Economic Development Agencies Editing and Proofreading Services

Every regional investment prospectus in the stack says much the same thing: the region is well located, the workforce is skilled and adaptable, the quality of life is high, and the region is open for business. A site selector reading her fourth of the morning cannot tell them apart, and a document that cost $40,000 to produce has communicated nothing. The same agency publishes an annual report claiming 1,200 jobs created, and a reporter asks how many would have arrived anyway. Attraction writing rewards confidence and round numbers, while accountability writing rewards caution, denominators, and named sources.

The documents we edit for Economic Development Agencies

Regional investment prospectuses and sector profiles reach us in the greatest number, and site and property marketing material arrives with them alongside investor pitch documents. Business cases for incentives and public investment come next, along with funding program guidelines, applicant guidance, and grant and contribution agreements. We also edit cluster and innovation strategy documents, labor market and skills studies, tourism and place branding material, consultation documents, annual reports, performance measurement frameworks, and submissions to state and federal funding programs. Our editors check that a claim made in the prospectus can be sourced, and that the performance reporting counts what the agency actually caused.

What the editing involves

The prospectus is where most agencies default to the same document, and the fault is an adjective standing where the evidence should be. "A skilled and adaptable workforce" is a sentence any region in the country can print. "Eleven hundred machining and mechatronics graduates a year from three community colleges within forty miles" is a sentence one region can print, and it is the sentence a site selector reads twice. We replace the adjective with the figure the agency already holds, and where the agency does not hold the figure, we mark the sentence and ask.

Serviced land reads the same way. "Development-ready sites" tells a reader nothing, while "sixty acres zoned I-2, with 12-inch water and three-phase power at the property line, and rail within a mile" can be set against a requirement list. Transit time to the port belongs in the document with the cost attached, and the two or three companies already operating in the region belong in it by name, with a line each about why they stayed. Those companies decide what they are willing to say, and their words arrive with the copy rather than written for them.

The honest weakness belongs in the prospectus as well. A region with a housing shortage, or with a two-hour connecting flight to the nearest hub, will have both found in the second week of diligence anyway. An agency that names them first has established that the rest of the document can be believed, and it also decides how the weakness is described. On the accountability side, a jobs figure needs its denominator, its method, and its source in the same paragraph, because "1,200 jobs created" arriving without those attachments is read as a claim rather than as a count.

Confidentiality and the limits of our role

Everything you send us is treated in confidence, including investor discussions, site details, and material under negotiation. We are editors, not economic or investment advisors, and we offer no opinion on any incentive, forecast, or business case. What we can do is make the persuasive material specific and the accountability reporting defensible.