recommended reading: elevate the debate
Breaking news! We could not be more excited to announce that two of the authors of Elevate the Debate, Jon Schwabish and Bridget Lowell, will be joining us on Thursday, February 13 from 10-11am ET, for our very first live “let’s chat” session in the SWD community! Jon and Bridget will be answering your questions about the book, communications, the Urban Institute, data visualization, effective presentations, or anything else you’d like to talk about. You can visit the event page now and pre-submit your questions; then, mark your calendars for 10am ET Thursday for the live event. It’s going to be a fantastic day. See you then!
Does this sound familiar? You have a project that you know is valuable for the world to hear about. Your findings, in the right hands, would drive genuine, positive change. You’ve worked hard on your research and analysis, you’ve put together a great product, polished it up, and after months or years, you publish it publicly...only to have it fall on deaf ears. For whatever reason, this valuable work just didn’t generate the response you expected and felt it deserved.
That is the challenge that Elevate the Debate, the new book from Jon Schwabish and his colleagues at the Urban Institute, intends to help us overcome. In today’s information-saturated world, it is not enough to simply publish our work and expect it to be heard and acted upon by the “right” people; we have to be strategic, thorough, and vigorous not only in our analysis and research, but in our communication strategy to ensure that our work succeeds in having an impact.
For those of us lucky enough to work in an organization with a large and well-connected communications department, we may not need to master (or even familiarize ourselves with) every facet of promoting our projects. However, most of us are not that fortunate, and Elevate the Debate serves as an incredibly valuable resource in those situations where we might not even know where to begin when it comes to, say, conducting interviews with the meda, or crafting an appropriate social media strategy, or organizing a coordinated communications plan for a large-scale research effort.
A core principle of Elevate the Debate, which Schwabish talked about when he recently appeared on the storytelling with data podcast, is that in communicating research, we will (or should) leverage different media, each of which requires different levels of complexity and has a differently-sized audience.
As the audience size grows, the message we deliver should become simpler and simpler. At the same time, that simple message should include easy pathways to the more complete and detailed versions of the message.
The majority of the book is broken up into chapters that address specific elements of this communication approach, including case studies and related additional resources. Schwabish himself writes the chapters on data visualization and creating more effective presentations, but for others he turns the reins over to different authors, each one covering a particular area of expertise. Bridget Lowell introduces the pyramid model and lays out the reasoning and logic behind Elevate the Debate’s recommended communication strategy. Amy Ellsbury and Amy Peake tackle the chapter about audience; in it, they explain how Urban Institute characterizes individuals in their audience, and how best to find and reach out to the people who should be in your audience, in order for your research to increase its impact. Kate Villarreal takes on the final chapter, about putting all of the various elements together for a successful strategic communications plan. There are other chapters about blogging (gaining confidence in writing one, and how to maximize the value of what you write), talking to the press (preparing for an interview and how to work with journalists in a mutually beneficial way), and using social media (from what platforms to focus on to how to balance your social media output content for optimal engagement).
Peppered throughout the book are checklists, worksheets, and easy-to-read pieces of advice that can be instantly adapted for use by anyone who has to communicate their analyses to an outside party—not just research institutes. While the processes described in Elevate the Debate are clearly designed by, and used by, people who are very comfortable and experienced in their particular roles in the overall communication plans, the book itself is obviously meant to be used by people who may have never had to write a professional Tweet, or answer a journalist’s questions on camera, or craft a presentation to give in front of a live audience. In a sense, it’s using its own system to communicate with us, the semi-technical public, by giving us an easy-to-apply introductory guide to all kinds of communication-shop tasks, and including additional resources for us to follow if we want more detailed information.
In a time when it is easy to put almost anything in front of an audience and call it “information,” it is critical that well-researched, factually sound material is widely available, in the hands of people who want it, need it, and can make use of it. Elevate the Debate makes it clear that it is our responsibility to make sure our own research gets to where it needs to go, and then delivers an accessible, no-excuses blueprint for how to make it happen.
Elevate the Debate is available now through Amazon, and at your local data-savvy bookseller.
You can visit the event page for our AMA with Jon and Bridget now, in our community conversations area, and join us in the same place on Thursday, February 13 at 10am ET to chat with Jon and Bridget.
