Principles of Policy Writing and Writing a Policy Brief

Hi, it's Marisa. Nice to be here with you. Thanks for joining us here in the room. I also have Reshma Nyuk. Hi everyone. We have Laura Blum, who was our administrative and logistic map when you were here in DC, and then we also have Heidi Worley. Heidi Worley is our editorial director here at PRB.

In the few weeks since all of you were here in the office, unfortunately Elizabeth Gay left PRB to move on to some new opportunities. And so Heidi is going to step into the role that Elizabeth was playing with the small group who was working with her on their topics. Hi everyone, look forward to working with you.

As our editorial director, Heidi has worked with many, many authors over the years to develop policy briefs and craft their messages into relevant policy-facing policy briefs, other types of publications, and she has a wealth of experience to share in how to guide all of us towards the goal that you're working on.

So today we are talking about the basic principles of writing for policy and non-technical audiences. And I apologize that I didn't send these slides out to you in advance, but we will send them afterwards. And we are recording this webinar, so for any of you who want to be able to go back afterwards and review particular parts, we will share the recording with you for your reference.

So in the presentation today, we're talking about the principles of policy writing, and these principles apply really no matter what the product or the specific format is that you're writing for. If that's a policy brief, as we'll focus on, or if that's a fact sheet, a tweet, or a Facebook post on social media, a blog, even the content of an oral presentation, the principles that we're talking about will apply no matter what you're working on.

And then we'll specifically discuss how to structure and write a policy brief. And that's an assignment that all of you will be working on in the coming—to write an outline for a policy brief and then craft that outline into a full brief.

So the first thing to begin is to forget everything you learned about writing in university. Maybe perhaps not quite everything that you learned about writing—you probably did learn a lot of useful skills about writing and improved your writing quite a bit—but a lot of that may have been focused on writing for other technical experts and other academics within your field. And policy writing is really quite different from academic writing, and it requires you to make a bit of a shift from how you may have been used to writing in a more academic environment.

So unlike academic writing, with policy writing you have a different audience, you have a different writing style. We typically use a different structure where the end and sort of the key message comes right up front. We have a shorter length, and the real focus is on interpretation, analysis, and proposed actions.

This quote here, "Researchers are from Mars, policymakers are from Venus," researchers and policymakers do not speak the same professional language. This is an old quote, but it's certainly still relevant today. Technical experts such as yourself and policymakers generally do not speak the same language, and that's something we certainly talked about a lot during the two days that you were here at CRB. What are some of the barriers that prevent research from automatically informing policy? This different language that the two groups speak is an important part of those barriers.

And so we believe in the end that it is all of you, as public health specialists, as subject matter experts, who are responsible for and must take the initiative to convey the findings of research in your field to policymakers in a format that they can understand and begin to use to influence and change policy.

And as PRB, we try to function kind of a bridging organization to identify the important policy issues and make them accessible to policymakers and the general public. And you, as subject matter experts, you can play that role as well. And we find that it's, it's really true that poorly translated information is not used, especially in policy. There's a lot of really useful research out there that never has the policy impact that it might have had if it had been better communicated. And you can all learn how to translate research for policy audiences through your writing.

Policymakers and really even the general public increasingly have information overload, and they need some help to sift through what's really important from the research on a given topic, because they won't—policy audiences won't be seeking out and reading research reports on their own. Research consistently finds that policymakers prefer information that is concise, that focuses on main points, that has unambiguous implications of findings, and provides clear guidance to those policy audiences on how they should proceed. So these are some of the goals that we have for how to communicate in a policy brief.

So what is a policy brief? It is a concise overview of a very specific issue. It examines the context surrounding this issue for decision-makers and policy advocates. And we find that a lot of other audiences use and value policy briefs as well, such as journalists, educators, and students. They often look to policy briefs to get a concise update about a given topic without having to sift through all the research themselves.

And then a really key element of policy briefs is that they include those recommendations for policy actions that we asked you all to work on and grapple with when you were here in DC. We know from many sources that policymakers want short summaries of research connected with recommendations, and a policy brief provides just that vehicle to communicate evidence to policymakers for action.

The audience for a policy brief is very specific. Depending on the topic, you may have a very narrow or a more broad audience, but it is specific and clearly defined. So, for example, if your topic is integration of Family Planning and maternal and child health services in Uganda, your audience might be narrowly defined as policymakers and leaders in the Ministry of Health in Uganda. On the other hand, if your topic is population and food security in Africa, your audience may be more broadly defined as national-level policymakers in sub-Saharan African countries. In both cases, it's very specific, and it's very clear who you're speaking to.

The length—we call these policy briefs because they are in fact supposed to be short, especially compared with typical research reports and journal articles. So about four pages is generally the best balance of brevity and including enough information. And we do find some policy briefs that stretch to six or even eight pages, but that's really the maximum that you would want to see. And as I said, research finds that policymakers generally prefer the shorter end of that range, so they prefer short printed materials. And keeping that in mind is important to keep your brief actually short so that they might read all of it.

And keep in mind that you can always give your audience additional materials to review if they want more detail. Many policymakers often request this, but they also really value that short version tailored to a policy audience that might be the first thing that they read that sort of tells them why this issue is so important and why they should dig deeper for some more information.

And then when it comes to the content of the policy brief, the policy brief is distinctive by urging the audience to action with those recommendations. Policy briefs include very specific recommended actions for the audience to take, and the implications are that bridge that interpret and contextualize the findings and make the connection to the recommendation. And so this all builds on a lot of the skills for strategic communication that we talked about when you were here in DC. And we're going to take those concepts about how you craft a policy message and put them into a policy brief material.

So there's a question about the types of additional materials that you might provide to policymakers—that might be an actual journal article or a comprehensive research report, if there's a particular study that you're looking at, maybe like an annotated bibliography or other types of publications that other organizations have put out on the topic, maybe some of the things—the resources that you draw from in crafting a policy brief—that really share the data in detail and can be valuable in understanding what are the interventions that are—that have worked, or what are the case study countries or things that you've learned from, and provide that full set of detail that backs up the recommendations you're making in the brief. Thank you.

Moving on, these steps should look similar to some of the things that we talked about in those sessions on strategic communication when we introduce the findings and the implications and the recommendation. We had that larger strategic communication framework. And in order to write successfully and communicate effectively with policy audiences, you really need to complete steps one through three first. So those steps are: identifying your audience, making that very specific naming of who your audience is; deciding on your objectives—what do you want your audience to know and do? And we're talking about those policy learning objectives, so what specifically is it that you need to communicate to your audience and why? And then what are the two to three main messages that they need to understand? And this is where we start to bring in the research—what are the key messages for them to understand?

And then these next two bullets are really essential parts of the process: you won't be able to include all of the information on a given topic; you probably won't be able to include all of the information that you would like to on your topic. And so the process of tearing down the information and selecting only what you really need to communicate your message starts at the beginning, and it likely continues until your final draft. I know that when I'm writing these types of policy products, the first draft is usually the longest, and I have to work throughout to pare it down and really refine it to what's critical—what's a key piece of information that builds a strong case. And at PRB, we do follow these strategies: after we develop a draft outline, we share it with donors, with experts, and other key stakeholders, and we get their buy-in before we proceed.

So let's pause here and let's turn to the policy brief that you reviewed, looking at building resilience in the arid and semi-arid lands—family planning is key. And this is a policy brief from Kenya. And as I mentioned in my email, this policy brief has not been published yet, although the date says June 2017—that's the date of this latest draft. NCPD is a partner that we work with as PRB in Kenya, and we provided technical assistance to them in developing this brief, but it was really their staff and their experts at the National Council for Population and Development who identified the topic and the research and wrote this policy brief.

So looking at this policy brief and thinking about these steps and planning—who do you think the target audience for this policy brief was? And you can either chat your answer into the questions bar or you can raise your hand, and we can unmute you as an attendee, and then you can speak over the audio—the microphone that you're using. So who do you think the audience was for this Kenya policy brief on resilience? Anybody out there? Okay, we've got two types of response—Franklin. Okay, Franklin, I'm going to unmute you. Franklin, go ahead.

Okay, good, good. I think this is here, yeah. We're having trouble hearing you because there's some feedback coming through.

Oh, I'm sorry. Can I go ahead?

Yes, that's much better. Thank you. Okay, I think now this policy belief against the workers that the name of the Minister over here, the Ministry of Agriculture—yes, the Minister—oh yes, mostly those ones that work closely—yeah.

Great. So the Ministry of Agriculture and the Ministry of Health. Thank you. And I'm going to mute you again. And yeah, we've got some people who typed in: government, government officials, government officials that work on family planning specifically. So I think you're all right. And Franklin, thank you for your response. A lot of the focus here was trying to broaden the group of government officials who are invested in family planning. So looking beyond kind of the traditional family planning government officials, and that Ministry of Agriculture is a key audience here, looking at how some of these resilience factors related to climate change, drought, agriculture—how family planning impacts those issues. So great answers. They're also looking at, you know, kind of the Ministry of Finance and the different groups who are focused on equity and poverty reduction in Kenya. And some of the context you might not know—might not come out clearly in the brief if you're not Kenyan—is that these arid and semi-arid lands are where poverty and inequality tends to be the highest in Kenya. And so the different groups looking at how to reduce those inequities were also targeting them as an audience. And again, they're kind of beyond the typical family planning decision-makers. So trying to broaden the group of government officials who believe that family planning is an effective strategy. Great, thank you for your comments and participation.

So moving on, let's talk about the style for a policy brief. And with style, we mean kind of what's the style of language of writing and the format. So the first and foremost key is to use non-technical language. And we mean trying to get rid of the jargon and the official terms that kind of go with your technical area. You need to—you can assume that you are explaining your findings to a professional who doesn't work in your field. So all of those jargon terms you need to define, and if you need to use specialized terms to convey the information, make sure to define them, or even see if there are ways to say them without using those technical terms, and was just using kind of the common language that you would use in everyday—one of the strategies for writing in that more everyday language is to write in what we call a conversational style. And this is the type of writing that you see in a newspaper article or a magazine article. You want to avoid the passive voice—those are sentences that lack a subject or an agent—and avoid other abstract language. For policymakers, you want the information to be as concrete as possible. And this doesn't—bullet point of right in a conversational style and avoid the passive voice. We are going to delve very deep into that—into—in the next two webinars that we do with you in January and February, and we'll do two whole webinars on what are the specific strategies that you can use to try to embrace this conversational writing style that's less formal and more accessible to your audiences.

Another key stylistic approach is to use subheadings and bulleted text within the policy briefs to break up the information into really short sections and allow your reader to scan it more quickly. A busy reader should be able to glance through the brief quickly and see what is relevant for him or her. You want to spell out acronyms the first time and then use the abbreviation thereafter, but always make sure that you spell it out the first time. And you always need to reference your data sources as you would in any research publication. If you want to insert those references and citations as numbered endnotes in your text, so that the list of references then appears at the end of the document together and doesn't disrupt the flow of reading. And that's in contrast to what's often used in more academic settings where people tend to use parenthetical references, where at the end of the sentences—sentence—you use parentheses or brackets to cite the author and the year. For policy audiences, they're not used to seeing that information in line with the text, and so you want to just use those numbered endnotes and list the references together at the end.

So talking more about the headings and the subheadings—that you can use headings like background, findings, and conclusions can be a bit dull. So after you've written a draft of your policy briefs, we encourage you to go back through and create new headings and subheadings to replace those that you might carry over from your original outline, and use the headings as an opportunity to emphasize the main points of each section. Busy readers, like your policy audiences, tend not to read documents through from the beginning to the end. They often skip around for the pieces or the sections that are the most interesting or the most relevant to them, kind of when—similar to when most of you are looking at things online—you probably don't start at the beginning of each webpage and read through. There's a lot of skimming around looking for the information that's most interesting. And if you can get your audience's to start reading, even if it's in the middle of your policy brief, then they might continue to the end, and that's really what you want them to do—is to read something, find it interesting, and keep reading more. And descriptive headings and subheadings help your reader to decide which parts to read and draw them in to read even more because it's clear that there's something interesting and compelling in here—more than just the word finding. So an example might be a policy brief about child marriage. Instead of listing background as the heading for the first section, you might say, "Child marriage is a problem around the world." Or a policy brief about domestic violence might have a heading like, "Less privileged women at higher risk," instead of findings. And you can assume that less privileged women at higher risk of domestic violence—that's part of the finding, that's part of the message that you're communicating in that section, and it's important, and so it gets elevated to the heading to draw people in and help them know very quickly what they're going to be reading about.

So let's talk again about the Kenya policy brief example. What are your thoughts on the headings and the subheadings that they used there? Was it an effective way to break up the text? Did they translate their headings into more interesting and more compelling key messages? What are some of your thoughts there on what works well or what could be improved? So again, you can type questions into the question box or you can use a little hand function to raise your hand, and we can unmute you so that you can speak. Any thoughts on the headings or the subheadings that they used in the policy brief? Anyone?

So the first headings show up on kind of the second page. The first one is, "Gender dynamics of vulnerability," and the second one is, "Building resilience through family planning." And that section on building resilience through family planning is really long. And I think that they did a really nice job in this section of then using subheadings to convey some of the key messages about how family planning builds resilience. So the subheadings that you see there are: "Family planning improves health and nutrition"—that's a key message; "Family planning improves educational attainment for women"—that's a key message; and "Family planning helps families achieve economic stability." So even if you've only read the headings here, you've gotten part of the key message, and I think that that's a really nice section where you can see how headings can be used effectively. We have a few other comments here saying some of the headings were technical, and some of the headings were not really kept very catchy. And that is absolutely the case for some of the headings that are coming up. So after that nice section on family planning and resilience where they used the subheadings effectively, at the bottom of page four then we have a section called "Recommendations," and that doesn't really tell us much of what's coming there. And similarly, on page 5, we have a section heading—heading—called "Conclusion." Again, that's a nice opportunity in the conclusion to just say what is the key message, what is the key concluding message here as your heading, instead of just saying "Conclusion," because the conclusion is boring—people think, okay, that's just summarizing everything I've already read. You want to use that opportunity to draw them in. So I think this brief is a nice example of some places where headings and subheadings were used really effectively, and some places where they could still improve it even further and make them a little less technical, a little more catchy, and used it as a better opportunity to convey some of those key messages. Great.

So moving on, let's talk about how to use data and graphics within your policy brief. We like to include visuals in all of our written products. It can be kind of overwhelming to hand somebody a several-page document and it's just for solid pages of text. And when you're sharing quantitative data, as many of you are, you often want to include a graph or a table to communicate that more concisely and clearly than just a bunch of text. And if you're sharing qualitative data, or for some reason the content of your brief doesn't lend itself well to a graph or a chart, you might try to at least include a photograph or a map to try to give some context to the written content. Graphs are usually better than tables to convey information, although they're not always beautifully feasible. Tables can be useful for summarizing data and displaying clear differences that might not stand out in text in a paragraph. Similar to the subheadings that you use to break up your text, titles and headings for graphics—whether they're photos, graphs, or tables—they should also be non-technical and convey the key findings. So in contrast to a typical research report or a journal article where you might have Figure 1 and maybe the two indicators that you're looking at, you want to translate that into a key message like, "Family planning increases as women's education level increases." So that tells you what's the—what's the message in this graph that you're looking at. And then no matter what it is—a photo, a graph, or a table—always include a caption that describes the image or conveys part of your message with maybe a one-to-three sentence description of what's happening there. There's a little cartoon here—we say, "Lead, but don't mislead." So in this cartoon, they've selected these two data points and chosen to connect them with a smiley face. So it's, you know, two data points alone—you could connect them using any type of line, and that's a bit misleading. So select the data that's relevant. We generally ask you to pair down the amount of data you're—you're showing—select only how much data you need to illustrate the point, but don't mislead your audiences, and make sure that you stay true to what the data is saying. In writing for policy audiences, you have this opportunity to set the direction of the discussion—you're trying to tell them how to think about the data—but at the same time, you do have an obligation not to misrepresent the facts by selectively choosing only the data that supports your arguments or only the data that you're interested in. So try to simplify it as much as possible to make it clear to non-technical audiences while retaining both fairness and accuracy.

So looking at the Kenya policy brief again—what are your thoughts on their use of data and graphics? Were the graphics effective? What did you think of them? Do they need improvements? Any thoughts on the policy brief, the data, the graphic in there? You can chat things in, or you can raise your hand if you want to speak out to everybody. As we said, we almost always try to include some sort of visual in a policy brief. In this one, they really only have one real visual, which is on page three. At the same time, on the first page, they use those text boxes at the bottom saying what is resilience and the USAID definition of resilience, and that's an effective way—even with just using text—that visually they break up the text and make it look a little more visually appealing. And then for the one visual that we have—any thoughts on quality? I have a comment here: "I like the caption, 'Lowest in arid countries,' for the map." So the title—you can see that they did a nice job here in explaining the key message: "Contraceptive use varies by counties and its lowest in arid counties." So again, even if you only look at the title, you're getting some of the information—you don't have an—have to look at the graph and try to understand—and try to understand what they're telling you. The title tells you right away what are we seeing here. I think it would have been nice if they had included a caption that describes in full sentences a bit more what you're looking at and how to—how to understand it—something that they don't include here. O Modi has raised his hand. Thank you, Modi. I'm going to unmute you and let you speak out to the group. Go ahead, Modi.

Hello, morning.

Hi there.

Hi. I motion that in page two, okay, second paragraph, yeah, if it's possible to mention the—

Timeline of all the data we provide: Women and children in the S cell region quickly trouble turning kilometer to access water on average. But you didn't say in which time this the woman trouble 20 kilometers access work water. Is it in month, or in day, or hour? Hmm, okay, yeah. So it's hard to understand how to really interpret that 20 kilometers. What does that really mean? And I think what they feed here is that women have to travel 20 kilometers; whether that's walking, taking a bus, you know, however whatever means of transportation they have, that's the average distance they have to cover in order to access water. But it's it can be a bit difficult to interpret, and I think, thank you Moti. I'm going to I'm going to mute you now.

I think that's an example again of how some of the things that seem quite clear to us as experts, and we think we're communicating it very clearly, can be quickly misinterpreted or not clearly understood by some of the non-technical audiences. We'll talk about reviewing your brief a bit later on and how you always want to get feedback from from potential audiences about how they're interpreting things. We have a few other comments on the map, and it says one of the comments is that it's hard to read the county names, and I agree. I think, you know, it's a it's a very nice map visually; it's clear, but you really have to have to squint a bit if you really want to read what those County names are.

And then we're talking here in this brief about the arid and semi-arid counties. For those of us who are non-Kenyans, we don't really know which can which counties qualify there. You can interpret from the data that it must be these these counties where things are are where the indicators are worse. And I've just noticed it actually does indicate that, sorry, I that just myself in the legend at the bottom: the striped counties are the arid counties. But again, it's a bit hard to see, and if they a caption here, as I said earlier, would really help to bring the key message and the visual together and help people understand the graph a little the graphic the map a little more clearly. Great. And there's a another comment that shows using a bar chart may have been more effective to show the relative differences, and I think that's a good point. That if we're looking at major differences in contraceptive use, a bar chart is going to bring those differences out a lot more clearly than the map where we see the variation across the country, but we don't get a sense of the scale of what those differences are. So that's a great point.

Moving on, I'm going to hand this over to Rushmo, who's going to kind of take over the presentation from here and talk about the outline and format for a policy brief.

All right, hello everyone. It's good to be talking to you again, and we're hoping that we have a bit of an interactive session for the remainder of the presentation. On each slide we'll have some questions for you, so do stay alert and have your Kenya policy brief in front of you. So this first slide here is what we provide as a suggested outline for your policy brief. So when you receive this presentation, I would certainly flag this particular slide because you'll be having an assignment where you're writing a policy brief, and you'll have to start with an outline. So this is a really great place to start your planning when you're when you're going to plan how you're going to put together your policy brief. So you can see here there are some really basic sections: introduction, which includes sort of an overview and background; the key messages, which gets into research findings, implications; and then the recommendations and the conclusions. And some of these sections should be familiar to you because we talked a lot about them during the workshop in the strategic communication session. You know, we talked about findings, we talked about implications, we talked about recommendations. So now you see how those feature into your policy briefs. We spoke about those in the context of components of a policy message, and so now you'll be able to use those components in your writing. So certainly this is a great starting point for your policy brief planning. And then, as Marissa said later, once you have the content filled in, you can go back through and change these headings. So introduction might turn into something more interesting; findings would have more of the message about what the actual findings are, as we were looking at in the in the Kenya brief. But usually what we recommend is to not worry about that in the beginning. In the beginning, the best thing is to open a word document, write down exactly this outline, and then start filling in the type of content you'll have; start drafting it, and later you can come back and kind of think of those really interesting headings or subheadings. So Marissa is going to review the assignment later in terms of the policy brief and what's required, so we'll sort of put that on the table for now. And then what I'll do now is walk through each of these sections and sort of what kind of content or what kind of information we would like to have in each of these sections.

So the first one is the summary or the overview. And so this overview is one section that I would say is a little bit different from probably what you've learned in academic writing, what you've done in work settings. I know when I came to PRB, this was not something I had done, so this is new, and I think it's a very effective way of presenting information. So what the overview is is essentially the first paragraph, sometimes two, but if paragraph is usually enough, of the very first paragraph of your brief that gives essentially the entire message at a high level. So you're telling people upfront what the key message is; this is the general background; we're going to talk about these kind of key findings; they may matter or they're important because of this reason; and these types of actions, you know, could could lead to positive change, right? So you're going to say all of those things in in just high-level, broad strokes sentences at the beginning. You're not necessarily putting in data, putting in detailed information; you're saying it more generically. But essentially think of it as if someone reads that one paragraph, they should know what your whole brief is about; they should know, you know, they're sort of suggested actions, the direction you're going in, why this issue matters, what the findings are at a high level. So think about it that way: your your overview paragraph is really kind of giving all the pieces, so you can it's a short version of findings, implications, recommendations, sort of wrapped into one paragraph. And the idea there is that if somebody just reads the first paragraph, they'll quickly get your message, and also that you're sort of wetting their appetite, so you're getting them interested and engaged to want to read more, to find out the details, to find out the data points and that kind of thing. So could anyone tell us in the Kenya brief, did you see an overview? Did they follow these instructions? Did you see something that looks like an overview? Could raise your hand. There's a hand, right? Adeiny, I'm going to unmute you; go ahead, Adam, you. Thank you very much for me. I didn't see a clear overview. If we are to look at the topic building resiliency married and semi-arid lands, family planning is key. I think in main message they are trying to say is the family planning is important, and that message didn't come out on t the last paragraph on page two. So I think the overview didn't really capture all the important points. Okay, are there other any other thoughts I'm sorry from from others. Thank you for that sponsor embodies solution. It's not dead. Okay, okay. All right. So yeah, I pre appreciate that point. So one thing we can look at in this brief, so they they didn't necessarily label it, but I do think what they were trying to do is a let's look at the very first paragraph of the brief. In a sense, this is the overview; it may have a couple of missing components, but they do try to bring in some of the key messages. So, you know, we see a little bit about the background: we hear chronic poverty, food insecurity, repeated economic and environmental shocks, poor health, and high population growth contribute to vulnerability in Kenya. So okay, we get a little bit of the background in terms of these environmental shocks; then it tells us this policy brief will explore the gender dimensions of vulnerability. So those are, you know, potentially some of the findings; this is the information they're going to talk about, and how birth spacing through family planning can help build resilience for individuals, families, and communities, etc. So what they do there is they kind of start to hint at at the type of recommendation that they'll be going for. So they do say, you know, we're talking about gender, we're talking about these issues, and how family planning can help build resilience. So it doesn't get into the details, but it does it does give us a message that family planning in some way is the solution here, right? It's where we're going in terms of the recommendations. So I would say that, you know, we just get a bit of that message in that first paragraph as an overview. This overview I would say could be strengthened somewhat; you could have, you know, a bit more information there in terms of of the findings, what they're telling us, and then get into that that suggestion about what family planning can help us achieve. But in this case, I would say that that that is where they were trying to to create an overview. So how about we go to the next section?

So now we're looking at the background. So in the background, I think this is probably something that you're all much more familiar with, you know, typically this is a background section of any paper; you're putting the issue in context; you're giving people, you know, maybe some historical background, background about other interventions or things that have been tried, you know, just putting your issue or your topic in in context. So that's, you know, something typically that you'll be familiar with. One thing though is that in this case, we don't want to spend a lot of time on the background. So with more academic papers, you know, with we do a very extensive literature review and put, you know, quite a lot of information here; we really want to distill the key points on the background. And so that might include context about the geographic situation: is this a country that we're working in? Is there anything particular we need to know about maybe the population size? And then are there specifics about the actual topic? What do we know that that's been done in the past, whether that's policies or programs and other kinds of things? And what's yeah, what's important there is that we start to hint at, you know, maybe the gaps that exist in what's already known, so that when we bring our findings in, we're showing, okay, here's what we've known up to this point, and here's what is the new information. So towards the end of the background, that's one thing is, you know, kind of a transition point that you can do is to sort of hint at what's missing from from the information that we do have. So how about if we look at our Kenya brief, do we see a background section, and what do we think about it? Does it give us enough context about the situation? Any thoughts on the background? So in the Kenya brief, I would say we're still on page one, you know, we sort of said the the first paragraph served as the overview, at least that was what they were trying to do with the first paragraph; the second two paragraphs would be more of the background. So even though they combined it into what looks like one section, there are two components there, and you can kind of see how the second paragraph now gives us context, right? We start to see more information about Kenya's the arid and semi-arid regions; we get population information; we get information about environmental shocks; we get more context about what resilience is all about. In our second paragraph, we start to get a little bit more detail about the communities in that region, how they're suffering from insecurity and drought, you know. So the first paragraph gave context in terms of helping define some of the terminology and the concepts that would be talked about, and then the second one let us sort of put into context how those concepts apply in the Kenyan situation or in the the regions that they are highlighting. So we get a bit of context there, and we have a comment from 4:10 saying the second paragraph gives the background but doesn't see the previous interventions or policies that impact this issue, and I think that's a good point. I think the authors here didn't think that there were, I assume based on the fact that this information is missing, that there weren't interventions or policies that were really critical to include here, but you're right that this is the place where if there was a particular policy that's in place that's relevant, that's working well or not working well, or particular interventions that are relevant here, you would want to allude to that and share some information in this background section. So I think the fact that it's missing and with my knowledge of my my cop my colleagues in Kenya that that wasn't relevant for this background and that's why it's missing commitment. You have a question as well, so I'm going to unmute you and let you go ahead. Go ahead. Yeah, so here my question is in the background because you see create era I prepared to I I planned to prepare the his policy brief. I I know about the recommendation and if you dishes, so if say, so in the background section, do I need to mention about the information related to the recommendation? For example, in this case, the main the main solution is for the family planning; it is in the background; I need to mention about the information related to their current situation of family planning and also current situation of standardization. Do you understand my question? Yes, yes, I do understand that question. Because in this case, when I read half when I read the background, just mention about that general situation, not use it as a detail information on family plan, the current situation of family planning and current situation attended I mission, right? Yeah, I know I do understand your point. Yeah, I think, you know, there are different ways to do this, you know, and and it sort of depends on circumstances, but in this case, I would say it's probably okay that they kind of did it this way where the background really just gives you a sense about the environmental shocks, the resilience that kind of say, and then they're leaving the family planning and the gender dynamics information for the finding section to sort of put it in context there, because now it's saying, okay, in the context of, you know, this kind of environment where they're facing these shocks, they're facing a lot of issues, you know, now we're bringing in why Family Planning is relevant to that, and in that context, you can start to provide the information about, you know, the current situation and in the fact that there are gaps, and so then that starts to imply that more, you know, could be done in terms of that. So I would say if you were trying to pack it into the background, then you would kind of maybe lose some of the punch when you got to the findings because, you know, now it would kind of mix up. So I would say you don't necessarily need to put too much detail upfront in the background. Okay, thank you so much. Sure. And yeah, I think just to go back to Marissa's point about the question related to policies and programs, you know, it's also the kind of thing where, you know, with some of these newer topics, they are only recently being addressed, you know, there might not be a lot of historical interventions or or policies that we're looking at some of these things, and that could be something that you end with in the background section to say, you know, to date, you know, minimal work has been done on, you know, resilience, that kind of thing. I'm not saying that's the case, but it could be if that's the situation you might want to to raise that point so that it adds some relevance to the new findings that you're going to present.

So our next section that we'll look at are the findings, and this should really be kind of a refresher; you'll remember that we talked a lot about this in our strategic communications presentation about the findings. You know, Marissa has already reminded us that we want to draw out, you know, some of the relevant key information that helps make the point, you know, what is it that really tells the message and that can can be compelling to make people understand why the situation is important, why it's something that needs to be addressed. And with your findings, you know, you can present some of that in terms of text, and you can you want to divide that up; oftentimes the findings is kind of the meat of your of your policy brief, and so you want to divide that into subsections, kind of give people guidance in terms of what you're talking about in each piece. And then, of course, with the findings, a really compelling way to help people understand data and information is to put that in the form of a graph or like we saw in the brief; we saw a map; sometimes we'll see another type of figure. And so whenever possible, it's visually visually kind of compelling figures are very helpful for presenting your data, getting people's eye drawn to that and getting them to really see the patterns and the issues. I'm sure you all understand when you read text, sometimes it's hard to kind of make sense of of a string of numbers or a string of information, and when you see it put in a graph, you quickly understand what's happening, and that's what you want to do for your audience; you want them to quickly understand what you're presenting to them. So putting it in that form is helpful. So in our Kenya brief, do we see findings? Which sections would you say would be the findings in this case? What is the sort of new information or the the data that they're providing for the the reader? And there's a question about can you use photos as part of the findings? And certainly, especially if you don't have some of the data that lends itself to two charts or tables, putting in a photo as for the visual appeal and conveying part of that message and the caption there can be really effective, but a photo probably isn't the finding in and of itself; it just starts to enhance that message and and make the brief more appealing. And with photos, you just want to make sure that you you know you have proper credits, you have proper captions, you know, not we don't want to be sort of grabbing photos from the internet and putting them there, oh, here's a small child, kind of thing. So we want to remember to keep our credibility and to ensure that we're using appropriate photos that that are, you know, allowed for this kind of thing and then accredited to the source. And we have a comment from Malika that she says she sees the findings starting on page two from this section on word not to the recommendations section. Okay, all right. I think that that that's right, you know, in this section really the new information that they want to present that they want to put in context is the information about the gender dynamics and then the information about family planning. So we start to see both of those things on page two, and we also see that the two headings, right? So they are talking about slightly different issues, so one is gender dynamics, one is around family planning, and so that we can see that clearly in the headings. So even the findings themselves have been separated into those two headings, and then, as Marissa pointed out, the Family Planning section was really the meat of what they wanted to present and the data, and so they further subdivided the Family Planning section into three three different pieces to give us further information. Is there anything else you notice about the findings section? Do you feel like the the type of data with enough data, with it too much data? How did you feel sort of reading the findings? Mm-hmm. So I think that we have two comments in the chat box around findings, essentially that, you know, there are two main findings: one around the women being the vulnerable groups and then the importance of family planning. So we've certainly pointed out those two components of the findings, and then another comment related to the subsections of family planning. Mm-hmm. And we have that the findings are summarized in the gender and vulnerability section, and the suggestion that the gender section could be the title of the gender section could be made more informative. Yeah, I certainly agree. Whenever we talked to people about making your titles compelling, as Marissa pointed out, you want the message to be there. So in this case, we see gender dynamics of vulnerability, and in fact, we don't actually get the full message there. What about the gender dynamics? How does it relate to vulnerability? We actually don't see the connection in the way the title is is written. So I agree that that that would be a good point; that would be a great place to improve a bit more about giving the message: what is it about those two that are connected? What is the what are the paragraphs under it going to tell us? And I think the term gender dynamics is a bit jargony, you know, what are gender dynamics? People could interpret that in a lot of different ways. So trying to translate that into a bit clearer language, of a simple language, of what are we actually talking about here. Yeah. All right. So so in that section, we saw how much of the brief that the findings took up, you know, we have page two, we have part of page three, and even part of page four. Or a lot of these for really covers the findings. In some cases, we might want to pare that down just a little bit; you do want the findings to be kind of a core part of your message, but as Marissa reminded us this earlier when we're talking about a policy brief, you really want to focus a lot on the interpretation of those findings and then the recommendations that follow. So just to kind of keep in mind a balance of those three sections. All right. So the next section we want to talk about are the policy implications, and again this, you know, should be a reminder of some of the things we talked about in the workshop. So if you remember, I had kind of broken down our sections, you know, findings, implications, recommendations, as what's the problem, why does this matter, and then what should be done about it. So for our policy implications, we're on the the why does this matter part, right? So the policy implications kind of answer that question. So what so there are these gender issues; so there's Family Planning in this, you know, in the picture; so but why does that matter? Why do I as a minister of health care about this? Why do I as the person in the agriculture sector care about this? Or what are you saying that these findings mean? What do they suggest? So those are two different ways that you can think about policy implications. So one way is that they can answer the question: so what? Why does this matter? And the other one is that the implications can extend the logic of the findings; they give a little more context, and they start to suggest which direction we should go with our recommendations. So what yeah, so let's just look at our Kenya brief again. Do you see implications in there? Did you see answers to why the findings matter? Why why are gender dynamics important? Why is family planning important? What are these findings suggest to us? And don't worry about the way that they have labeled the sections, so maybe you'll find implication sitting in in another section, or you know, the idea is to find the information. So do you see things that look like implications that look like they explain why family planning is important or what it would mean or what these findings suggest to us? Mm-hmm. So somebody has mentioned that the implications are that family planning improves health and nutrition. Okay, and then family planning improves educational attainment of women; family planning helps achieve economic stability. Aha. So we certainly started to see those things, right? And even though we earlier kind of labeled those sections of findings, in this case, they have kind of embedded the implications along with the findings. So they're telling us, okay, here's the family

Planning situation and and here's what the evidence says about why family planning is important. What is the effect we can get if we bother to improve this situation? So I think that's certainly right in terms of part of the story. So some of the implications are embedded along with the findings. Do we see any other implications aside from that piece? Anyone else see other implications? So integrates if someone has said that integration of approaches build resilience as shown in the last paragraph under the recommendations. Okay, and I think that you raise an important point there. So you're saying in the recommendations section we're seeing some information that looks like implications, and I think that's the the trick with this brief, right? So in this case, they have labeled a section recommendations, but we would probably say that the information under here could qualify as implications because what we're really seeing here is a bridge from the findings and kind of the other information and implications we saw in the previous section to more concrete recommendations that we see in the next section.

So here we start to see the suggestion about family planning and how this is the direction we need to move. And you can see the strong sentence at the very beginning as well: Family planning transforms woman's ability to plan their families and may help women in the ASL region to adapt to climate change and other crises. So even in that sentence, basically it's suggesting the direction we need to go; it's telling us family planning is a good thing; it can help us get here, but we haven't yet seen a clear recommendation. So it's much more the implications, and then towards the end of that section we also see—I think this was pointed out—that the integrated approaches can help build resilience. And then we also see a sentence towards the end that says: Combine strategies will make communities more resilient in terms of health outcomes and food security. So the implications there, it's really kind of telling us, you know, this matters because it can help us get to this kind of point, and it's suggesting what the Asians should look like. And so I think that's a—it's a really nice example of the implication summarizing things in this brief, but as a few of you pointed out, that the headings here are a bit misleading, and so this heading of recommendations should really be a key message summarizing these implications. I think even that first sentence that Reshma read out about family planning transforms woman's ability—that could be recrafted into a heading here—that's really the main takeaway message, and then it becomes more clear that the specific recommendations are the next section. And a few of you have made comments that said you weren't quite clear what was happening in this section, and so I think the the content of the brief is good, but the way it's been labeled is a bit confusing, and so you can see where it could be improved. And then now we'll just go to the final section.

So this is our recommendation section—again, something that we talked about at length during the workshop. So one thing that we had emphasized then is that the recommendations really must flow from the evidence that you've presented, right? We sort of said, if you're going to present this kind of recommendation, kind of think back: Did I did I show that that was a gap in my finding? Does it link back to what I've said was the issue? So we want to kind of keep those things in mind so that our recommendations are not sort of popping out of nowhere. We need to have touched on on whatever issue or topic is is there in our recommendations. So two key components of recommendations that we always want you to remember is that you want to be specific about what exactly is needed, and you want to specify who it is that needs to take this action. I think we talked about, you know, if you're presenting in a room or you write us a letter to someone and you say, you know, "it's necessary to improve family planning in Kenya," everyone will walk away from that meeting and do nothing because nobody knows who was supposed to do that and nobody knows what exactly they were supposed to do. Did you want money for family planning? Do they need a guideline? You know, do they need supplies? Did they need training? It was very unclear if we just say, "Let's improve family planning." So in our recommendations, we want to be as specific as we can be. Does anyone remember what SMART stands for? If you want to either raise your hand or type that in, we suggested that your recommendations be SMART. What does that mean? Okay, great. So we have two answers first: S for specific, and M for measurable. Anyone for the A? Attainable. Mm-hmm. Look, it's A—attainable, achievable. Fortune, we're gonna go ahead and unmute you. Go ahead, feedback there. Sorry, go ahead. These T stands for attainable or achievable. I don't see ten pound, right? Great. So specific, measurable, attainable or achievable, realistic, and time-bound. So we want our recommendations to kind of, as much as possible, follow those those pieces. And we said in the workshop, sometimes it's not possible to have them all fit those criteria, but when we when they don't follow it, we need to have a good reason for it. So it could be just related to the situation, the context, various things, but you need to have make it intentional that that the recommendation doesn't follow it if that's the case.

So another thing that we wanted to remind you of in terms of your recommendation is that it's always helpful to provide evidence that supports your recommendation. So if you're wanting to set, you know, "let's do this kind of pilot program" or "let's do this kind of training," that if you can that you provide evidence that shows this is effective, this works, this was done in another part of the country, or this was done in a neighboring country that's very similar to us, or a pilot project worked quite well, maybe we can scale up a bit. So you know, as much as you can, you want to show a little bit of proof that what your recommendations are saying I have a likelihood of working. So whenever you can, you might fit that into into your brief as well. So in this brief, do we see recommendations and are they specific? Do they tell us who should do things? Okay, so someone mentioned it seems there are no timelines. Mm-hmm. And in some cases, so this might have been an intentional thought by the authors of this brief that they didn't put timelines, maybe because the audience is, you know, it's it's specific in terms of government official things like that, but maybe this wasn't the place to to put down the timeline and to say, "Let's do this by the end of the year. Let's do it in a certain time period." Possibly that was the follow-up effort that might happen, but I think it's a good point that here we don't see any timeline, and if we leave them out, we should have a reason for that. Can anyone tell us what are the action verbs in the recommendations? And as we said before, the section labeled recommendations is really more implications, and so then in the "what is needed to build resilient" section, we see the more specific action-oriented recommendations. So within there, where do you see the action words? Have you found the recommendations? So we look in that section. Okay, there we go. I think we just had a slight delay. So there are recommendations like "raise awareness"—those are the action verbs—"must improve access," right? So that's that's perfect. So "raise awareness," "improve access," the next one is "integrate family planning," there's another "raise awareness" after that, "include reproductive health in the policy," uh-huh, and somebody has just mentioned that one as well. So you can see here that all of the bullet points that say what should be done have an action verb or action phrase in them. And then what else do they all have? I think this recommendation section does a good job of sort of following some rules that were suggested. What is the other rule that they follow? Well, hmm. So do we know who should take these actions? Is that clear in this brief? So in this case, so we see, you know, very clearly each of the bullet points, we see an audience listed: who should do this? Government officials, NGOs, faith leaders, right? Ministry is responsible for agriculture and environment, State Department for gender, national drought management authority. So in this case, they were very very clear about the who—who should do what. So they've named who, and then they've made a very clear action point. And I think in the comments we have some concern that maybe we don't necessarily see measurable in some cases. Measurable is just a matter of would we be able to track what this done, yes or no? So sometimes measurable doesn't necessarily have to be, you know, complex sort of data indicators on it, but would we be able to tell if we've achieved what is listed here as the action point? So you know, for the example for the last one, "they should include reproductive health and family planning in the national policy," is that something that we could at some point go and look at the policy, find out if it was included? And maybe that's one that needs more clarity: Is it enough to just include family planning four times, just a few words here and there, or is it that they want it as an entire section? Do they want it intensely discussed? You know, and maybe that's a point where the recommendation could be more clear. So that's a good kind of a marker for us to look through our recommendations and think to the future and say, okay, if in one year I wanted to know whether this happened or not or if it was successful, could I measure that? And we just saw in this example that, oh well, maybe we needed to be more specific on this recommendation in in order to measure it well later. So that's a good way to mark whether your recommendations are strong or not.

All right, so we are kind of wrapping up now. So the conclusion, you know, in this case, we do see a conclusion at the end of the brief that's labeled as such, and they you know they essentially kind of summarize what has been in the brief. We don't always have to go back and repeat things that have been said. What you want to do with the conclusion is kind of keep it short and sweet and end with kind of a positive note that tells the reader or suggest to them if you take these recommendations, these are the positive things that could be achieved in our country. So you want to kind of keep the recommendation or the sorry the conclusion positive in that sense and and give that kind of information. So you know, by improving, you know, family planning and gender dynamics, Kenya can, you know, improve our, you know, resilience to to climate shocks and, you know, have some other positive outcome. You know, you could frame that nicely to show that if you do the things we're suggesting, these are the the positive things that we could have at the end of that. So you want to leave them with that kind of note. So that's really what you want to do with the conclusion; it can be kind of a quick paragraph or two at that point. So I think now we are going to oh quickly talk about getting feedback. I think Marissa sort of mentioned this; we did talk about it in the workshop as well. As much as you can plan in advance, if you have to write a brief, write anything like this, you know, start your drafts early so that you have time to involve others and get feedback from other people. You know, when we know a topic a certain way in our minds, we sort of tend to maybe leave out certain information or use our really technical terms, and if somebody else reads it, they can easily point out gaps in our logic, you know, words that maybe we want to change and things like that. And so it's really really valuable to get the perspective of colleagues who might be similar to your audiences or who might just be coming from another perspective so that you can make sure that one the messages that you're trying to get across are coming across and that two your presenting them in the most clear and compelling way possible. You know, your your reviewers can give you that kind of information that it just as we just reviewed this brief; if you were a reviewer here, you might have given the author certain input that, well, this section wasn't so clear, this heading could be improved, things like that. And that's the kind of input that you could get from others when you're preparing your briefs. So it's important to do that and to kind of ask them whether they're getting your key messages. So we have a PRB checklist that you either have or will be getting, and this is a really valuable tool to kind of check whether you're including the the key components in your policy brief, whether you're touching on the tips that we've been giving you. So when you have a decent draft written, what you can do is kind of sit side by side with this checklist and see how you match up with each of the the key points here. And the checklist kind of follows the same outline that we've given you in terms of overview, background, findings, implications, recommendations, and conclusion. So you can make sure that you're kind of hitting the key points. And what you're seeing here on the screen, you know, I know it's hard to read, but this is a document that will send to you that you can use as you work on your policy briefs as kind of a checklist for yourself. And so in the last few minutes that we have here, I just want to pull up the assignment that you'll each be doing and talk you through that quickly.

So as we've been discussing, you will each have—you will need to be writing a policy brief on the topic that you started working on here in the workshop in DC. And each of you identified a topic, I looked into the policy landscape of that you identified your stakeholders, your key audiences, some of the key messages that you want to communicate. So building on the work that you did during the workshop and starting to take that forward into a specific policy brief, the first step, as Reshma talked us through, is creating an outline. And so the assignment you each have now is to create a policy brief outline, and that will be due to us at PRB in mid-January, and I will follow up with all of this information and the documents by email so you have it written for you. Is that this is the outline format that we'd like you to follow, drawing on the work you did here in DC. Remind us what is your policy goal, and for yourself to remind yourself what's the policy goal up front that you're working towards. Who are your audiences, and what do you know about them? Remind yourself about that work that you did because that informs what you're going to say in the brief. A policy brief is inherently a policy learning activity in that framework that we use. So thinking about policy learning, what is your communication objectives? What are you trying to communicate to this audience, and what do you expect will happen as a result of communicating this information? Your audience might be more informed; they might understand the actions that they could take to address the issue. So most of that should come from the work and the thinking you did here during the workshop in DC, and hopefully that will be pretty easy to think about. And then this is the real outline for the brief. It follows the outline Reshma talked us through: the summary and key message up front, the backgrounds, the key findings, the implications, the recommendations, and if you want to identify the key references and resources that you'll be drawing on. So we will send this document to you; you can work within the document to create your outline, or if you're more comfortable just starting fresh in Microsoft Word, you're welcome to do that, but we find that it is really helpful as for us as reviewers, but more so for yourself as an author of this policy brief, remind yourself throughout what is the policy goal, who are these audiences, and why are you talking to them about this issue. If you're clear on that and if you remember that throughout this process, the brief comes together with a strong message and a clear audience and purpose. And so we really want you to make sure you think through those early steps upfront. So we have used our soul hour here, and I know many of you and many of us have commitments at one o'clock, so I will leave you here and wrap it up. Thank you so much for your attention. As I said, I will send you the checklist, the slides, the brief outline document by email along with the due date and the expectations for the assignment, and you're welcome to follow up with any specific questions that you have as you start to think about that. And the policy brief outlined will be due in mid-January, so you have a bit of time, and I know some of you are probably going to be traveling over the winter break from classes and so you'll you'll have some time to figure out when you can fit this work into your schedule. So with that, thank you so much, and we look forward to being in touch. Thanks everyone. Bye.