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Episode #167: Elevate the Debate: How to Drive Fact-Based Policy Conversations
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In this week’s episode, I start to celebrate my new book, Elevate the Debate: A Multilayered Approach to Communicating Your Research. Co-authored with my colleagues in the communications department at the Urban Institute, the goal of the book is to...
The post Episode #167: Elevate the Debate: How to Drive Fact-Based Policy Conversations appeared first on PolicyViz.
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Transcript
Introduction to Special Episode
00:00:11
Speaker
Welcome back to the Policy Viz Podcast. I'm your host, John Schwabisch. And on this week's episode, I am going to switch things around a little bit. So usually you come to the show and you hear me interview someone about the work that they're doing. Well, in this week's episode, I'm going to post another podcast in which I, along with two of my Urban Institute colleagues, were interviewed about a new book that we have just published. So hopefully you have heard about my new book, Elevate the Debate,
Overview of the New Book
00:00:37
Speaker
that helps anyone working with data learn how to do a better job communicating their work, communicating their data and their analysis. So to help people do a better job with their visualizations, with their presentations, teach them how to write better blog posts, how to talk to members of the media, and how to set up a strategic plan. So if part of this book, I, along with two of my colleagues at Urban Institute, Bridget Lowell,
00:01:01
Speaker
and Kate Villareal were interviewed on the Urban Institute's Critical Value podcast. So what I'm going to do this week is simply repost that podcast in case you missed it. But to incite you even more about this book project, I'm going to offer a free book to my listeners. So all you need to do is put up a tweet about the book
00:01:24
Speaker
Say it's great, say it's not great if you don't like it, but put out a tweet about the book, maybe something you learned from the episode this week, and add the hashtag elevate the debate book. So that's elevate the debate book, B-O-O-K.
00:01:40
Speaker
and tag me in it. And for everyone who tweets in the next two weeks with that hashtag and tags me in it, I'll put you in a hopper and I'll pick out one random person and that person will win a free book of the new book, Elevate the Debate. So hopefully you will enjoy this week's episode. You'll learn a little bit about what we do at Urban and how we think about communicating our data and our research and our analysis. And you'll be inspired to check out the new book.
00:02:07
Speaker
So take a listen to this week's episode of Critical Value.
Public Policy and Communication Challenges
00:02:11
Speaker
Elevate the debate, how to drive fact based policy conversations. Welcome to Critical Value, the podcast from the Urban Institute that explores issues of significance for research, policy and people. I'm your host, Justin Milner.
00:02:45
Speaker
If you're listening to this podcast and you don't have to be listening because you're related to me, hi mom, or one of our producers, then you're likely someone who's curious about public policy and thinking about the way our policies shape our lives. And to stay informed of policy news, you probably soak in information from a lot of places, right? Twitter, Facebook, cable news, newspapers, email alerts,
00:03:14
Speaker
And sometimes that can be exhausting. Every day we, the news audience, get bombarded with tidal wave after tidal wave of information. And it can be hard to swim your way through what's fact, what's fiction, and what's truthy. The truthiness is anyone can read the news to you. I promise to feel the news at you.
00:03:43
Speaker
There's also not a lot of trust right now in our institutions or in the media. The new Edelman Trust Barometer survey shows a whopping 37% drop last year in trust among Americans in government, media, business and non-government organizations. Basically, everybody in power, nobody trusts them.
00:04:04
Speaker
So how can facts about public policy and research break through to people, especially in such a challenging and crowded media environment?
Role of Experts in Policy Conversations
00:04:11
Speaker
This is a question that we at the Urban Institute think about all the time. How can those of us interested in sharing facts become better communicators?
00:04:20
Speaker
On today's episode, we're talking about how experts can play a stronger role in shaping today's policy conversations. And experts can be anyone, from a researcher to a nonprofit leader to people just thinking about how to convey facts to new audiences. It just so happens that my colleagues here at Urban wrote a book on this. It's called Elevate the Debate, a multi-layered approach to communicating your research. And believe it or not, you can pre-order it now wherever books are sold.
00:04:49
Speaker
While this book is written with researchers in mind, it's really for anyone thinking about strong messaging and how to get your message heard. Three of the co-authors, Bridget Lowell, John Schwabisch, and Kate Villarreal, joined me to talk about the importance of connecting with policy audiences beyond academia. I started my conversation with Bridget, Urban's chief communications officer, by asking for some context on what the current media landscape looks like.
00:05:14
Speaker
Well, I would say this is a tough moment for facts in America. We are on information overload. Everyone is. And it's very hard to distinguish good information from bad information. And in an atmosphere like this, bad information can fester. In addition to that, all the polling tells us that Americans have declining faith in their institutions, and that includes government and includes higher education.
00:05:36
Speaker
And we've got a model now where, whereas before there were certain facts that were agreed upon, sort of the bedrock of society, and science had value, and I think increasingly that is called into question. And facts that we've long agreed on that weren't considered political have all of a sudden become politicized. And that's really difficult. And I feel like that, and we say this in the book, that that means researchers have to step up and do more. That everybody who is in the business of facts
00:06:05
Speaker
has a burden of responsibility to be their own translator and ensure those facts get used well and responsibly.
Importance of Evidence-Based Decisions
00:06:13
Speaker
While this may not seem like a priority for everyone, Bridget says the stakes are quite high. I think because there are a lot of conflicting sources of information and because there is this need to rebuild trust in fundamental facts. And we need to see that decisions are made based on facts and evidence.
00:06:31
Speaker
Lives are at stake. When you aren't making decisions based on good policy and evidence about what works and what doesn't, people's lives will change, for better or worse. I think the stakes are very high in this moment because there are a lot of big policy decisions that are at play. The need to ensure that those are rooted in evidence and that the American public really understands what's being analyzed, what matters, and what's at stake.
00:06:57
Speaker
It's high. But sometimes when people are confronted with new facts that they may not agree with, their instinct is to double down against them.
00:07:06
Speaker
I think we know that facts alone do not change minds. And there's been plenty of evidence of that in recent years that when confronted with facts that don't conform with your perspective and your tribe, if you will, with your identity, it's hard to accept them. I think that the divides in America currently are enormous and they are frightening. And as people increasingly feel threatened or they feel their way of life is threatened,
00:07:30
Speaker
That's where that sense of tribalism takes hold. So I think that the solution to that is to appeal to our shared values. And that's where I feel like this value of empathy really matters.
Empathy in Communication
00:07:40
Speaker
And that's what we're thinking about at Urban right now is how do you pay our evidence and empathy? How do you make people care about the facts because you are putting them in the context of values that we all share and care about? Bridget says empathy can open up a path for dialogue.
00:07:56
Speaker
So whether it's that you're looking for a fair shot, for opportunity, for a better life for your children or for the next generation, there are things that we can agree on. If we talk about them in that frame and if we're presenting facts and evidence in the context of people's lives and decisions and struggles, I think that we send a better chance of ensuring that people are at least open to the discussion or at least open to the frame of a shared goal, which creates some opportunity for dialogue.
00:08:26
Speaker
Facts alone won't do it, though. So thinking about how to pair evidence with empathy should be a top-line goal for organizations working on policy. But there is another way in which empathy is helpful. John Schwabisch is a senior researcher and database expert at Urban. He talked about how policy researchers need to have empathy for the audience they're writing for. If I've been working on a report or a graph or an analysis for six months, I'm really
00:08:54
Speaker
in the weeds on it and I kind of can forget that someone who's reading it or looking at it has never seen it before. A lot of what it boils down to is not having a sense of empathy for the person who is reading it, using it, or listening to it, right? That we are not putting ourselves in the
00:09:12
Speaker
of our reader or our audience members. So that when we stand in front of them and talk about it or we give them this 300 page report, we're not thinking about what does it mean to a policymaker who may be a very smart person. And yet we think like, well, just because I put it out there, therefore people will read it and they'll understand it. That's just not the way people are. And that's just not the way we as researchers need to think about it.
00:09:35
Speaker
John says, you have to meet people where they are. The if you build it, they will come mentality does not apply to most policy research. There's a fairly famous study from the World Bank where they looked at their library of PDFs and like 80 plus percent of these PDFs had been never downloaded. I mean, that is painful, right? And you know that there's a lot of good information in there, but people just aren't, they're just not reading it, they're just not getting it.
00:10:03
Speaker
so that the way we've been producing research for the last 50 years of 35-page PDF reports buried in PDFs or buried in academic journals, that's not the way research is going to be disseminated for the next 50 years. We have to be thinking about meeting people where they are, meeting people on social media, meeting people on video, meeting people and the way that they consume information on their mobile phones.
00:10:28
Speaker
This requires a bit of a shift from the traditional research slash dissemination process. Researchers often think about audience last instead of first. Here's Bridget. This whole shift that we're talking about starts on the outside and works your way in. It starts with who are the audiences who could stand to benefit from this research? Who needs access to our insights even if they don't have time to read the paper? How could their decisions be improved as a result of our research and evidence? And what's the ultimate end goal?
00:10:58
Speaker
And when you're starting with that outside perspective, you're starting with how research can ultimately change a decision in lives and communities, and then looking at the mechanisms to do that, the policy levers on a federal level or a national level or a local level, the decision makers at various stages in the process. And now we have a lot more agents of social change who are out there from philanthropists to companies to local advocates.
00:11:22
Speaker
When you're trying to be a resource to all of them, you have to start with where they are and understand what they need and then translate your research to be relevant to them and in a format and in the places that will reach them effectively.
Strategic Communication Steps
00:11:35
Speaker
This gets to the core idea of strategic communications, what some describe as communications in pursuit of a larger goal or simply communications with a plan. Kate Villarreal is the director of strategic communications at Urban.
00:11:48
Speaker
The best practices of strategic communications can really apply to anyone, whether it's a one-person or zero-person comm shop to a 50-person one. And it really just goes to having a goal for what you're trying to communicate, having a vision for what success would look like, being really thoughtful about who you're communicating to, how to get them what they need, and having a really, I think, clear message that you're trying to communicate.
00:12:17
Speaker
Kate walked us through six key steps of putting together a plan for communicating research. Step one is identifying your goal. So we always try to start with a goal and we're not putting out research just for the sake of publishing it. We're putting it out because we want people to read it and to do something with it.
00:12:36
Speaker
So I think one mistake that we've made here at Urban is to skip the planning stage and just go right to the products and the tactics, because that's kind of the fun part, you know, when you get to start creating interactive charts and blog posts. So I think it really, really helps at the beginning to just step back and say, OK, what is our actual goal here? What are we trying to achieve?
00:12:57
Speaker
The second step is to focus on your audience. Do you want to think about who your audience is and what do you want them to do? And, you know, you could have multiple audiences, in which case I would take the time to kind of rank those so you can figure out how to best channel the resources that you have.
00:13:14
Speaker
you might have conducted a program evaluation in St. Louis, Missouri. So you definitely want to be communicating with policymakers in St. Louis, you know, in the state of Missouri, perhaps the region if there are regional implications to the research, and perhaps national if there's something that's, you know,
00:13:31
Speaker
exciting or interesting or could be relevant and transferred to other states. So I think it really just depends on what your core findings are and who has an appetite to learn about those findings, who is positioned to take those findings and act upon them.
00:13:47
Speaker
Step three, develop your timeline. So what is the optimal time to contact your audiences with your research? When is the issue that you're focused on going to be most relevant for them? If you have research you've done on the Affordable Care Act, you don't want to get it to policymakers a day or two after they're debating it on the floor. You want to get that to them well in advance so they can use those facts and evidence in their arguments as they're debating the merits of that policy.
00:14:15
Speaker
The next step is to think about your message. How can you synthesize your work into a few takeaways that will get your audience's attention? You also want to think about your key messages. Those will depend on who it is that you're talking to. So for example, if you're talking to news media, you'll want to think about, you know, what's surprising or interesting or, you know, what makes the work newsworthy.
00:14:36
Speaker
If you're talking to policymakers, you'll want to include your policy recommendations or perhaps information about why this research is relevant to their particular district or geography.
00:14:47
Speaker
Step five, now it's time to think about tactics. How are you going to actually reach your audience? So once you've thought about your audience and your messages, you'll want to think about the channels and tactics that you're going to use to communicate to your audience. And different audiences will have different preferences. So think about whether it's, you know, through social media, is it through traditional media outreach?
00:15:08
Speaker
Is it a direct email where you just take your report and pick out those top two or three bullet points and put that in an email to your audience? Think about the best channels that you can use to reach them and the ways that they prefer to receive information.
00:15:24
Speaker
And finally, the last step is to decide how you'll measure the success of your communication strategy. So how are you going to know whether or not your communication strategy was successful? So think about that at the beginning, like what's the best way to go back and measure your goal and measure whether or not you're able to achieve your goal. And that might be things like, did you get a response to the email that you sent? Did the reporter you contacted end up writing a story? If you have more sophisticated tools available, you can look at things like website traffic and other analytics.
00:15:54
Speaker
One important point is that communicating research doesn't require dumbing it down.
Balancing Rigor with Reach
00:16:00
Speaker
Your audience is smart, but a lot of them don't need the full methodology to get the gist of your report. Here's John. That has all the math, has all the data, has all the rigorous details and the deep and the subtlety and the nuance, you know, has the error term for the math that, you know, the six people who read that paper really care about because that's how you advance the field of study.
00:16:21
Speaker
And the model that we talk about in the book is essentially a pyramid, which essentially starts, if you think about the structure of the pyramid, at the very bottom are these technical, in-depth, working papers, white papers, right, that has all the math, has all the data, has all the rigorous details. Building up from that research foundation, the higher levels of the pyramid are less complicated products.
00:16:44
Speaker
Then you get into maybe fact sheets or issue briefs that are a little bit shorter. You get into op-eds, you get into the newsletters, you get all the way up to the top and you have, you know, that tweet. So the point is every communications product, including something as short as a 280 character tweet, can be traced back to that core technical paper at the bottom of the pyramid. On the flip side, the shorter the communication, the larger the potential audience.
00:17:09
Speaker
And so six people are reading the technical working paper, a bunch more reading the fact sheets, lots more reading the op-eds and the testimony and the blog posts. And then you have, you know, hundreds or maybe thousands or, you know, if you're lucky, hundreds of thousands or millions of people are reading the tweet or the Facebook posts or the Instagram posts or whatever it is. Ultimately, you're aiming to reach audiences in different ways and thinking about how those channels connect. So let's think practically, how can you become an expert communicator? Here's Bridget.
00:17:37
Speaker
First, it's the ability to articulate your key takeaways. And that means don't be frustrated if somebody else translates your work. You should be the one who's translating your work. You should be the one who can articulate why your work matters, what you found, how it ultimately can make a difference.
00:17:54
Speaker
But it's not enough to just do that translation. You need that broader theory of change, which means that you are understanding in the very beginning what questions you're trying to answer, why these knowledge gaps persist, and how your evidence can maybe point someone in the direction of a solution.
00:18:10
Speaker
And to do that, you have to know your audience. You have to know what they're struggling with. If your audience is federal policymakers, you have to know where are they trying to find solutions? Where are the problems? Where is there a need for greater evidence? And you don't necessarily need a huge communications team or a lot of resources to do this well.
Impact of Effective Communication on Policy
00:18:28
Speaker
The goal of the book Elevate the Debate is to put the power in the hands of researchers to more effectively communicate their work to different and broader audiences.
00:18:39
Speaker
We think that you do need skills and training in a lot of these different areas, but we also think that people can do more and much better with the tools that they have than they have in the past. And we think that this book can serve as a toolkit for those people to do a better job.
00:18:56
Speaker
I don't think you need a 50-person team to be successful. I think you need to have clarity about why your work matters and be able to explain what you found and how it will ultimately solve a problem. Then you need to understand who the audiences are that will care and you just have to know how to reach them. You don't need a 50-person team to do that. You need an email and clarity about how to explain your work and maybe some access to social media.
00:19:23
Speaker
You can have impact and you can build relationships if you can present your work in a way that it is engaging and accessible and that it is relevant in the moment. And in the end, the goal of any communication strategy is to better inform policymakers and the public at large. And the reward is when you see your research and your attempts to elevate the debate actually take hold. Those moments can be immediate and they can also be a long time in the making. Here's Bridget.
00:19:49
Speaker
We look for markers along the way of whether we are on the way to impact. Sometimes you get an email that says, wow, this research was really helpful and we just changed the way this program was implemented thanks to what you said. Thank you. This was really instrumental to us. Those moments are fantastic. But sometimes you just see a tweet that gets picked up by an influential member of Congress or senator who is in the middle of a big debate
00:20:12
Speaker
and is using our research to ultimately try to change how that legislation is perceived. As we are putting that information out there, it can shape public opinion and drive demand for a set of adjustments so that more people will benefit from a policy. So those moments are really gratifying, and they do happen. I think a measure of success is whether people are increasingly turning to us throughout that process and asking us for research that will help them make decisions or answer questions that they might have.
00:20:41
Speaker
As always, we'll close with some key takeaways. Here are three things to know. One, everybody who's in the business of facts has to be their own translator and ensure those facts get used well and responsibly.
00:20:54
Speaker
To do that, you have to be able to say why your work matters, what you found, and how it ultimately can make a difference. Two, don't assume your audience will magically find your work. You need to have a plan. This includes knowing who your audience is, where they get their information, and how to package your work in the most engaging format.
00:21:13
Speaker
And three, translating your work is not dumbing it down. You're just pulling out the insights that are most relevant to the people who can act on it, while the foundation of those insights is still rigorous research. So that's our show. Thanks again to Bridget Lowell, John Schwabish, and
Conclusion and Acknowledgments
00:21:30
Speaker
Kate Villarreal.
00:21:30
Speaker
You can find out more about the Elevate the Debate book in the show notes on our webpage, www.urban.org slash Critical Value, and you can pre-order it wherever you buy books. And thanks to all you awesome Critical Value listeners. Take a second to leave a rating on iTunes. It helps others to find the show. And if you have any comments or questions, you can always email us at criticalvalue at urban.org.
00:21:55
Speaker
Big ups to the Critical Value team, and big thanks to Jacinthe Jones, Kate Villarreal, Rob Abert, and Katie Smith for all their help, and our sound editor, Riley Byrne, from potagie.co. That's P-O-D-I-G-Y.C-O. Our theme music is by Moby. For everyone on the Critical Value team, this is Justin Milner, signing off.
00:22:24
Speaker
And thanks everyone for tuning into this week's episode. I hope you enjoyed that. Obviously a little bit of a different flavor than the usual episode here on the Policyviz podcast. Again, if you would like a free copy of the book, just tweet out anything about the book, add the hashtag, elevate the debate book and tag me at J Schwabish.
00:22:44
Speaker
And I will put all those tweets in the hopper, pick out one random person, and that person will receive a free copy of the new book, elevate the debate, a multilayered approach to communicating your research. Of course, if you don't want to wait for the next two weeks to find out if you won that raffle, you can go over to Amazon or to Wiley or to wherever you buy your books and pick up your own new copy. So until next time, this has been the PolicyViz podcast. Thanks so much for listening.