Elevate the Debate

A Multilayered Approach to Communicating Your Research

Jonathan A. Schwabish

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781119620020
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Personal Success

Learn how to make data-driven research accessible to decision makers, policymakers, and the general public

Many researchers, scholars, and analysts fail to develop communication strategies that work in today's crowded landscape of content, research, and data. To be successful, modern researchersneed to share their insights with the wider audience that lies beyond academia. Elevate the Debate helps researchers of all types more effectively communicate their work in any number of areas, from traditional news outlets to the new media platforms of the digital age. After reading this book, you will be inspired and equipped to use traditional and digital media environments to your advantage. This real-world guide helps you present your data-driven research with greater clarity, coherence, and impact.

An array of practical strategies and proven techniques enables you to make your research accessible to diverse audiences, form engaging narratives, and design and implement meaningful outreach plans. Each chapter examines a specific communications strategy, such as data visualization, presentation skills, social media, blog writing, and reporter interactions. Written by expert members of the Urban Institute's Communication department, and edited by Jonathan Schwabish, a Senior Fellow at Urban, Elevate the Debate guides you on how to use the media environment to your advantage and make a difference through policy insights and policy solutions.

This valuable book teaches you how to:

• Develop and apply data-driven and story-focused communication
• Use the "Pyramid Philosophy" of rooting accessible, engaging communications products in sophisticated research.
• Solve problems with your research by defining goals and recommending conclusions-based actions
• Identify the researchers, organizations, funders, influencers, and policymakers who are most important to your goals and precisely target their information needs
• Employ communication styles and strategies to get your work in the hands of people who can use it and act upon it.

Elevate the Debate: A Multi-layered Approach to Communicating Your Research is a must-have resource for academic researches, policy researchers, and all analysts of data-driven research.

chapter one
Why Research Needs a Big Audience

Bridget Lowell

If you're like most researchers, you question the value of communicating your work to a broader audience. It's fair to be skeptical. Maybe it seems trivial. Maybe you've been burned by a reporter who completely misunderstood your findings, despite your having spent an hour on the phone explaining them. Maybe your results got distorted by a well-meaning blogger who doesn't quite understand what a confidence interval is. Maybe your peers or department chair sneered at you for blogging or tweeting, saying your time was better spent writing for academic journals.

I get it. I've heard all these complaints, and more. My goal—and our goal throughout this book—is to demonstrate that being a successful scholar today requires that you share your insights beyond the academic community. After all, what value is your research if it doesn't connect to the very world it is trying to influence and change? Great research—whether it comes from the academic community, nonprofit research organizations, or thought leaders in business and elsewhere—needs a plan to find different and wider audiences that can expand its impact.

We will arm you with the necessary tools to translate your work on your own terms, telling the reader and user how to interpret your findings. After reading this book, you will be inspired and equipped to use traditional and digital media to your advantage, and you will never sneer—or be sneered at—again for communicating your work to the world.

We wrote this guide for the converted and the skeptics because, frankly, the research community can no longer afford not to participate in the conversation. Evidence-based thinking needs to push its way deeper into all institutions and organizations so that insight and keen observation have legs to stand on everywhere. Your goal should be to take the results of your research into all conversations and ultimately drive sound critical thinking, decision-making, and problem-solving.

It's up to you to prove that facts matter. And to make them count.

The environment for facts, science, and information began a radical shift even before “alternative facts” and “fake news” entered our lexicon. Respect for institutions—the ones that have typically been the sources for widely agreed-upon facts—has been eroding for years. A March 2019 poll by the Pew Research Center found that “majorities of Americans had not too much or no confidence in the news media, business leaders or elected officials to act in the public interest.” Other surveys also find declining trust in business, media, government, and nongovernment organizations (NGOs) globally and in the United States. A June 2018 Gallup poll shows public confidence is lowest in Congress and media organizations, but “no institution has shown a larger drop in confidence over the past three years than higher education.” Gallup found the decline in trust in academia was steepest among self-identified Republicans, but Democrats and independents expressed less confidence as well.

This is perhaps best summarized by what former United Kingdom Justice Secretary Michael Gove said in the fallout after the Brexit vote in the United Kingdom: “People in this country have had enough of experts.”

Federally elected officials, themselves often ranked among the least-trusted, are hardly embracing evidence as they develop and vote on legislation. In 2017, some members of Congress went so far as to stop relying on the objective, nonpartisan legislative analyses of the Congressional Budget Office, which had long been upheld as the definitive source for budget and economic estimates.

So, the bad news is that the stakes are high, facts are endangered, and people conducting serious research and analysis can't afford to sit on the sidelines. To ensure that research is factored into today's most important decisions, researchers must engage in today's fast-evolving policy ecosystem.

The good news is that it's never been easier to do so.

Never has it been easier for researchers to directly set the terms of debate. Never have scholars had this much control over how their evidence is presented and disseminated. Never have people been so well equipped to democratize data and put information directly into users' hands for thought and consideration, and possible action around evidence-based thinking.

Today's consumers of information have access, transparency, and the opportunity to personalize information and understand what it means for their own communities like never before. This is how we will demonstrate as a research community that facts do indeed matter, and they matter more than ever.

Be Strategic: Set Goals for Impact

Too many scholars and analysts write a report, memo, or blog post and expect that by virtue of its quality alone, it will find an audience and generate positive impact. But that's not how it works in today's crowded landscape of content, research, and data. Impact is earned not through dissemination at the report's conclusion, but through intention and careful planning at its inception. Ideally, your outreach plan should coincide with your research design. You should start by asking, What questions am I answering, and what problems am I solving with this research? For whom and to what end?

Effective communications and outreach strategies always start with questions, not findings. Questions such as: Who can benefit from my research? How might it improve their decisions? How does my audience consume information, and how can I present my findings in a way that works for them?

Meet People Where They Are

In this book, our team provides you with the tools and tactics to get evidence directly into the hands of people who need it—whether they know it or not.

The first step is to define and understand your audience, then adjust your product to your audience's needs. Your audience should never be “the general public,” a meaningless description reviled by marketers. Your audience is the consumer of your work: the individual empowered to take action upon engaging with it. A fellow scholar at a university might be eager to dig into your 150-page report, but a staffer on Capitol Hill or a busy CEO might only have time for the topline findings during her morning commute. If your goal is to reach all these various audiences, you will need specific communication products tailored differently for each.

Notice this isn't “dumbing it down”—that's an insult to the sophisticated, substantive experts who are both seeking and communicating evidence-based insights. This is about clarifying, simplifying, and leading with your insights while grounding them in evidence. Then make sure the data and details are available for everyone who wants to dig deeper.

Defining your audience is the first step to translating your research and then letting the conclusions from your analysis show the answers to critical questions.

The Pyramid Philosophy

There are a myriad ways to communicate your research: long reports, short briefs, interviews, blog posts, social media posts, presentations, and more. Your content may not be appropriate for all approaches, nor will every audience respond to each of them. It's useful to think of these different output types not as a box of options, but as a hierarchy. You are not necessarily pitting one audience against another or trading off sophistication for simplification. Rather, you are communicating your work in a multilayered approach.

We like to think about communicating research using two mirroring pyramids, shown in the following graphic. On the one side is the Complexity pyramid. This is where we start this multilayered approach: At the bottom is the foundation of rigorously conducted research, typically a dense, technical report like a white paper or working paper. We then work our way up the pyramid—next comes the peer-reviewed journal article, which may strip out some of the working paper's denser analysis and exposition. Then comes the Congressional or expert testimony where your expertise is most important and is embedded within the written document. Further up the pyramid we find less technical and more accessible products such as fact sheets, briefings, blog posts, and media interviews; at the very top are social media posts.

We pair this Complexity pyramid with another pyramid that shows the size of the Audience. It's not surprising that only a few people are reading the working paper, and only a few more are reading the journal article. The audience for these products is small: The reader must make it through dozens of pages on methodology, literature review, and analysis across dozens or even hundreds of pages of formulas and tables before getting to the findings. Not many have the expertise to glean the insights that the author intends. But more people are reading briefs and fact sheets, and possibly many more are reading op-eds, commentaries, and blog posts. And possibly hundreds, maybe thousands, are reading that tweet or post on Facebook.

Here's the key: Every product on the Complexity pyramid links to one below it, grounded in in-depth, sophisticated analysis. Every blog post links to underlying evidence and a report. Every web feature includes the option to download a dataset or report. Every tweet finds its way back to a more in-depth analysis that provides evidence to support the claim made at each level of the pyramid. The data are available for the user who wants to dig deeper. Evidence is as deep—or deeper—than the question planted, and then answered in detail.

Be Your Own Translator

Many scholars and researchers consider public education their personal mission. Generous with their time, they go to great lengths to give people comprehensive explanations about their data and their research. Understandably, they get frustrated when their work is described inaccurately—by managers or reporters, panel moderators, or even colleagues. They assume the person didn't understand, missed the point, or doesn’t care. They blame the recipient for their lack of sophistication or short attention span.

But that misunderstandin...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• chapter one: Why Research Needs a Big Audience
• chapter two: Developing an Audience Outreach Strategy
• chapter three: An Introduction to Visualizing Your Research
• chapter four: Better Presentations: More Effective Speaking
• chapter five: How to Blog about Your Findings
• chapter six: Working with the Media to Increase Your Impact
• chapter seven: Social Media Can Build Audiences That Matter
• chapter eight: Putting It All Together to Make a Difference
• Bibliography
• About the Contributors
• Index
• End User License Agreement