, a continuity pack, an unseen-work log and a first-draft strategy to take to leadership.Who This Course Is For:Communicators who are new to government, or new to their organizationPeople covering public information alongside another role, and solo communicators running a one-person shopExperienced communicators who want to reset how they work and how they describe their value to leadershipLeaders who supervise a communicator and want to understand what the role really involves

Communication Strategy for Government Communicators

A practical, self-paced course on building a communication strategy for a government organization: one short enough to use, specific enough to act on, and backed by evidence you can put in front of leadership.Most government communicators are so busy reacting that strategy never gets a turn. The council member's request, the reporter's deadline, the rumor in the neighborhood group and the video leadership wants all arrive before lunch, and the plan becomes whatever lands first. That isn't a failure of skill. It's what happens to a function that produces things on demand for everyone else, and it leaves you unable to show what any of it achieved.This course works through strategy the way the job is actually done. You'll start by auditing what already exists, including the accessibility and plain language checks that now carry legal deadlines for state and local governments. You'll map the people you need to reach, including the online group moderators and residents that most maps leave out. You'll look honestly at the narrative your organization already has and plan how to build a better one, find the stories in your organization's data without overstating them, and set up measurement that tracks what changed rather than how much you posted.Every lesson draws on real, sourced cases, from the Flint Water Advisory Task Force's findings on official communications to the FBI's 2021 crime data gap, and each one ends with something to do for your own organization. Drawing on The Frontline Communicator, it's written by a practitioner for practitioners, and it uses three working tools: a strategy worksheet, a communications audit workbook and a stakeholder mapping worksheet.Who This Course Is For:Government communicators who have never had time to write a strategy and know they need oneCommunicators new to a role who need to understand what they've inherited before deciding what to changeCommunications leads who have been asked what their team actually achieves and want a better answer than follower countsOne-person communications offices that need a plan simple enough to keep using