writing a good policy brief - a template!

​The fundamentals of achieving impact from research, is getting the knowledge and information that is contained (usually) in academic research publications into the hands and heads of the next and end user - the people who can start applying that knowledge.
 
This means a different audience, and with that a need to change how you’re communicating, so you’re speaking their language. 
 
As researchers, a key audience for us are policy makers. They might be involved in operational policy (setting rules and guidelines for how things get done), or strategic policy which is much more about setting the overall rules of the game (like legislation).
 
In either case, someone who works in policy needs the ‘so what’ bits of your research provided to them in as short but comprehensive a way as possible. 

eIf you google ‘policy brief templates’ there is no shortage of options and it can be confusing where to start, and how relevant the advice might be for our context.

Recently, the Riddet Institute has funded Dr Hannah McKerchar to undertake an internship with the Prime Minister's Chief Science Advisor.
 
Her project has been focused on exploring how to improve the use of research evidence and connections with policy in the area of food sustainability regulations in Aotearoa, and as part of this internship Hannah has produced some great resources to help researchers effectively engage with policy makers.

What’s great about this resource is Hannah has developed two short explanatory videos, and included some really helpful completed examples, where you can see how the tips play out when summarising a real piece of research. 
 
All the templates and videos can be found here. We suggest watching the second video first. In this video they talk about a number of the kinds of challenges and issues we also talk about in our own training, and is a helpful reminder that these are the kinds of challenges anyone working in research experiences. 

Although you can find the full guide here, we suggest you download and review the DELTA example first. In this example you can see exactly how they’ve completed the policy brief with two additional pages of explanation. The CellAg example then shows another example of a completed brief.

What is really helpful with both these examples is they’ve been drafted as what is the classic ‘one-pager’.

Anyone who’s worked in or with government knows that if you can’t summarize it on an A3 page, you’re probably going to loose your audience, so these are a particularly helpful resource for the New Zealand context.