Fiscal Fluency

Numbers are at the core of a public finance officer's job. A big part of the job is communicating those numbers to other people. However, numbers are not the first language of many in a finance officer's audience.

Numbers are abstract concepts. Abstractions require effortful thinking. Which is why young children are taught to count objects, like fingers and toes, this makes the numbers more concrete. The numbers that public finance officers need to communicate often go well beyond what can be accommodated by fingers and toes. However, we can take a cue from our childhood and transform numbers into human experience. GFOA's research report Fiscal Fluency Made Easy provides essential strategies for transforming numbers into human experience, based on the popular book, Making Numbers Count. Download our report for more strategies to make fiscal fluency easy for your audience.