How to Interpret Social Welfare
By Helen Cody Baker
and Mary Swain. Routzahn: Russell Sage Foundation. $2.50.
This book sets out to tell Social Agencies how to ” sell ” their Welfare by the Spoken Word, the Written Word, in Pictures and finally by Planning. It opens with a diagram: the Agency is the sun round which revolve in dazzling fervour Volunteers, Clients, Cooperators, etc., and lastly, in the outermost circle, the General Public. The authors describe the work as a ” basic study course in public relations Some of the lessons strike one as rather elementary; for example before a board meeting: ” by practising the conversational skills discussed in Chapter I you can make your board members feel that they are welcome and needed About panic before making a speech we are told that ” beforehand nervousness charges your batteries “, and we are instructed in letter writing that ” Plus values in goodwill may be gained by improving the quality of letters In connection with the preparation of Social Agency Bulletins the would-be editor is counselled to remember that ” the most effective bulletins of all are those that know exactly what they intend to accomplish. … Don’t take reader interest for granted This is How to Win Friends and Influence People on a grand scale.
The illustrations do not make more serious demands on the student and there are hints on ” humanizing statistics ” that develop the technique of the pictograph ?rows of little men, one mutilated, showing what is meant, relatively speaking, by ” 23 per cent.”. It is questionable whether this method achieves its aim. The telling use of photographs, however, is well shown by six that illustrate the use of artificial limbs. Some diagrams, not to mention the comic strips, are rather puerile: for instance a tree of black foliage labelled Services and white roots labelled Taxes. The value of such methods, in this country, is doubtful. Perhaps the idiom is indigenous but the reviewer’s seven-yearold enjoyed the pictures. The publishers tell us that one of the authors ” has been writing since the age of sixteen One cannot help feeling she has earned a rest. J.H.W.
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