The challenges of salience

Start with the end goal, not the research question

Think tanks often come at things from the wrong starting point. We start with an interesting research question, we do our research, we produce a report, and then we say ‘here, policy makers, this is what we found, do something with this.’

We should be flipping it and starting with the end goal: what is the policy we are trying to change? What is the law we’re trying to change? Then from that decide what research is needed, or even whether research is needed at all.  

To influence the end goal you may need a five-year randomised control trial that spits out a precise estimate. Maybe. But I doubt it.

Has your thing entered visceral territory?

Once an issue is of high salience—once it’s a voting issue, once there are daily headlines about it—there’s just less proactive policy-making space. Policy makers feel constrained by what other politicians and the public think.

Evidence is still useful in those instances, but it has to be a different type of evidence. Policy makers don’t need theoretical research and big-picture numbers. What they need is practical, evidence-informed policies that can be implemented now, that are relatively constrained in how they’re designed, that sit within the Overton window, that can be sold to policy makers and the public, and that have some positive benefit they can sell more broadly.

Don’t complain about your comms team if you don’t give them the space they need

Comms people are very often not enabled. Their skills are not valued at the same level as researchers’. They’re not brought into conversations with researchers at the beginning, and they’re not meaningfully consulted throughout—researchers will sometimes listen, but they’ll rarely change what they’re doing because of that advice.

Comms teams are also often overworked. Most think tanks put out way too much, including ours. Even if the comms team wants to do strategic communications, even if they’re empowered to, they’re so busy editing blog posts and writing tweets that they don’t have time for that macro work.

And researchers themselves often don’t understand what they’re trying to achieve. You’d need a researcher coming to the comms team saying ‘this is what I’m trying to achieve, these are my audiences, this is what I want them to do with this research, what do you think?’ Very few researchers I’ve worked with think like that.

If a product has not been designed to achieve a specific outcome, putting it out is mere dissemination. And yet we talk as though it is strategic communications. It isn’t.

Build an operating model that creates, and resolves, tensions

When I started at ODI [development think tank], there was a central communications function doing what I’d call dissemination: a media person, a blog editor, a publications editor, an events person. But individual programmes also had embedded comms officers with knowledge of the subject area. My very first job was a comms officer in the politics and governance team.

You weren’t just there to work in partnership with researchers on how to structure their questions and get their work out, you were also a bridge between the research programme and the central comms team. A translator. 

The central team would say ‘we want this’ and you’d say the research team is just not going to do it like that. The researcher would say ‘we want to run this event’ and you'd say the events team is never going to say yes to that. You were always trying to find a halfway house. It worked extremely well as a model.

Who drives organisational change?

Some think tanks have forty or fifty years of research pedigree and a reputation for big exciting ideas in top-five economics journals. Re-orientating them to start with the end goal first is going to be extremely hard; it’s much easier to start a new think tank built that way from the beginning. 

What helps to drive toward that goal is internal and external pressure. Internally, younger staff really want to know they’re having an impact, that they’re contributing to something larger, and they’re getting more ballsy about calling on their organisations to care about that. 

Externally, we’re getting pressure from donors, as we should. As we move from big, long-term, flexible grants towards smaller, much more focused grants—increasingly from the effective altruism community—they demand a theory of change and a theory of impact. That forces you to change.

Where’s the line between advocacy, policy and lobbying anyway?

Advocacy is often a dirty word in think tanks. Some will say advocates don’t necessarily go with what's evidence-led: they’re trying to achieve a particular policy goal and will use all avenues to get there, whether or not it’s evidenced. Whereas we can say ‘here is what the evidence says, policy maker, do with it what you will.’ 

But is there really a big difference between advocacy, policy engagement, dissemination, and strategic communications? How can I say I’m doing strategic policy communications but I’m not doing advocacy? Where is that line? And where should it be, if we’re going to be impactful?

Thank you to the 126 of you who have referred colleagues to this newsletter. The views expressed in Policy Unstuck interviews are those of the interviewee, and do not necessarily represent Cast from Clay’s view. You can read our editorial guidelines for more information on the goals, process, and formatting of this series.