Research to Action

The Global Guide to Research Impact

Navigation

  • Home

  • How To ▾

    This list of how to’s provides an essential guide for a number of key communication and engagement activities that will help make your research travel.

    • Building Capacity
    • Policy Briefs
    • Research Impact
    • Theory of Change
    • Uptake Strategy
  • Topics ▾

    • Eye on 2022
    • Impact Practitioners ▸
      • Impact Practitioners
    • Knowing your audience ▸
      • Building a strategy
      • Engaging policy audiences ▸
        • EBPDN
        • Targeting policy actors
        • Targeting practitioners
      • Stakeholder mapping
      • Strategic communication ▸
        • Building a brand
        • Engaging the public
      • Working with the media
    • Making your research accessible ▸
      • Framing challenges
      • Knowledge translation
      • Learning in context
      • Open access
      • Presenting your research
      • Using digital tools ▸
        • Using multi media
        • Using online tools/ICTs
        • Using social media
      • Using intermediaries
    • Monitoring and evaluation ▸
      • Applying M&E methods
      • Evidence into policy
      • Measuring success
    • Uncategorized
  • Dialogue Spaces ▾

    • GDN: Doing Research
    • Manchester Policy Week 2015
    • TTI Exchange 2015
    • Strengthening Institutions to Improve Public Expenditure Accountability (GDN PEM Project)
    • DFID/AusAid Research Communication and Uptake Workshop
    • 3ie Policy Influence and Monitoring (PIM) project
    • Policy Engagement and Communications (PEC) Programme
  • Reading Lists

  • Impact Practitioners

    • Impact Practitioners overview
    • Capacity Building
    • Communication and Engagement
    • Frameworks
    • Indicators
    • Learning
    • Monitoring and Evaluation
    • Policy Impact
    • Strategy
    • Theoretical
    • Utilisation

Social Media

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Instagram
  • LinkedIn
  • Vimeo

Featured

Is the age of the Policy Brief over?

By Laura ffrench-Constant 30/10/2014

What does the ever increasing availability of an internet connection mean for a policy brief? Policy Briefs have become a popular means for researchers to speak to policy audiences, but there are reasons to suggest that their popularity may be declining.

The increased availability of the internet for policy actors may mean one of two things: the slow decline of the policy brief as the ‘go to’ form of policy communication or the reestablishment of its popularity within a multi-method communications strategy.

A working paper written by Simon Batchelor at IDS explores the ‘information ecosystems’ of policy makers’ and suggests that with ever increasing internet connectivity policy makers may start looking for research more actively, contrary, to the established idea that policy makers are too busy to look for information themselves. Preliminary findings from the study conducted across Ghana, Nepal, India and Ethiopia found that the ‘information ecosystem is changing’.  Preliminary data implies that policy makers spend more time finding their own information rather than reading briefings or consulting information sourced by assistants.

What does this mean for policy briefs? The research seems to suggest that policy briefs are becoming less important in the face of increasing internet connection, which enables policy makers to research more widely themselves. Furthermore, the phenomenon appears to be widespread, with research by Talbot and Talbot on policy makers in the UK finding that a surprising amount (55%) of civil servants directly accessed academic research in full.

These research findings contravene the conventional wisdom that a policy brief is the most appropriate format of information for a busy policy maker and the most efficient way of attempting to influence policy. However, policy briefs have not lost their value completely in the face of policy makers’ evolving behaviour. A hard copy of a policy brief cannot be deleted quickly or inadvertently make its way to the spam folder of an email inbox, unlike electronic information. A hard copy has the potential to be lost at the bottom of a giant pile of paper or have a mug of coffee spilt on it, but, it also has the potential to pass the ‘breakfast test’, being scanned whilst a morning meal is hastily consumed, with the possibility of influencing policy retained. A policy brief also acts as a physical object that can be presented to policy makers at a meeting, or even provide an excuse for setting up a meeting in the first place.

It should not be forgotten that policy makers will always be busy, even if their information sourcing patterns are evolving. Every policy maker needs breakfast, which leaves an opening for a policy brief. Policy Briefs may increasingly be accessed online, and a tablet or smartphone may eventually replace the hard copy, but as long as policy makers are busy, there seems to be little chance of them scanning an academic paper when they have five minutes to spare, whereas they may engage with a policy brief.

In an increasingly digital age with an ever busier ‘information ecosystem’ perhaps what is needed is a mixed model for policy communications. A recently produced Toolkit  by GDNet argued that videos and data visualisation are necessary to reinvigorate research communications with policy, but noted that even engaging and dynamic multimedia videos cannot ‘replace a policy brief in its depth and detail’.

Videos are hailed by the toolkit as a means of making a policy briefs ‘more popular’, a complimentary product instead of its replacement. Duncan Green similarly blogged on the need to diversify research communications outputs, mentioning the virtues of infographics and youtube pieces as accompaniments to research reports because they improve access.

The end of the age of the policy brief is not a foregone conclusion given increasing internet connectivity. The survey of UK policy makers by Talbot and Talbot, mentioned above, rates the policy brief/research report as the most widely consulted source of research information, concluding that policy makers need concise or ‘pre-digested’ information. The policy brief will have to evolve simultaneously with the increasingly crowded, ever changing ‘information ecosystem’. Perhaps the age of the alternative policy brief has dawned, ushering in multimedia briefs over morning coffee alongside the traditional policy brief.

Image courtesy of Jean Marc Cote/commons.wikimedia.org

Related posts

EBPDN: Refreshing recommended resources - 31/10/2019
Building momentum to advance citizen evidence in policymaking - 03/09/2019
Bringing researchers and knowledge brokers together for greater impact - 29/05/2019

Get 'New Post' e-alerts and follow R2A

> > > > >

Contribute to R2A:
We welcome blogposts, news about jobs, events or funding, and recommendations for great resources about development communications and research uptake.

Topics: #pbweek14, africa, dfid, gdnet, ids, infographics, policy brief, policy brief week, research

Laura ffrench-Constant

Laura is Social Media and Outreach Coordinator for Research to Action. Laura manages R2A's social media channels, webinar series and any other project partnerships including conferences. She is also a Senior Associate at CommsConsult. Laura has a degree in Politics and Philosophy from the University of Edinburgh, where she grappled with distilling complex ideas without detracting from the content or context of research.

Contribute Write a blog post, post a job or event, recommend a resource

Partner with Us Are you an institution looking to increase your impact?

Tweets by @Research2Action

Most Recent Posts

  • Free webinar: Beyond content delivery: How to make online learning truly participatory
  • UNV Social and Behaviour Change (SBC) Officer, UNICEF: Ethiopia – Deadline 29 March
  • How research influences policy: case studies from Australia
  • Network for Advancing & Evaluating the Societal Impact of Science
  • Communications and knowledge management officer- Biosciences, International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) – Deadline 17 March

This Week's Most Read

  • How to write actionable policy recommendations
  • What do we mean by ‘impact’?
  • Policymaker, policy maker, or policy-maker?
  • Gap analysis for literature reviews and advancing useful knowledge
  • Outcome Mapping: A Basic Introduction
  • Top tips: Writing newspaper opinion pieces
  • 12ft Ladder: Making research accessible
  • Key questions to ask when putting together a Theory of Change for Research Uptake (Part 1 of 2)
  • Stakeholder Analysis: A basic introduction
  • Decolonising research: Some useful strategies

About Us

Research To Action (R2A) is a learning platform for anyone interested in maximising the impact of research and capturing evidence of impact.

The site publishes practical resources on a range of topics including research uptake, communications, policy influence and monitoring and evaluation. It captures the experiences of practitioners and researchers working on these topics and facilitates conversations between this global community through a range of social media platforms.

R2A is produced by a small editorial team, led by CommsConsult. We welcome suggestions for and contributions to the site.

  • Home
  • About Us
  • Cookies
  • Contribute

Subscribe to our newsletter!

Our contributors

  • Paula Fray
  • Shubha Jayaram
  • Sue Martin
  • Maria Balarin
  • James Harvey
  • Emily Hayter
  • Susan Koshy
  • Ronald Munatsi
  • Ajoy Datta

Browse all authors

Friends and partners

  • AuthorAid
  • Global Development Network (GDN)
  • INASP
  • Institute of Development Studies (IDS)
  • International Initiative for Impact Evaluation (3ie)
  • ODI RAPID
  • On Think Tanks
  • Politics & Ideas
  • Research for Development (R4D)
  • Research Impact

Copyright © 2023 Research to Action. All rights reserved. Log in