By Rob Moore, Principal, Scioto Analysis
For the past year and a half, I have slowly been writing blog posts about the eight steps of Eugene Bardach’s “Eightfold Path.” This eight-step framework is a common framework used for understanding how to conduct public policy analysis and has been very helpful for me to understand what public policy analysis actually is.
This is the final installation in that series, focused on the eighth step in the Eightfold Path: “Tell Your Story.”
As policy analysts, we often focus on the “nuts and bolts” of analysis. We are comfortable with literature review, monetization, statistical tests, sensitivity analysis. These are activities that are certainly used by analysts in an applied context, but are nonetheless safe at home in an academic environment. In order to communicate findings to clients such as policymakers, nonprofits organizations, or the public, we need to be intentional about telling a story they can understand.
One key tool Bardach gives us is the “Grandma Bessie Test.” This is an exercise where you ask yourself if your intelligent but not quite politically-aware Grandma Bessie would understand what you’re talking about if you explained it to her.
I know we don’t all like talking about work in our everyday lives, but I’ve found having conversations with family or friends to be a helpful way to apply the Grandma Bessie Test. If I can explain an insight I’ve had at a party or to my parents or to friends and keep their interest, then I’ve found a way to tell the story of my analysis in an effective way. So next time a family member or someone at a party asks you about your job, don’t focus on the broad strokes of what you do, try to explain a problem you’re working on. It could help you figure out how to tell your story better.
Another piece of advice Bardach gives is to gauge your audience. As policy analysts, our job is to be envoys between the ivory tower of academia and the alabaster dome of policymaking. This means we have to be fluent in two distinct dialects of English, wonkspeak and in politicospeak, along with subdialects relevant to our particular fields of study and policymaking.
In one recent analysis, I found myself adjusting to a client who spoke a different language than I did. While I saw economists analyzing a policy intervention as a tax and subsidy program, the client bristled at those words, saying that “tax” and “subsidy” have implications among policymakers that are different than those among economists. While I still liked how straightforward those words were in explaining how the policy functioned, I also understood that the words mean very different things to economists than they mean to bureaucrats or legislators.
Another consideration when telling a story put forth by Bardach is what medium to use when telling it. Below are just a few options for policy analysts.
Oral presentation, virtual or in-person
Memo
White Paper
Report
Media Release
Blog Post
Depending on the resources in your organization, you might need to develop more skills in some of these media versus others. Here at Scioto Analysis, we’re a small shop of two analysts, so we have to be serviceable in all of these forms of communication and spend a lot of time making sure what we present is in the best format for a client.
Bardach also implores you as a policy analyst to give your story a logical narrative flow. I tend to think writing a policy analysis is closer to journalism than it is to formal academic writing. Don’t fixate on your methodology: make it available in appendices at least but in the body of your report at most. Findings should come first so a busy policymaker with possibly only minutes to skim your report will retain the results of your analysis.
Bardach has a great list of common pitfalls to avoid, too.
Don’t follow the Eightfold Path too closely. Focus on results, not methodology: that is what decision makers want to see.
Don’t qualify compulsively. Go through your report and strike out double qualifications (e.g. “we find that it may be likely” usually just means “we find that it is likely”). Be straightforward and confident in your findings so they are not lost in a sea of qualification.
Don’t show off all your work. Don’t give your client a thorough explanation of all the specifications of your Monte Carlo simulation if she is not going to read them. Leave it in the appendix.
Don’t list without explaining. Don’t include lists of potential policy options or evaluative criteria that do not end up being important to your findings. These are usually not necessary and at best can be relegated to an appendix.
Don’t spin a mystery yarn. People come to policy analysts for answers, not more questions. Answer the most important questions first rather than burying answers and making clients search for them.
Don’t inflate your style. Don’t be an academic, don’t be a bureaucrat, don’t be your client’s best friend. Write like a professional trying to provide a clear understanding of what will happen when a policy is put in place.
Don’t forget that analysis doesn’t persuade—analysts do. A report never stands on its own. As a rule, people trust other people much more than they trust arguments in a vacuum. Your analysis product exists in an ecosystem that includes the credibility of the organization you work for, your own professionalism, and the needs and desires of your client. Keep in mind that all of these will impact what people think of your analysis.
Bardach’s chapter closes with some practical advice.
Have an executive summary unless your report is very short. Use a table of contents if it’s very long (longer than 15-20 pages is a good rule of thumb).
Make sure statistics you use are understandable—always think of Grandma Bessie when using a number. Try to make them as tangible and concrete as possible: use numbers in your narrative that people would understand in everyday life. When tangible, numbers are the most powerful tool we have as analysts. When abstract, they can be the most obscure and impotent.
Reference, reference, reference. Make sure every piece of evidence you use in your analysis has a reference to back it up. At Scioto, we prefer hyperlinks and footnotes. Hyperlinks are nice for less formal products like blog posts, footnotes are good for more formal. While there is a trend toward using endnotes, the world of PDFs makes endnotes overly cumbersome for any reader interested in using them.
As analysts, our job is not just to be accountants, it’s to be communicators. Policymakers need to make important decisions that impact the lives of their residents and others but the collective knowledge of civilization is diffuse, complicated, and sometimes contradictory. It is our job to distill and communicate that information so policymakers can make informed policy decisions. Telling our story is a key part of that work and one that every analyst needs to do.