“Schwabish and team are master communicators! And Elevate the Debate masterfully explains how to bring your scholarship and data-driven research out of the library, off the page, and into the eyes and minds of those who can put it to good use.”
—David Autor, Ford Professor of Economics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
“Being an expert is both a privilege and a responsibility. So often researchers struggle to clearly frame their work in a way a larger audience can appreciate. Elevate the Debate lays out easy-to-follow steps that will help the wonkiest of wonks break down their research and clearly explain why their work matters. If you wish more people could appreciate why your work is important, check this book out.”
—Dan Gorenstein, host and executive producer of Tradeoffs, a health policy podcast
“Elevate the Debate is the scholar's handbook to bridging the divide with policymakers and making a real impact with one's research. The research report is yesterday's tool for dissemination; the infographic is today's. The Urban Institute team clearly and artfully guides academics in identifying their audiences and visualizing results in new, more media-friendly ways that hold great promise for improving evidence-based policy and practice.”
—Carolyn Heinrich, Patricia and Rodes Hart Professor of Public Policy, Education and Economics, Vanderbilt University
“Scholars spend years learning how to conduct research but rarely are taught to convey insights effectively. This book offers a thoughtful and accessible way to fill that gap by helping researchers to identify an audience, to use more than one medium, and to tailor content, visuals, and tone to broaden their reach.”
—Ellen Meara, Professor of Health Economics and Policy, Department of Health Policy and Management, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health
“In an age of increasing disinformation and noise, it's crucial that scientists, researchers, and educators of all types get their message out with simplicity and clarity. Evidence-based thinking and communicating have never been more important than they are today. This may be the most important book you read this year!”
—Garr Reynolds, author of Presentation Zen and Professor of Management at Kansai Gaidai University
“Data without communication is just data. This essential guide shows you how to transform those numbers into something real and vital that can have true impact. If you want to change the world with data, this guide is a great place to start.”
—Simon Rogers, Google
“At a time when the world struggles to separate fact from fiction in our media and information, there are few more important endeavors than guiding researchers and scholars in disseminating their work. This exceptional volume from the Urban Institute is an essential and timely resource for doing just that. Here's hoping it is widely read and absorbed!”
—Jimmy Soni, award-winning author of A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age
“This book is the essential how-to guide for researchers and analysts who intend to be relevant. Getting your message into the right hands doesn't happen by accident!”
—Tom Terry, CEO of the Terry Group
“Elevate the Debate is a fabulous new book that offers to teach researchers how to communicate our work to get attention from multiple audiences. This volume takes the importance of a good presentation as a start and goes on to help researchers and analysts to communicate data, research, and analysis to different audiences. It is accessible, clearly written, and a very important tool to increase the use of our work to improve policy formation. I hope it is widely read and followed.”
—Barbara L. Wolfe, Richard A. Easterlin Professor of Economics, Population Health Sciences, and Public Affairs, University of Wisconsin–Madison
© 2020 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.
Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.
Published simultaneously in Canada.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:
Names: Schwabish, Jonathan A., editor.
Title: Elevate the debate : a multilayered approach to communicating your research / edited by Jonathan Schwabish.
Description: First edition. | Hoboken, New Jersey : John Wiley & Sons, Inc., [2020] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019046227 (print) | LCCN 2019046228 (ebook) | ISBN 9781119620013 (paperback) | ISBN 9781119620037 (adobe pdf) | ISBN 9781119620020 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Sociology, Urban—Research—United States. | Urban policy—Research—United States. | Communication in city planning—United States.
Classification: LCC HT123 .E44 2020 (print) | LCC HT123 (ebook) | DDC 307.76072/073—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019046227
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019046228
Cover image and design: Allison Feldman
The chapters in this book were developed from a series of workshops that the Urban Institute Communications Department conducted between 2016 and 2019. Workshop participants hailed from diverse fields: housing, international development, social work, labor economics, healthcare, and more. Feedback was unanimously positive, and we were inspired to empower more researchers by putting those lessons in words.
We are indebted to the researchers at the Urban Institute whose dedication to their scholarship and their collaborative spirit has helped make Urban a trusted resource for thought leaders, academics, practitioners, journalists, and policymakers. We also thank our current and former Urban colleagues who supported this project directly: Rob Abare, Fiona Blackshaw, Ben Chartoff, Matt Chingos, Mary Cunningham, Allison Feldman, Dan Fowler, Martha Galvez, Heather Hahn, Rachel Kenney, Arlene Corbin Lewis, Jeffrey Lin, Rhiannon Newman, Sheryl Pardo, Archana Pyati, Brittney Spinner, Jerry Ta, Alex Tilsley, John Wehmann, and Sarita Williams.
We are grateful to the president of the Urban Institute, Sarah Rosen Wartell, for her leadership; for believing in accessible, engaging research; and for providing a vision that inspires us to “elevate the debate” every day.
The most important contribution to this book comes from the authors, all of whom are experts in their fields of communicating research and analysis in different ways across different mediums and platforms. They all share a belief in the importance of using data, facts, and research to help improve public policy, communities, and lives.
—Jonathan Schwabish
The Urban Institute is a nonprofit research institution located in Washington, DC. It was founded in 1968 to study the nation's urban problems and evaluate the Great Society initiatives of the Lyndon B. Johnson administration. Today, Urban comprises more than 500 social scientists, economists, mathematicians, demographers, data scientists, policy experts, and communicators. At our core, we believe good decisions are shaped by facts, rather than ideology, have the power to improve public policy and practice, strengthen communities, redirect the way businesses think and operate, and transform people's lives for the better. Our research is not done for the sake of research or for a handful of other scholars; it is conducted to serve as a catalyst for change in perception, thought, and action.
Urban's Communication Department began to grow rapidly in 2013, evolving to better help Urban connect with other researchers, policymakers, practitioners, the public, and the press. With a refreshed brand identity and transformed digital presence, Urban began pioneering new ways to bring research to life. Today, a modernized approach and institute serves as a model for other nonprofits and organizations.
As Urban's communication efforts began to bear fruit, the team began to host trainings—internally and externally—on a range of topics including media relations, blogging, social media, data visualization, presentation skills, and translating research for policymakers. At the request of a major foundation, we rolled all these together into a daylong session to equip researchers with the tools they need. Today, we offer these personalized trainings to a range of academic researchers and organizations seeking more meaningful impact for their important work. In this book, we capture our overviews, tips, and tactics so they can be yours to remember and apply.
_______________________
When Bridget Lowell, Urban's Chief Communications Officer kicks off our Research to Policy Boot Camp, she starts with a simple question: “How many of you have felt frustrated when working with a reporter or a marketing communications staffer?”
Immediately, almost all hands go up
The second question she asks is, “How many times have you invested significant time and energy to painstakingly help nonexperts understand your issue, only to have them publish stories in which they get it all wrong?”
Most hands stay up
Whether at an academic institution, nonprofit organization, or government agency, researchers far too often feel that their work is ignored or misrepresented. Many feel that doing a better job communicating their work is outside their skill set or not worth their time. At Urban, we feel just the opposite. We feel that people who have dedicated their time to conduct objective, rigorous research can also effectively communicate that work to whatever audience they want to reach. The same communications toolkit we follow can be applied by any organization that seeks to share research-based information and rally audiences to thoughtfully consider a point of debate and drive the correct decision-making to solve a problem. In that way, the techniques we have developed at Urban may be used by researchers and thought leaders of all types, elevating the debate inside and outside their organizations.
It takes time. It takes effort. It takes skill. But it can be done, and this book will help you do so. Our goal in this book is to take you through the journey of effectively communicating your work to your audience across eight different subject areas. Together, they will help you find and reach your audience. There are a variety of payoffs to doing so: reaching a broader audience; having an impact on policy; finding new collaborators; finding new data; and finding new funders, to name just a few.
This book is organized in eight chapters to help you on your way to better research communication.
Together, these chapters will provide you with the basic, practical strategies to be your own communications manager. See our webpage for more information and downloadable resources and worksheets: https://www.urban.org/ElevatetheDebateBook.
As a team, we are committed to helping researchers and other data-driven knowledge seekers do a better job communicating their research and reaching their desired audiences. We are sharing our tools, techniques, and strategies because we believe that more and better communication of important research can lead to better outcomes.
We hope President Lyndon Johnson would be proud of the independent institute he commissioned in 1968, one that promised “to give us the power through knowledge to help solve the problem that weighs heavily on the hearts and minds of all of us—the problem of the American city and its people.” He hoped the Urban Institute would fill a real need by “bridging the gulf between the lonely scholar in search of truth and the decision-maker in search of progress.” We hope this book will advance today's scholars and decisionmakers on that journey.