Economic Development Agencies Editing and Proofreading Services

Economic development agencies write to persuade investors and to justify themselves to the public that funds them, and those two purposes reward opposite habits. Attraction material rewards confidence, superlatives and round numbers. Accountability reporting rewards caution, denominators and named sources. Agencies that let the first voice into the second find their job-creation figures picked apart by a local journalist; agencies that let the second voice into the first produce a prospectus no investor finishes.

We edit what economic development organisations produce — regional investment prospectuses and sector profiles, site and property marketing material, investor pitch documents and proposals, business case documents for incentives and public investment, funding programme guidelines and applicant guidance, grant and contribution agreements, cluster and innovation strategy documents, labour market and skills analyses, tourism and place branding material, community and stakeholder consultation documents, annual reports and performance measurement frameworks, and submissions to provincial, state or federal funding programmes. Our editors check that a claim made in the prospectus can be sourced, and that performance reporting counts what the agency actually caused.

The investment prospectus is where most of these agencies default to the same document. Every region is well located, has a skilled and adaptable workforce, offers a high quality of life, and is open for business. An investor reading their fourth such document that morning cannot distinguish any of them, which means the prospectus has spent a budget to communicate nothing. We rewrite these so the claim is replaced by the evidence a site selector actually uses: the specific labour pool with the numbers and the institutions producing it, the serviced land with its zoning status and the utility capacity already at the boundary, the transit time to the port and what it costs, the two or three companies already there and what they say. We also make the prospectus state the honest weakness — the housing shortage, the two-hour flight — because a site selector will find it in the second week of diligence anyway, and a region that named it first has established that everything else in the document can be believed.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including investor discussions, site details and material under negotiation. We are editors rather than economic or investment advisers and offer no view on any incentive, forecast or business case. What we can do is make the persuasive material genuinely distinctive and the accountability reporting defensible.