Ethics commissions serve a fundamental role in democracy by training vast government workforces on how to adhere to laws and rules intended to preserve the public’s trust in government. Ethics commissions often have the complex duty of serving diverse stakeholders, including government officials and employees, lobbyists, government contractors, journalists, and the general public. All these groups, directly or indirectly, rely on ethics commissions to provide comprehensive and engaging training to public officials.

CLC designed this analysis to offer proven solutions for ethics commissions wanting to innovate their training resources to improve the effectiveness of their ethics programs. We researched and interviewed state and local ethics commissions nationwide to provide examples of the following 10 tools:

For each feature, the relevant ethics commissions provided practical insight on why they implemented the feature, the benefits, the resource costs, and lessons from their experience. Any ethics commission can improve their training programs by adopting any one of these tools.