Beyond the Journal Article: Lessons Learned from Sharing Research with Policymakers
Hey, I know one of those names. Me to several. Good morning everyone, we will get started in just a minute. Morning. Good morning, got people coming in. Good morning. Welcome to those joining us. We'll wait just another 30 to 60 seconds here. Welcome, we'll get started in just just less than a minute here. Okay, well we will get started. Welcome, Hello to all of you joining us today for our first Prof2Prof webinar. Beyond the journal article lessons learned from sharing research with policymakers. This webinar is being recorded and we will make the recording available to all of you, as well as some other interested parties who weren't able to attend today after the fact, we'll be offering more of these webinars over the course of the next year, some of which Heidi will be invited back to give and we'll talk more about that. But first, my name is Kristen Slack. I'm a professor at the University of Wisconsin Madison where I've spent the last 20 years of my career, but I'm wearing a different hat today as the creator and founder of Prof2Prof. Which is intended as a higher education ecosystem where we can share, as academics, our teaching and research and administrative and student support tools and resources. So proud to have launched about four years ago now, so we're entering our, our fourth year with the start of this new academic this new fall semester. The platform is free to join if you work inside higher ed or if you're a doctoral student or postdoc, and I'll say a few more words about the platform at the end. Our featured guest is Heidi Normandin. Heidi is the owner of Above the Fray consulting and you're also a former colleague from the UW Madison, where I had the pleasure of working with you in your efforts to translate research to Wisconsin policymakers, so I'll let you introduce yourself in a bit more detail Heidi. Okay. Well good morning everyone or though if you're on the other side of the planet. It'd be good afternoon or good evening. So as Kristi said I'm Heidi Normandin and I, I like to say that I have been building bridges between research and researchers on one side and policymakers, especially state policymakers, on the other side.
And so for 17 years it has been my life to try to understand the culture of each side. And in particular, I've really focused on helping researchers better communicate their research to policymakers through presentations, through meetings, through their written publications. In my experience I've had seven years of experience working at a large national education policy organization called Education Commission of the States. When I was there I worked with Governors, legislators, the state superintendent of education, higher education officials. And what we were doing was trying to help them access and use data to improve education policy, and for 10 years as Kristi mentioned I was working at the University of Wisconsin Madison, and I oversaw three really innovative, interesting programs that worked with legislators and their staff, Governor's office staff and state agency leaders in helping them to really access and use research in their decision making. And I even spend a little time conducting a study to better understand how legislators and how and why legislators use research, so really interesting. I think all told I've personally worked with more than 200 legislators, four governors dozens of other state policymakers, I've worked with more than 120 professors and researchers at the University of Wisconsin campus and probably about 50 different faculty members and researchers from universities around the country. So, this is work that is really exciting to me. So happy to share some of the lessons that I have learned all these years. Right, thank you, Heidi. Just a couple of housekeeping items. The Q and A is open and you are free to submit questions throughout the presentation and we will try to get to as many of them as we can. And hopefully be able to follow up with ones that we aren't able to get to.
So the agenda for today, we're going to talk, initially just about why it's important to do this work and presumably, just by virtue of you joining this webinar, this is something you don't need to be convinced of, but we'll just briefly talk about that as a starting point. And then Heidi is going to talk about some general principles for working with policymakers and government leaders and tips on how to get started. And then we'll sort of wrap up, touching the surface a bit around tips for communicating research with policymakers. So why do this work? And I think before we get started we're going to just do a quick poll, and get a sense of how many of you have had some experience working directly with policymakers and government leaders. So let that go for you all are quick. So we have an almost perfectly normal distribution. So that's great. And those of you who have had some experience or a great deal of experience know, I'm sure have had very varied experience as well. So it's good to, to know that as we as we begin here. So I just want to say from an academic perspective. why this is important to me, and I'll share the results here as I'm talking. You can see how everyone responded Can you see that Heidi? Yeah, okay. You know, those of us in academia know there's this sort of legacy set of metrics of success you know around publications and citation counts and grants and I've just never really been motivated by that set of metrics, you know. I really have always wanted my research to matter. And, and we're not always incentivized or encouraged to, to track the, the varied ways that we do work that that makes a difference for society so I've looked for these ways to make my research, have an impact beyond just the academia over the years and so that, I think, has gravitated me towards people like Heidi who are passionate about this work and I've learned a lot along the way and I've had some misconceptions about the work and we'll talk about that too.
So it's one of the reasons I created Prof2Prof too, I have to say, it's just that I want us to all be better at articulating this kind of work in our, you know tenure dossiers and our promotion files, because it's really important work and at the end of the day I think it's, it's, it's more important than a lot of the other ways we measure success in academia. So Heidi I'll turn it over to you. Why do you think it's important to do this work? Well, I have a lot to say about this, and it's not only because I love this work I'm, again, if you're here you are interested in learning more about this or you are already doing this work and want to, kind of, you know, have a discussion about how to maybe take it further. And just as a clarifying comment. I know some of you are grad students, some of you are faculty, some of you maybe work in government relations or in policy organizations. I'm just going to use a shortcut and call everybody a researcher even though I know that you're all sort of playing different roles, but just for the ease of the conversation today. So, but why do we want to do this work, and I'm going to say something that's really obvious. And we've probably all been saying this a lot in the last couple of years but I think we would all agree the public policies, many public policies could be vastly improved if scientific research were incorporated into discussions and incorporatee into incorporated into actual legislation. And so I think the main reason that you want to do this work, and so for those of you who are on the, you know, faculty side, you know, on top of your teaching and your research is that you can make a real difference. There's a lot of good work to be done. There are not enough people doing this work and there are some people or organizations who are doing this work, who are not doing it well. There's definitely room to grow here, and every one of us can help change public policies for the better.
And the reason I know this is that in all of the projects that I have worked on, we have done a lot of evaluation and research on are we making, are we having an impact. Is what I'm doing on a day to day basis, making change, our elected officials and policymakers actually kind of getting the information that I'm trying to convey or that I'm sharing with them, is it changing public policies? And so in these evaluations over the years I see consistently that doing this translational work really well, building relationships with policymakers and doing it well does move the needle so rest assured that the work that you put in will make a difference. So some of the ways that I know this is that I've done evaluations of programs I put on. I know that policymakers their, their knowledge about that topic, whatever we presented on, it does change. We've had statistically significant increases in knowledge, we know that we can help them understand the unintended consequences of the policies that they're considering, they may not have a comprehensive knowledge base on the issues that they're working on. And so we can play a role in helping them understand the unintended consequences. We can also help them understand which investments, investments in which programs and policies would help them get the greatest return on their investment. So, we have evidence that this kind of work really does make a difference, and I have just a couple of quotes from some legislators that I have worked with. So a special type of policy maker is an elected official, so a senator said that we need good information so that we know we're doing the right thing, they realize that they may not have complete information and they're looking for people like you to help them out. Here's a quote from a representative and she said, "it's really important for me to know that there are people who are experts because, again, there are thousands of pieces of legislation and ideas that are thrown around in this building, every session period, we cannot be experts on all of them.
So knowing that there are people whether at the university or in the private or public sector, who we can bounce those ideas off of, figure out what's working and not working, what has worked elsewhere, is very valuable for us in order to do our jobs well." And then I'll just quickly wrap up and say it's the second reason I think you want to do this work is that it's really gratifying. It's really fulfilling to share your research with policymakers and to see your work and your, your hard work, translated into policy, um, and some researchers, researchers have that I've worked with have even said that doing this work has improved their own research. They've asked better research questions, they've finessed their research methods, all with the goal of perhaps producing more practical or applied research. And so, I will just end by saying that no one will probably ask you to do this work, you have to raise your hand and pick yourself. And it is very rewarding and I'm glad that you're all here and you have either raised your hand or you're looking to raise your hand to participate in this really exciting work. And I'll just leave with two quotes, with researchers who I have worked with over the years, one is a full professor at a very prestigious university, he is, in fact, his role is to help translate research so he does this all the time. And we collaborated on an event and he said "this is one of the most meaningful things I have done. I can point to only two times in my career where I see my research translated to real world policy." So this is exciting. And here's another person who plays a nonpartisan role with the legislature. "If I were to explain my job, I'd say it's all about sharing accurate and unbiased information to policymakers and enjoying the rewards of seeing that information used as a basis of sound decisions." Right. Oh wonderful quotes. Yeah. So I hope that you know I am excited for you to get involved in this type of work or if you're already involved in this work to sort of reinvigorate your energy, you know to towards doing this work.
And so the question, you're probably asking is, how do you do this? So, yeah and I, you know, I've we've talked about this several times over the years that I've known you and I can say that, you know, one of my early reservations about doing this work is that translating your research in sort of a hyper partisan environment. I just wasn't convinced you know that there would be interest from both sides of the political aisles in what I had to say. And I do want to say I have, that was a misconception I mean I've had I've had interest in in my research from both Republicans and Democratic legislators and more traction with one party versus the other in ways that surprised me at different points in my career. So I had to sort of get past that and realize that that in both parties, there are people who are very interested in, in doing the right thing and trying to understand how to make good decisions based on on factual information. Yeah, this is I think this is such an important question to before we even get into the hows, because I'm guessing that this is like the elephant in the room, we're all you know many of you on the call maybe around the room may be thinking, Okay, I'm not so sure that I'm going to get any traction with one side of the aisle versus the other. And I would just suggest, you know, in the 17 years that I've been doing this I've played a strictly non partisan non advocacy role, and I'll talk more about that later but, um, and so I have worked with equal numbers of both parties in all of my, you know all of my projects in my positions and I would just offer this to you. I would say go into this with an open mind, I would say don't assume that you know whether or not a policymaker and I think what we're really talking about here is elected officials, whether they will use research based on whatever party they affiliate with.
They, you know, elected officials in particular but policymakers in general they have to deal with so many issues and problems, every week. They need reliable go to people who are outside of the Capitol building or outside of their, their department. And so they you, you need to help kind of expand their circle. I think I will say that yes my experience has been that it has been slightly easier to get in the offices of Democrats, I think they need less convincing to meet with you. They're just more likely that if you call them up and want to set up a meeting their offices tend to be more likely to be open to meeting with you. They just tend to have a more favorable view of universities so if you're with a university. the doors are going to be easier to open. But I will say that I have had great success, meeting with Republicans as well. There are certainly many Republicans who do use research who value it, especially those who have been around for a long time and were around politics before the extreme partisanship and polarization really took root in the last 10 years I would say, but there are more, I would say that just keep an open mind and and know that there are people on both sides of the aisle, who will want to build a relationship with you and learn more about what you have to offer. I do have a quick story. Right before I ended my most recent position, so this would have been in May, we were working with legislators in Wisconsin and making calls to set up some meetings with them to, to help them get connected with University of Wisconsin Madison, researchers on whatever topic they're working on so we were sort of playing the middle the middleman the middle person between the two, two sides. And so we did meet with a Republican who is quite right leaning, he often, he he's on social media, he has a lot of provocative you know sentiments and beliefs that he shares and so we just weren't sure going in, if he would even meet with us and if so what the meeting would be like.
So we ended up meeting with him. It turned out fine and what ended up happening is that he wanted, he was very interested in the resources we had to offer, wanted to be connected with faculty members in six or seven different policy areas. So that in itself was actually very telling because that's a high number for the program that we were running. So, you know, our expectations were not you know we were surprised even further, he ended up meeting with all of these faculty faculty members with whom we matched him and introduced him, that also that does not happen whether you're Democrat or Republican. These matches that these connections that we would make would not often result in the legislative office actually following up and scheduling a meeting, and he actually did, so it it just it put an exclamation point or put a highlighter on the fact that you just don't know what you're going to get when you walk in, so keep an open mind. Exciting. Yeah, and just, you know, I think there's different ways to get started doing this and I know you'll, you'll, you'll share your tips on this but for, for my own journey, you know it, there's sort of a longer time horizon that I invested in and then there are these moments, you know where you can jump in, and I've experienced connections with policymakers in both of those scenarios. But when I started my academic career I offered to sit on committees in in a state agency that was relevant to my work, and really just sort of built capital, over the years, with that state agency, led to involvement with another state agency, so that I was part of these discussions that were going on around policy and when people needed the research perspective, I was in a position to help facilitate that. And so I became kind of a go-to person over the years for a lot of questions that even the agency executives had. And the trust was built. Then there's been other times where something happens in society, in the world, locally, where it's clear your research is really relevant, and you can find ways to bring that to bear on the discussion that is going on at the moment, but it does start with a lot of relationship building.
So, you can take it from there, Heidi. Yes, that's so true so. And for those of you who just joined us welcome, we are getting started talking about how to start working with policymakers and sharing your research. If you have any questions or comments or thoughts, please put them into the Q and A so there's a button at the bottom of your screen called Q and A, so go ahead and, and we will take some of those as we go on and then we'll have time at the very end to answer some questions and share some of your thoughts so. So before I get started about how you want to get involved, I, I, for those of you who have not gotten involved so that was about, I think, 20 or 25% of you on the call is that, rest assured that you do not have to be an expert in everything or in your field, you know the literature around the area that you specialize in, that is enough. Um, I have worked with, you know, first year assistant professors who had a very niche area of expertise. They were able to offer very valuable research based information to policymakers. So think about what are the findings from your research or from your field, from the literature that you would want to share with policymakers and move forward with that it's, it's good enough, you're going to be helpful that way. So the first question in terms of thinking about how to become involved or how to up level your involvement if you're already working with policymakers some, which most of you are, is that this is a question that I think is really important that nobody is talking about is, every organization and every person says that they are going to, they are going to play a non partisan role in Policymaking, they are going to be a nonpartisan contributor.
That means nothing anymore. The Urban Institute is nonpartisan, the American Enterprise Institute is nonpartisan. It just doesn't, it doesn't say anything anymore. I think we have to make a decision about are you going to be an advocate, or are you going to be an educator in the nonpartisan in the policy space, so what kind of contribution do you want to make? There are pros and cons to each but it's just imperative that you know what role you're already playing, or what role you would like to play. And so here's an example. So an advocate is somebody who's an advocate and yes there are lots of faculty members and researchers who are advocates, even though they do, you know, unbiased research. So an advocate would walk into a conversation and you would have like a specific policy outcome or a specific policy option, or a best outcome in mind when you walked into a meeting or when you were presenting to a policymaker group. So like you're the energy like your, I call it, you come from energy, you're sort of consciously trying to shape and influence the debate in a line of preconceived ideas or principles that you have decided are the best route to go. So if you're writing op eds. If you are blogging, you're probably an advocate, you've taken the literature and formed conclusions about about, about what should be done next with it. Now the educational approach on the other hand, is what, like the in-house nonpartisan legislative service agencies do. So each legislature has sort of in-house nonpartisan staff that just stay on for a long time, It doesn't matter what party's in office, office, and their goal is to inform the policy debate, you clarify the potential consequences. You lay out policy alternatives. You talk about the research in a way that is answering their specific questions rather than coming in with a list of recommendations or ideas about how to move forward. You come in with key findings from the research you pause and you then ask the person you're talking to or presenting to, what are they most interested in doing, what are their goals and then you respond and say well research would suggest this or this is what the research would say to help inform your thinking on this topic.
So as an example, if you're kind of presenting, if you're playing the role of just presenting the literature, you're not giving your personal opinion, you're probably playing the role of an educator. And you can be an advocate in one way and that is advocating for the use of research in policymaking so like that is what you're, you're trying to push is is not a specific policy option, but just pushing the idea that hey scientific research has a lot say, and can help make better public policies. Now, the role that you want to play or that you are playing. There's no right or wrong answer, we need both actors in the policy world. It really depends on your personality, some people are really fiery they have an activist energy they, that's really a role that they want to play. Great, go ahead, run with it. Other people tend to be you know a little bit you know they can take a step back, they can kind of see the whole view, they can see the long view and maybe they want to play, you want to play more of an educational role so you know it really depends on your personality, your preference, even the department that you are in. So if you're on faculty or a student, you know your department might also have a kind of a personality or a culture with expectations about what role you play. I just think it's really important for us at the start when you're getting into this game or you're already in it. What role are you playing? And I want to say something kind of bold, is that you cannot play both roles, so this is why it's so important to identify where you are, where you want to be. Policymakers, especially, elected officials, they are always sniffing you out. They want to know what side you are on whether it's a particular issue, or your party.
I have heard so many legislators when they talk about the quality assessing like how how reliable is a piece of information or research, they will very often say like, yeah, I look to see who funded the research project, I look to see you know what groups they're a part of. They are constantly assessing your credibility as an individual that so they are sort of checking you out in the background, checking out your papers. And so, they are going to determine whether you're playing an advocate or an educator role, so it's just very important for you to kind of know where you where you stand and, and, and move forward from that. So, yeah, I think I just like to add to, you know, I think there can be. You can be an advocate, you know for some sort of policy solution, but your approach to communicating with policymakers, you know matters. And so, as you develop your research agenda and learn more about the questions you're asking your thinking on that topic will evolve and you will get and have opinions about what the right policy option or outcome should be. And what I had to try to, what I what I learned early on in working with different policymakers and government leaders is that there's a difference between what causes some problem or some issue, and what people think causes some problem or issue. And so I had to sort of realize like where people were thinking the root causes were coming from and have this conversation about the science and the research to give a broader picture of what actually is the root cause, you know, or or the set of root causes and what, and sometimes it's imperfect information. and what and sometimes it's imperfect information. But you, you are dealing with people who have opinions that aren't necessarily formed by the research, they're just based on their belief systems and and past experiences. But people are open to changing their minds, not everyone. And I've seen that happen in in interactions that I've had over the years, with different kinds of politicians.
Yeah, I think that's so true I think that when you take the educational approach as the approach, that's the choice I made in my career, is that you do just recognize that policymakers, especially elected officials. They have constrained budgets that they're working on. they have constituents that they have to respond to. They have their personal values their personal experiences, party expectations. There are many factors that go into the ultimate decisions they make, too, when they're discussing discussing legislation or voting on something. But the more work we can do as researchers to inform their thinking and that discussion, it really does make a difference. There is one question that maybe I can quickly address and that is about, Could I speak a little bit more about how I approached agencies to join boards and advisory committees and I will say is that, you know, as a brand new professor, you know back in early 2000. I was primarily interested in collaborating with the Department of Children and Families here in Wisconsin, and they have a cycle of federal reviews that they go through every seven or eight years that does require you know some analysis, and I joined the faculty at a time where that new cycle of review was just starting again. So I reached out to the folks at DCF that were sort of managing that process and just offered to be part of whatever committee or whatever advisory group they were forming, and they were absolutely appreciative about that offer and took me up on it. And that sort of formed the basis of lots of relationships within the department as time went on, and I would then be available to them if they had questions, if they were writing like a request for proposals and they needed some information on on research on a particular topic and I would pull some of that together. So, it did take some time and it was uncompensated time for the most part, but it really paid off in terms of what happened later in my career.
To talk to people about about policy solutions that were sometimes even adopted. Yeah, that's great. I think that kind of falls into the second point I wanted to make about how to go about getting started working with policymakers or just rethinking your approach to working with policymakers is, I think it's really important to get clear on who is a policy maker. And who would be the best fit for the research that you're doing or the information you want to share with them. So there are elected officials at the local, state and federal level, there are school boards, there are state agencies you know as Kristi mentioned she had worked with at the beginning, you're thinking about your research. It's really important to target the right policy maker and I hear a lot of researchers who will just lump policymakers together and either talk about their frustrations, or you know feel like they're not making any progress. It could be that you're just not targeting the right person who can take action on your research so really be deliberate about about who you want to work with. Like an example would be like in homelessness policy, you know the feds, and the local governments tend to be much more active than state government, there's a lot of money that goes directly from the federal government to counties and communities. And so, digging a little bit deeper if that's kind of the research that you do, you may want to spend more time at the local county level, versus with your state legislators, and so that will make the best use of your time and also help you see results. And then the third how to, how to get started working with policymakers, is, is, we should focus on not disseminating information to policymakers, but on building relationships with them as Kristi just mentioned. And the question is, it can be hard to answer is like how do you even get started? I don't know where to begin. And I have a few ideas for you, that you know may or may not be helpful for you but here are five I think I have five different ideas.
County government, a legislative district a congressional district set up a meeting with them. Go in talk with the staff, talk with the elected official, share your research, you know, think about one finding or one surprising piece of information that they may want to know about your topic that the area that you research, and just meet with them kind of cut your teeth on your own elected officials, you are a constituent, they are very happy to meet with their constituents. Um. Another way to begin a relationship is to start to follow the committees of the city council, county or state government legislative bodies that that work on issues that you also work on, so just start following those committee meetings, whether you're actually watching the YouTube videos, going to them live or just reading summaries, you could start to see who are the, the, the actors, like the main actors like who are the main elected officials who are seem to really be taking the lead on these issues, who are the experts that they are calling in to give testimony, they will often call in government leaders, you know the the County Human Services Director might come in and talk to the county commissioners or the state department, health department secretary may come in and talk with the health committee a lot and so kind of see who are the key actors and then those can be people that you can approach and set up a meeting with. Um, you can ask people in your network, whether it's friends or families or business leaders in your community. Who do they know who is a policy maker and ask them to make introductions for you. Those warm introductions those warm handoffs are, it's easier for us to kind of reach out to these policymakers if we've had an introduction from somebody that they know, if you're at a university, you could ask your Government Relations Office, most campuses have one.
So ask them for the names of policymakers, who they would recommend that you connect with. They're going to not only be able to recommend people who have your, share your, your interest in a certain topic or policy issue. They're also going to be able to give you insight or information about who is probably more open to working with, with researchers, so that can be an easier way to get started or to expand your network of policymakers is to get those insider get that insider information and those introductions. And then the final way that you can get started is to look for and work with intermediary organizations. So these are organizations that work with policymakers on a day to day basis. They. So one of the programs that I worked with at UW Madison is called the Family Impact Seminars, 20 states around the country are doing these same seminars, they are often looking for speakers, so you can look to see if your university has a family impact seminar site and introduce yourself and perhaps they have a space for you in their upcoming seminar. The League of Women Voters works with elected officials, in particular policy makers. There are lots of think tanks that put on events that work with policymakers on a day to day basis, just kind of keep your eyes out and you're going to start to see these organizations that perhaps you could plug into, they've already done the legwork, they have the networks, they have the know how of working with policymakers. And so you can often put forth your name to perhaps be a speaker at a breakout session, to be a resource for their staff will then share your research with policymakers, so you'll be indirectly working with policymakers. They may even have a need to, you know, to to want to connect, you know, researchers with policymakers so knowing that you're out there. And that you're raising your hand and are willing to be a resource for them. So, so those are just some ideas if you don't know where to start, that'll get you started if you have, if you're already doing this work maybe that'll prompt some ideas for how you might want to expand your work in the policy making space.
So those are just three. Three what you know, three considerations for how to get started is thinking about what role you want to play, an advocate or an educator, thinking about which policy maker type is best for the research that you do, and then thinking about how to actually start building those relationships. Right, Thank you. The one other question came in, before we move to the third part of this presentation, this webinar, universities don't tend to recognize or appreciate the important work that we're discussing how would we suggest getting acknowledgement or space to do this work. So, this is a really great question, and it's definitely something I've struggled with during my career. One thing I do want to say, though, that if we're ever going to sort of change the culture around what counts in academia, we have to start talking about it and and including it you know in our materials that are visible to our review committees, to the general public. You know, there are so many things I have done over the years that don't show up on my CV, but they actually involved having more of a scholarly impact than I think my, you know, paywalled publications have had or my presentations at conferences with other academics. academics. So talking about it and including it in your materials and your CV. In your tenure dossiers in your annual activities reports and talking about the time it takes to build these relationships so that, you know, more and more people on your faculty or on your, in your university, understand not only the importance of this work but the investment that needs to happen. Universities are really quick to celebrate this kind of scholarly impact when it happens, and have it in the news and, you know, write stories about it. But don't always have the infrastructure or the or the will around supporting the investment that needs to go into it, so I think it does take some education on our part and pushing on our part to make sure that we make that case.
Yeah, and I know the WT Grant foundation is also doing some work to try to change the culture of what is valued in academia. So they are really pushing for making this work count towards tenure, so if anyone's interested, that may be another resource you want to check out. Right. I think we can move to taking a slightly deeper dive about how to talk to or communicate with policymakers Yes, so. in the door, now you have a meeting with a policy maker, or you have been asked to present to policymakers or maybe you want to, you know, put together a great issue brief or some sort of publication to share with policymakers. And so there's kind of the, now what? And I just wanted to share some high level lessons that I've learned, some, some ways of doing, sort of look some ways of communicating with policymakers that I have found to be really effective. So I've sort of broken it out into speaking with policymakers and writing for policymakers, There's a lot of overlap. But I will start with speaking. So if you are meeting with a policy maker one on one or in a small group, or if you've been asked to present, it is essential that you pick 1 to 3 points that you want them to remember and that will serve as sort of your through line during your conversation or in your presentation. So sit down and think about what are the three takeaways I want them to have when we end our time together? Use those takeaways and reverse engineer your talking points. That will help you simplify, it's especially if you're in academia, we can get very bogged down in the details in long sentences in explaining every little nuance, talking about limitations hedging our bets, not moving, you know not talking beyond what the literature the research says so. You have to loosen up on that a little bit and you need to flip your perspective and think about if I'm sitting at the other side of that table or if I'm in, in that seat in the audience, what do you want them to remember as they walk out the door? The other point when you're talking with policymakers, and this is especially true when you're talking with elected officials who are just absorbing mounds of information each day is that this is going to be new information to them.
This is not, you're not at a conference of your peers. This is a lay audience. So you want to remember to include it to add information very slowly and bring in concepts one by one don't stack on a bunch of concepts and lingo in one sentence or in one slide you need to introduce things slowly and build things up in a foundation. And because this method of communication takes more time, you will inherently need to cut down the number of points that you're making which is why I said pick 1 to 3 main points you want to make. Kristi mentioned this earlier that, she is spot on, is that you want to start with, it's often really good to start by presenting the scope of the problem. How many people you know like basic definitions about what the problem is. If you are working on homelessness, for example, that's your area. How many people are homeless in your state or in their district? Are the numbers trending upward or down? They love to know trend information. They love to know data that's specific to their district or to their constituents. So if you're meeting with, let's say you're presenting to state legislators, narrowing down your data to the state rather than national data, they will, their ears perk up. So the more you can kind of customize the data that you're presenting, and sharing the scope of the problem with them. You're already off to a great start. A couple of tips if you're presenting in particular. A couple of tips if you're presenting in particular. So when I have coached. I've had, I've worked with probably 50 different researchers from around the country at the events that I've put on for Wisconsin legislators and over and over again some of the things that I say are one concept on each slide, keep it really simple.
You want titles of your slides that are very explanatory and basic. Don't make them nebulous or vague. If you were talking about how many people are homeless, your slide title should say, how many people are homeless in Wisconsin, or something like that, keep it very obvious. Remove extraneous information from your slides, especially from any tables or charts that you have. And I'm talking about like removing extraneous grid lines and making your access labels super super clear, you know, trying to remove as many, you know, as you know, many details as possible to create a sleek. Think of Steve Jobs what would Steve Jobs do when presenting data on a slide. There's a great person. He's a staff member of the Urban Institute, his name is john Schwabish. He has some great resources on data visualization, so how to present your data in a way that's compelling and clear for a lay audience. So look into john Schwabish if you want more information on this. I always say don't pull graphics from journal articles. Like we'll do this if it's not our research and we want to pull, try to recreate the graph or the table, rather than pulling something from a journal article because they are so confusing. And don't use lingo unless it's widely known. I literally say spell out everything, even if it is widely known, you don't want to leave anybody in the room behind and especially if you're talking to a crowd of elected officials, they are going to be embarrassed to ask you really simple things, so don't put them in the position where they won't know what you're talking about. And then finally, share cost benefit information or cost effectiveness information if you have it, they love that information. It helps them prioritize if they know that they will get a big return on an investment, such as with early childhood programs, they are more likely to listen to the research and think about how can they use that information, because if they can get a lot of bang for their buck, they're going to look into it.
And finally, I go on to just a few points of writing for policymakers, but when you're talking, either in a meeting or in a presentation with policymakers, I just like to throw this quickly in. Address them with their formal title, especially if they are an elected official, so address them as representative or senator or council member, or secretary, even if you don't know their last name or you you don't know how to pronounce it, just call them by their formal title it, it kind of gives them respect and they will really appreciate that. Okay, yeah. And I just I just have a couple of points for writing for policymakers, a lot of the same points for speaking and presenting to policymakers apply. but I have found that it is really true, that one or two page issue briefs are really best. Try your hardest to get whatever you are presenting on into one or two pages that just means you're going to have one or two charts or graphics, you're going to have a few headlines and very succinct text. This is not a journal article. You don't want to bury your main points at the very end, you're not leading up to your conclusion in your communication with policymakers. You state your objective your, your findings, your takeaways up front and then you repeat them at the end. Don't go too deep into methods, in fact they don't really care about methods, they don't necessarily, especially if they're elected officials, they don't care about the individual researchers names, who did this landmark study. Just talk about that there was a landmark study done that, that we you know we got a lot of information from, it's a strong study and here's what they found. And then the final thing I will say is that just in your slides, in your issue briefs, use very catchy titles and headings.
You know you want to stay away from boring academic titles. Questions can often be very good headings, so if you're doing an issue brief. I like to use questions. So one of the questions that I had in a recent issue brief for Wisconsin policymakers was, how was home visiting administered in Wisconsin, and they know that if they scan that issue brief that they can BAM find the information to answer that question. So those are some tips for writing and speaking to and meeting with policymakers, and I'll actually share the one page brief that you made me create when I asked to work with you and made me hone it down from however many pages, it was when we share the video and we'll also point you to some other links. And I want to point out that in the chat. Clark Peters shared a link to the Op Ed Project that also has some great trainings for people interested in communicating their science through that approach as well. There is another question that came in. So, what would you say, Heidi, about doing this kind of work as, what are the opportunities for PhDs working outside of an academic research environment, are there any advantages or disadvantages to doing this kind of work, external or internal to academia? I would say, I mean, if this is something that interests you, I think that there's that personal gratification, that what you are doing, you know the research that you were doing, you know if you're working in a think tank or if you're working in a consulting role and expanding the reach that you have with the research that you're doing. It's very personally gratifying. But I think it's also just on a societal level it's so important that more and more researchers get involved in the policy process. And so whether or not you're working with a policy organization that's already doing this work I mean if you're interested in it. There are many roles in policy organizations for people with PhDs, to play this role I mean you you will, there's there's abundant opportunities.
So I would say yes, go for it. Right. I also just want to give two quick examples of how this work has, for lack of a better term, paid off you know, in terms of my desire to have an impact with respect to policy, and one is you know all those years I spent being available, you know to this particular state agency to answer questions about what is the research say on x or y or z, eventually it got to a point where the agency was willing to just fund a doctoral student for me every year to help answer those kinds of questions by coming up with briefs, you know, that summarize the literature on various topics they were interested in. So I have this sort of way of funding now for doctoral students using this mechanism. And it's a win win for everybody. Because there's practical experience that the doctoral students get doing this work with policymakers directly, the policymakers get the research and and I'm not scrambling for funding every year for for my doctoral students. And the other brief story I just wanted to tell is, you know, one of the policy issues I worked on has, had been working on, is how to prevent child maltreatment using economic supports. It, and it's there's a whole sort of spiel I would give on that topic if there were more time. It's there's a whole sort of spiel I would give on that topic if there were more time. But when, when my colleague Lonnie Berger and I actually had an intervention to suggest in this, in this policy arena, it was a Republican administration, and they weren't interested in, simply providing money to families to help with their economic stressors, but they were very interested in supporting that intervention if we added a component around personal responsibility, and the component we added was just simply having a caseworker be available to help families navigate social welfare benefits systems, answer questions about what's the best strategy for paying bills when you don't have enough to pay them all.
And that was a component that was very powerful in the intervention but it met the needs of the administration that was currently in office. It was, it enabled us to go forward with that with that policy solution for lack of a better word, you know. That's a great. And I think that the thing is, that if you do this work I think the goal should be or the thought should be that you're in this for the long haul. It takes time to build these relationships, it takes takes time to establish a reputation. But once you have that you're golden and it's, it is just so rewarding. I love working with policymakers, they are such interesting people. They are approachable, especially elected officials. They are people people, they love to gather information, they love to meet people, I had a legislator once tell me. "I want to be able to go to a cocktail party and share a piece of information so I look like the smartest guy in the room." So any role that you can play and helping them do that. and I know that Greg in the chat. Hi, Greg. This is the you, um, you know he's not saying exactly this but there is something to be said for, you know, the consistent work with, with elected officials and policymakers in general over time. I mean you want them to be the hero of the story so that they can take the information you provide and run with it. But knowing that you're the go to resource is, is really gratifying and it's a rare thing so I just encourage everybody on the call to continue doing the great work you're doing and if you haven't jumped in yet, jump in. Right. In the last few minutes I was hoping you'd just say a little more about your Above the Fray consulting. In June, I'm now living in another state so I couldn't stay on with my job but I just love this work so much so I started my own consulting group, you know, Above the Fray consulting. And so I work with individual researchers, or groups of researchers, or organizations that want to share their research with policymakers at all levels, whether it's local state or federal, so I help with writing projects, presentations, and overall just strategies for communicating with or building relationships with policymakers.
I think a lot of grants nowadays, especially federal grants, are requiring that your proposals include a piece for dissemination. So I think that's kind of where I can play a role in either putting together the proposal or helping you, you know, for the deliverables of your, your grant projects, and also working with, with individuals and organizations who just want to do this work whether or not they're being encouraged to do it by their funder, so. Great, thank you. And I'll just take the last minute here to say a few more words about Prof2Prof. So again, you know, my motivation for creating Prof2Prof came out of my frustration, you know with the fact that the kinds of work, the kinds of things I love to do in this realm weren't necessarily incentivized or rewarded in inside academia. And I wanted to create a space, you know where I could talk about the full range of work that I did as an academic that extended well beyond just a publication, you know, or even a report. So you can use Prof2Prof as a landing page for talking about the work that you do in this realm. You have the option of turning on a public facing profile on Prof2Prof and sharing, while you may not be able to share your actual research articles depending on the copyright you're under, You can talk about your research, and offer the sort of one page takeaways, you know, of your research that could, can be made available to anyone. And also just talk about the various activities you're involved in with respect to your service work that, service does count in academia and this is often characterized as service work. So how do we make it come to life, rather than just listing on our CV that we sat on a committee? So you can use Prof2Prof in a number of ways to I think help change the culture around what counts in academia and that's my that's my hope.
One of my hopes for the site. Excellent. I know we had a poll we wanted to, yes you all are interested in learning more about some of these topics that we kept at a high level at today, so I can, I can launch it. Oh, I just got it. Okay, yeah, I just launched it. Yeah, so this was just sort of a broader overview today but Heidi is well positioned to dive deeper into a number of different topics and so we're interested to just know if you have an interest in any of these topics we have up here, so take a few seconds to get your feedback on that. Yeah. And while we're doing the poll I just want to say I'm just so excited to see so many people interested in doing this work, or who are already doing this work, it's a, it's a playground that I love to play in, so it's it's exciting to, I think, see this, these, this type of effort grow and grow. I think that when I started doing this work in 2000, the whole term evidence based policymaking or evidence informed policy making was pretty new at the time. Now everybody's throwing it around, and so it's just been really exciting to kind of see the arc of how this work has, has evolved over the years and how we've been able to share and really scale up the work that we're doing and up level our efforts so that we are, that we are making the most out of the limited time that we all have to do this work on top of all of our other duties, so many responsibilities. So right so there's almost a perfectly even distribution of interest so that's great you might, you might have four more of these to do. So thank you everyone for coming, like we said this is being recorded and we will communicate with you how you can access that recording and any other material we think would be useful to you following, give us a couple days to get that together, and we'll be sure to reach out to you and and share that information. So thank you all for coming. And thank you, Heidi for sharing your wisdom.
Well thank you, Kristi for Prof2Prof and working with you over the last couple of years has been delightful.
And so for 17 years it has been my life to try to understand the culture of each side. And in particular, I've really focused on helping researchers better communicate their research to policymakers through presentations, through meetings, through their written publications. In my experience I've had seven years of experience working at a large national education policy organization called Education Commission of the States. When I was there I worked with Governors, legislators, the state superintendent of education, higher education officials. And what we were doing was trying to help them access and use data to improve education policy, and for 10 years as Kristi mentioned I was working at the University of Wisconsin Madison, and I oversaw three really innovative, interesting programs that worked with legislators and their staff, Governor's office staff and state agency leaders in helping them to really access and use research in their decision making. And I even spend a little time conducting a study to better understand how legislators and how and why legislators use research, so really interesting. I think all told I've personally worked with more than 200 legislators, four governors dozens of other state policymakers, I've worked with more than 120 professors and researchers at the University of Wisconsin campus and probably about 50 different faculty members and researchers from universities around the country. So, this is work that is really exciting to me. So happy to share some of the lessons that I have learned all these years. Right, thank you, Heidi. Just a couple of housekeeping items. The Q and A is open and you are free to submit questions throughout the presentation and we will try to get to as many of them as we can. And hopefully be able to follow up with ones that we aren't able to get to.
So the agenda for today, we're going to talk, initially just about why it's important to do this work and presumably, just by virtue of you joining this webinar, this is something you don't need to be convinced of, but we'll just briefly talk about that as a starting point. And then Heidi is going to talk about some general principles for working with policymakers and government leaders and tips on how to get started. And then we'll sort of wrap up, touching the surface a bit around tips for communicating research with policymakers. So why do this work? And I think before we get started we're going to just do a quick poll, and get a sense of how many of you have had some experience working directly with policymakers and government leaders. So let that go for you all are quick. So we have an almost perfectly normal distribution. So that's great. And those of you who have had some experience or a great deal of experience know, I'm sure have had very varied experience as well. So it's good to, to know that as we as we begin here. So I just want to say from an academic perspective. why this is important to me, and I'll share the results here as I'm talking. You can see how everyone responded Can you see that Heidi? Yeah, okay. You know, those of us in academia know there's this sort of legacy set of metrics of success you know around publications and citation counts and grants and I've just never really been motivated by that set of metrics, you know. I really have always wanted my research to matter. And, and we're not always incentivized or encouraged to, to track the, the varied ways that we do work that that makes a difference for society so I've looked for these ways to make my research, have an impact beyond just the academia over the years and so that, I think, has gravitated me towards people like Heidi who are passionate about this work and I've learned a lot along the way and I've had some misconceptions about the work and we'll talk about that too.
So it's one of the reasons I created Prof2Prof too, I have to say, it's just that I want us to all be better at articulating this kind of work in our, you know tenure dossiers and our promotion files, because it's really important work and at the end of the day I think it's, it's, it's more important than a lot of the other ways we measure success in academia. So Heidi I'll turn it over to you. Why do you think it's important to do this work? Well, I have a lot to say about this, and it's not only because I love this work I'm, again, if you're here you are interested in learning more about this or you are already doing this work and want to, kind of, you know, have a discussion about how to maybe take it further. And just as a clarifying comment. I know some of you are grad students, some of you are faculty, some of you maybe work in government relations or in policy organizations. I'm just going to use a shortcut and call everybody a researcher even though I know that you're all sort of playing different roles, but just for the ease of the conversation today. So, but why do we want to do this work, and I'm going to say something that's really obvious. And we've probably all been saying this a lot in the last couple of years but I think we would all agree the public policies, many public policies could be vastly improved if scientific research were incorporated into discussions and incorporatee into incorporated into actual legislation. And so I think the main reason that you want to do this work, and so for those of you who are on the, you know, faculty side, you know, on top of your teaching and your research is that you can make a real difference. There's a lot of good work to be done. There are not enough people doing this work and there are some people or organizations who are doing this work, who are not doing it well. There's definitely room to grow here, and every one of us can help change public policies for the better.
And the reason I know this is that in all of the projects that I have worked on, we have done a lot of evaluation and research on are we making, are we having an impact. Is what I'm doing on a day to day basis, making change, our elected officials and policymakers actually kind of getting the information that I'm trying to convey or that I'm sharing with them, is it changing public policies? And so in these evaluations over the years I see consistently that doing this translational work really well, building relationships with policymakers and doing it well does move the needle so rest assured that the work that you put in will make a difference. So some of the ways that I know this is that I've done evaluations of programs I put on. I know that policymakers their, their knowledge about that topic, whatever we presented on, it does change. We've had statistically significant increases in knowledge, we know that we can help them understand the unintended consequences of the policies that they're considering, they may not have a comprehensive knowledge base on the issues that they're working on. And so we can play a role in helping them understand the unintended consequences. We can also help them understand which investments, investments in which programs and policies would help them get the greatest return on their investment. So, we have evidence that this kind of work really does make a difference, and I have just a couple of quotes from some legislators that I have worked with. So a special type of policy maker is an elected official, so a senator said that we need good information so that we know we're doing the right thing, they realize that they may not have complete information and they're looking for people like you to help them out. Here's a quote from a representative and she said, "it's really important for me to know that there are people who are experts because, again, there are thousands of pieces of legislation and ideas that are thrown around in this building, every session period, we cannot be experts on all of them.
So knowing that there are people whether at the university or in the private or public sector, who we can bounce those ideas off of, figure out what's working and not working, what has worked elsewhere, is very valuable for us in order to do our jobs well." And then I'll just quickly wrap up and say it's the second reason I think you want to do this work is that it's really gratifying. It's really fulfilling to share your research with policymakers and to see your work and your, your hard work, translated into policy, um, and some researchers, researchers have that I've worked with have even said that doing this work has improved their own research. They've asked better research questions, they've finessed their research methods, all with the goal of perhaps producing more practical or applied research. And so, I will just end by saying that no one will probably ask you to do this work, you have to raise your hand and pick yourself. And it is very rewarding and I'm glad that you're all here and you have either raised your hand or you're looking to raise your hand to participate in this really exciting work. And I'll just leave with two quotes, with researchers who I have worked with over the years, one is a full professor at a very prestigious university, he is, in fact, his role is to help translate research so he does this all the time. And we collaborated on an event and he said "this is one of the most meaningful things I have done. I can point to only two times in my career where I see my research translated to real world policy." So this is exciting. And here's another person who plays a nonpartisan role with the legislature. "If I were to explain my job, I'd say it's all about sharing accurate and unbiased information to policymakers and enjoying the rewards of seeing that information used as a basis of sound decisions." Right. Oh wonderful quotes. Yeah. So I hope that you know I am excited for you to get involved in this type of work or if you're already involved in this work to sort of reinvigorate your energy, you know to towards doing this work.
And so the question, you're probably asking is, how do you do this? So, yeah and I, you know, I've we've talked about this several times over the years that I've known you and I can say that, you know, one of my early reservations about doing this work is that translating your research in sort of a hyper partisan environment. I just wasn't convinced you know that there would be interest from both sides of the political aisles in what I had to say. And I do want to say I have, that was a misconception I mean I've had I've had interest in in my research from both Republicans and Democratic legislators and more traction with one party versus the other in ways that surprised me at different points in my career. So I had to sort of get past that and realize that that in both parties, there are people who are very interested in, in doing the right thing and trying to understand how to make good decisions based on on factual information. Yeah, this is I think this is such an important question to before we even get into the hows, because I'm guessing that this is like the elephant in the room, we're all you know many of you on the call maybe around the room may be thinking, Okay, I'm not so sure that I'm going to get any traction with one side of the aisle versus the other. And I would just suggest, you know, in the 17 years that I've been doing this I've played a strictly non partisan non advocacy role, and I'll talk more about that later but, um, and so I have worked with equal numbers of both parties in all of my, you know all of my projects in my positions and I would just offer this to you. I would say go into this with an open mind, I would say don't assume that you know whether or not a policymaker and I think what we're really talking about here is elected officials, whether they will use research based on whatever party they affiliate with.
They, you know, elected officials in particular but policymakers in general they have to deal with so many issues and problems, every week. They need reliable go to people who are outside of the Capitol building or outside of their, their department. And so they you, you need to help kind of expand their circle. I think I will say that yes my experience has been that it has been slightly easier to get in the offices of Democrats, I think they need less convincing to meet with you. They're just more likely that if you call them up and want to set up a meeting their offices tend to be more likely to be open to meeting with you. They just tend to have a more favorable view of universities so if you're with a university. the doors are going to be easier to open. But I will say that I have had great success, meeting with Republicans as well. There are certainly many Republicans who do use research who value it, especially those who have been around for a long time and were around politics before the extreme partisanship and polarization really took root in the last 10 years I would say, but there are more, I would say that just keep an open mind and and know that there are people on both sides of the aisle, who will want to build a relationship with you and learn more about what you have to offer. I do have a quick story. Right before I ended my most recent position, so this would have been in May, we were working with legislators in Wisconsin and making calls to set up some meetings with them to, to help them get connected with University of Wisconsin Madison, researchers on whatever topic they're working on so we were sort of playing the middle the middleman the middle person between the two, two sides. And so we did meet with a Republican who is quite right leaning, he often, he he's on social media, he has a lot of provocative you know sentiments and beliefs that he shares and so we just weren't sure going in, if he would even meet with us and if so what the meeting would be like.
So we ended up meeting with him. It turned out fine and what ended up happening is that he wanted, he was very interested in the resources we had to offer, wanted to be connected with faculty members in six or seven different policy areas. So that in itself was actually very telling because that's a high number for the program that we were running. So, you know, our expectations were not you know we were surprised even further, he ended up meeting with all of these faculty faculty members with whom we matched him and introduced him, that also that does not happen whether you're Democrat or Republican. These matches that these connections that we would make would not often result in the legislative office actually following up and scheduling a meeting, and he actually did, so it it just it put an exclamation point or put a highlighter on the fact that you just don't know what you're going to get when you walk in, so keep an open mind. Exciting. Yeah, and just, you know, I think there's different ways to get started doing this and I know you'll, you'll, you'll share your tips on this but for, for my own journey, you know it, there's sort of a longer time horizon that I invested in and then there are these moments, you know where you can jump in, and I've experienced connections with policymakers in both of those scenarios. But when I started my academic career I offered to sit on committees in in a state agency that was relevant to my work, and really just sort of built capital, over the years, with that state agency, led to involvement with another state agency, so that I was part of these discussions that were going on around policy and when people needed the research perspective, I was in a position to help facilitate that. And so I became kind of a go-to person over the years for a lot of questions that even the agency executives had. And the trust was built. Then there's been other times where something happens in society, in the world, locally, where it's clear your research is really relevant, and you can find ways to bring that to bear on the discussion that is going on at the moment, but it does start with a lot of relationship building.
So, you can take it from there, Heidi. Yes, that's so true so. And for those of you who just joined us welcome, we are getting started talking about how to start working with policymakers and sharing your research. If you have any questions or comments or thoughts, please put them into the Q and A so there's a button at the bottom of your screen called Q and A, so go ahead and, and we will take some of those as we go on and then we'll have time at the very end to answer some questions and share some of your thoughts so. So before I get started about how you want to get involved, I, I, for those of you who have not gotten involved so that was about, I think, 20 or 25% of you on the call is that, rest assured that you do not have to be an expert in everything or in your field, you know the literature around the area that you specialize in, that is enough. Um, I have worked with, you know, first year assistant professors who had a very niche area of expertise. They were able to offer very valuable research based information to policymakers. So think about what are the findings from your research or from your field, from the literature that you would want to share with policymakers and move forward with that it's, it's good enough, you're going to be helpful that way. So the first question in terms of thinking about how to become involved or how to up level your involvement if you're already working with policymakers some, which most of you are, is that this is a question that I think is really important that nobody is talking about is, every organization and every person says that they are going to, they are going to play a non partisan role in Policymaking, they are going to be a nonpartisan contributor.
That means nothing anymore. The Urban Institute is nonpartisan, the American Enterprise Institute is nonpartisan. It just doesn't, it doesn't say anything anymore. I think we have to make a decision about are you going to be an advocate, or are you going to be an educator in the nonpartisan in the policy space, so what kind of contribution do you want to make? There are pros and cons to each but it's just imperative that you know what role you're already playing, or what role you would like to play. And so here's an example. So an advocate is somebody who's an advocate and yes there are lots of faculty members and researchers who are advocates, even though they do, you know, unbiased research. So an advocate would walk into a conversation and you would have like a specific policy outcome or a specific policy option, or a best outcome in mind when you walked into a meeting or when you were presenting to a policymaker group. So like you're the energy like your, I call it, you come from energy, you're sort of consciously trying to shape and influence the debate in a line of preconceived ideas or principles that you have decided are the best route to go. So if you're writing op eds. If you are blogging, you're probably an advocate, you've taken the literature and formed conclusions about about, about what should be done next with it. Now the educational approach on the other hand, is what, like the in-house nonpartisan legislative service agencies do. So each legislature has sort of in-house nonpartisan staff that just stay on for a long time, It doesn't matter what party's in office, office, and their goal is to inform the policy debate, you clarify the potential consequences. You lay out policy alternatives. You talk about the research in a way that is answering their specific questions rather than coming in with a list of recommendations or ideas about how to move forward. You come in with key findings from the research you pause and you then ask the person you're talking to or presenting to, what are they most interested in doing, what are their goals and then you respond and say well research would suggest this or this is what the research would say to help inform your thinking on this topic.
So as an example, if you're kind of presenting, if you're playing the role of just presenting the literature, you're not giving your personal opinion, you're probably playing the role of an educator. And you can be an advocate in one way and that is advocating for the use of research in policymaking so like that is what you're, you're trying to push is is not a specific policy option, but just pushing the idea that hey scientific research has a lot say, and can help make better public policies. Now, the role that you want to play or that you are playing. There's no right or wrong answer, we need both actors in the policy world. It really depends on your personality, some people are really fiery they have an activist energy they, that's really a role that they want to play. Great, go ahead, run with it. Other people tend to be you know a little bit you know they can take a step back, they can kind of see the whole view, they can see the long view and maybe they want to play, you want to play more of an educational role so you know it really depends on your personality, your preference, even the department that you are in. So if you're on faculty or a student, you know your department might also have a kind of a personality or a culture with expectations about what role you play. I just think it's really important for us at the start when you're getting into this game or you're already in it. What role are you playing? And I want to say something kind of bold, is that you cannot play both roles, so this is why it's so important to identify where you are, where you want to be. Policymakers, especially, elected officials, they are always sniffing you out. They want to know what side you are on whether it's a particular issue, or your party.
I have heard so many legislators when they talk about the quality assessing like how how reliable is a piece of information or research, they will very often say like, yeah, I look to see who funded the research project, I look to see you know what groups they're a part of. They are constantly assessing your credibility as an individual that so they are sort of checking you out in the background, checking out your papers. And so, they are going to determine whether you're playing an advocate or an educator role, so it's just very important for you to kind of know where you where you stand and, and, and move forward from that. So, yeah, I think I just like to add to, you know, I think there can be. You can be an advocate, you know for some sort of policy solution, but your approach to communicating with policymakers, you know matters. And so, as you develop your research agenda and learn more about the questions you're asking your thinking on that topic will evolve and you will get and have opinions about what the right policy option or outcome should be. And what I had to try to, what I what I learned early on in working with different policymakers and government leaders is that there's a difference between what causes some problem or some issue, and what people think causes some problem or issue. And so I had to sort of realize like where people were thinking the root causes were coming from and have this conversation about the science and the research to give a broader picture of what actually is the root cause, you know, or or the set of root causes and what, and sometimes it's imperfect information. and what and sometimes it's imperfect information. But you, you are dealing with people who have opinions that aren't necessarily formed by the research, they're just based on their belief systems and and past experiences. But people are open to changing their minds, not everyone. And I've seen that happen in in interactions that I've had over the years, with different kinds of politicians.
Yeah, I think that's so true I think that when you take the educational approach as the approach, that's the choice I made in my career, is that you do just recognize that policymakers, especially elected officials. They have constrained budgets that they're working on. they have constituents that they have to respond to. They have their personal values their personal experiences, party expectations. There are many factors that go into the ultimate decisions they make, too, when they're discussing discussing legislation or voting on something. But the more work we can do as researchers to inform their thinking and that discussion, it really does make a difference. There is one question that maybe I can quickly address and that is about, Could I speak a little bit more about how I approached agencies to join boards and advisory committees and I will say is that, you know, as a brand new professor, you know back in early 2000. I was primarily interested in collaborating with the Department of Children and Families here in Wisconsin, and they have a cycle of federal reviews that they go through every seven or eight years that does require you know some analysis, and I joined the faculty at a time where that new cycle of review was just starting again. So I reached out to the folks at DCF that were sort of managing that process and just offered to be part of whatever committee or whatever advisory group they were forming, and they were absolutely appreciative about that offer and took me up on it. And that sort of formed the basis of lots of relationships within the department as time went on, and I would then be available to them if they had questions, if they were writing like a request for proposals and they needed some information on on research on a particular topic and I would pull some of that together. So, it did take some time and it was uncompensated time for the most part, but it really paid off in terms of what happened later in my career.
To talk to people about about policy solutions that were sometimes even adopted. Yeah, that's great. I think that kind of falls into the second point I wanted to make about how to go about getting started working with policymakers or just rethinking your approach to working with policymakers is, I think it's really important to get clear on who is a policy maker. And who would be the best fit for the research that you're doing or the information you want to share with them. So there are elected officials at the local, state and federal level, there are school boards, there are state agencies you know as Kristi mentioned she had worked with at the beginning, you're thinking about your research. It's really important to target the right policy maker and I hear a lot of researchers who will just lump policymakers together and either talk about their frustrations, or you know feel like they're not making any progress. It could be that you're just not targeting the right person who can take action on your research so really be deliberate about about who you want to work with. Like an example would be like in homelessness policy, you know the feds, and the local governments tend to be much more active than state government, there's a lot of money that goes directly from the federal government to counties and communities. And so, digging a little bit deeper if that's kind of the research that you do, you may want to spend more time at the local county level, versus with your state legislators, and so that will make the best use of your time and also help you see results. And then the third how to, how to get started working with policymakers, is, is, we should focus on not disseminating information to policymakers, but on building relationships with them as Kristi just mentioned. And the question is, it can be hard to answer is like how do you even get started? I don't know where to begin. And I have a few ideas for you, that you know may or may not be helpful for you but here are five I think I have five different ideas.
County government, a legislative district a congressional district set up a meeting with them. Go in talk with the staff, talk with the elected official, share your research, you know, think about one finding or one surprising piece of information that they may want to know about your topic that the area that you research, and just meet with them kind of cut your teeth on your own elected officials, you are a constituent, they are very happy to meet with their constituents. Um. Another way to begin a relationship is to start to follow the committees of the city council, county or state government legislative bodies that that work on issues that you also work on, so just start following those committee meetings, whether you're actually watching the YouTube videos, going to them live or just reading summaries, you could start to see who are the, the, the actors, like the main actors like who are the main elected officials who are seem to really be taking the lead on these issues, who are the experts that they are calling in to give testimony, they will often call in government leaders, you know the the County Human Services Director might come in and talk to the county commissioners or the state department, health department secretary may come in and talk with the health committee a lot and so kind of see who are the key actors and then those can be people that you can approach and set up a meeting with. Um, you can ask people in your network, whether it's friends or families or business leaders in your community. Who do they know who is a policy maker and ask them to make introductions for you. Those warm introductions those warm handoffs are, it's easier for us to kind of reach out to these policymakers if we've had an introduction from somebody that they know, if you're at a university, you could ask your Government Relations Office, most campuses have one.
So ask them for the names of policymakers, who they would recommend that you connect with. They're going to not only be able to recommend people who have your, share your, your interest in a certain topic or policy issue. They're also going to be able to give you insight or information about who is probably more open to working with, with researchers, so that can be an easier way to get started or to expand your network of policymakers is to get those insider get that insider information and those introductions. And then the final way that you can get started is to look for and work with intermediary organizations. So these are organizations that work with policymakers on a day to day basis. They. So one of the programs that I worked with at UW Madison is called the Family Impact Seminars, 20 states around the country are doing these same seminars, they are often looking for speakers, so you can look to see if your university has a family impact seminar site and introduce yourself and perhaps they have a space for you in their upcoming seminar. The League of Women Voters works with elected officials, in particular policy makers. There are lots of think tanks that put on events that work with policymakers on a day to day basis, just kind of keep your eyes out and you're going to start to see these organizations that perhaps you could plug into, they've already done the legwork, they have the networks, they have the know how of working with policymakers. And so you can often put forth your name to perhaps be a speaker at a breakout session, to be a resource for their staff will then share your research with policymakers, so you'll be indirectly working with policymakers. They may even have a need to, you know, to to want to connect, you know, researchers with policymakers so knowing that you're out there. And that you're raising your hand and are willing to be a resource for them. So, so those are just some ideas if you don't know where to start, that'll get you started if you have, if you're already doing this work maybe that'll prompt some ideas for how you might want to expand your work in the policy making space.
So those are just three. Three what you know, three considerations for how to get started is thinking about what role you want to play, an advocate or an educator, thinking about which policy maker type is best for the research that you do, and then thinking about how to actually start building those relationships. Right, Thank you. The one other question came in, before we move to the third part of this presentation, this webinar, universities don't tend to recognize or appreciate the important work that we're discussing how would we suggest getting acknowledgement or space to do this work. So, this is a really great question, and it's definitely something I've struggled with during my career. One thing I do want to say, though, that if we're ever going to sort of change the culture around what counts in academia, we have to start talking about it and and including it you know in our materials that are visible to our review committees, to the general public. You know, there are so many things I have done over the years that don't show up on my CV, but they actually involved having more of a scholarly impact than I think my, you know, paywalled publications have had or my presentations at conferences with other academics. academics. So talking about it and including it in your materials and your CV. In your tenure dossiers in your annual activities reports and talking about the time it takes to build these relationships so that, you know, more and more people on your faculty or on your, in your university, understand not only the importance of this work but the investment that needs to happen. Universities are really quick to celebrate this kind of scholarly impact when it happens, and have it in the news and, you know, write stories about it. But don't always have the infrastructure or the or the will around supporting the investment that needs to go into it, so I think it does take some education on our part and pushing on our part to make sure that we make that case.
Yeah, and I know the WT Grant foundation is also doing some work to try to change the culture of what is valued in academia. So they are really pushing for making this work count towards tenure, so if anyone's interested, that may be another resource you want to check out. Right. I think we can move to taking a slightly deeper dive about how to talk to or communicate with policymakers Yes, so. in the door, now you have a meeting with a policy maker, or you have been asked to present to policymakers or maybe you want to, you know, put together a great issue brief or some sort of publication to share with policymakers. And so there's kind of the, now what? And I just wanted to share some high level lessons that I've learned, some, some ways of doing, sort of look some ways of communicating with policymakers that I have found to be really effective. So I've sort of broken it out into speaking with policymakers and writing for policymakers, There's a lot of overlap. But I will start with speaking. So if you are meeting with a policy maker one on one or in a small group, or if you've been asked to present, it is essential that you pick 1 to 3 points that you want them to remember and that will serve as sort of your through line during your conversation or in your presentation. So sit down and think about what are the three takeaways I want them to have when we end our time together? Use those takeaways and reverse engineer your talking points. That will help you simplify, it's especially if you're in academia, we can get very bogged down in the details in long sentences in explaining every little nuance, talking about limitations hedging our bets, not moving, you know not talking beyond what the literature the research says so. You have to loosen up on that a little bit and you need to flip your perspective and think about if I'm sitting at the other side of that table or if I'm in, in that seat in the audience, what do you want them to remember as they walk out the door? The other point when you're talking with policymakers, and this is especially true when you're talking with elected officials who are just absorbing mounds of information each day is that this is going to be new information to them.
This is not, you're not at a conference of your peers. This is a lay audience. So you want to remember to include it to add information very slowly and bring in concepts one by one don't stack on a bunch of concepts and lingo in one sentence or in one slide you need to introduce things slowly and build things up in a foundation. And because this method of communication takes more time, you will inherently need to cut down the number of points that you're making which is why I said pick 1 to 3 main points you want to make. Kristi mentioned this earlier that, she is spot on, is that you want to start with, it's often really good to start by presenting the scope of the problem. How many people you know like basic definitions about what the problem is. If you are working on homelessness, for example, that's your area. How many people are homeless in your state or in their district? Are the numbers trending upward or down? They love to know trend information. They love to know data that's specific to their district or to their constituents. So if you're meeting with, let's say you're presenting to state legislators, narrowing down your data to the state rather than national data, they will, their ears perk up. So the more you can kind of customize the data that you're presenting, and sharing the scope of the problem with them. You're already off to a great start. A couple of tips if you're presenting in particular. A couple of tips if you're presenting in particular. So when I have coached. I've had, I've worked with probably 50 different researchers from around the country at the events that I've put on for Wisconsin legislators and over and over again some of the things that I say are one concept on each slide, keep it really simple.
You want titles of your slides that are very explanatory and basic. Don't make them nebulous or vague. If you were talking about how many people are homeless, your slide title should say, how many people are homeless in Wisconsin, or something like that, keep it very obvious. Remove extraneous information from your slides, especially from any tables or charts that you have. And I'm talking about like removing extraneous grid lines and making your access labels super super clear, you know, trying to remove as many, you know, as you know, many details as possible to create a sleek. Think of Steve Jobs what would Steve Jobs do when presenting data on a slide. There's a great person. He's a staff member of the Urban Institute, his name is john Schwabish. He has some great resources on data visualization, so how to present your data in a way that's compelling and clear for a lay audience. So look into john Schwabish if you want more information on this. I always say don't pull graphics from journal articles. Like we'll do this if it's not our research and we want to pull, try to recreate the graph or the table, rather than pulling something from a journal article because they are so confusing. And don't use lingo unless it's widely known. I literally say spell out everything, even if it is widely known, you don't want to leave anybody in the room behind and especially if you're talking to a crowd of elected officials, they are going to be embarrassed to ask you really simple things, so don't put them in the position where they won't know what you're talking about. And then finally, share cost benefit information or cost effectiveness information if you have it, they love that information. It helps them prioritize if they know that they will get a big return on an investment, such as with early childhood programs, they are more likely to listen to the research and think about how can they use that information, because if they can get a lot of bang for their buck, they're going to look into it.
And finally, I go on to just a few points of writing for policymakers, but when you're talking, either in a meeting or in a presentation with policymakers, I just like to throw this quickly in. Address them with their formal title, especially if they are an elected official, so address them as representative or senator or council member, or secretary, even if you don't know their last name or you you don't know how to pronounce it, just call them by their formal title it, it kind of gives them respect and they will really appreciate that. Okay, yeah. And I just I just have a couple of points for writing for policymakers, a lot of the same points for speaking and presenting to policymakers apply. but I have found that it is really true, that one or two page issue briefs are really best. Try your hardest to get whatever you are presenting on into one or two pages that just means you're going to have one or two charts or graphics, you're going to have a few headlines and very succinct text. This is not a journal article. You don't want to bury your main points at the very end, you're not leading up to your conclusion in your communication with policymakers. You state your objective your, your findings, your takeaways up front and then you repeat them at the end. Don't go too deep into methods, in fact they don't really care about methods, they don't necessarily, especially if they're elected officials, they don't care about the individual researchers names, who did this landmark study. Just talk about that there was a landmark study done that, that we you know we got a lot of information from, it's a strong study and here's what they found. And then the final thing I will say is that just in your slides, in your issue briefs, use very catchy titles and headings.
You know you want to stay away from boring academic titles. Questions can often be very good headings, so if you're doing an issue brief. I like to use questions. So one of the questions that I had in a recent issue brief for Wisconsin policymakers was, how was home visiting administered in Wisconsin, and they know that if they scan that issue brief that they can BAM find the information to answer that question. So those are some tips for writing and speaking to and meeting with policymakers, and I'll actually share the one page brief that you made me create when I asked to work with you and made me hone it down from however many pages, it was when we share the video and we'll also point you to some other links. And I want to point out that in the chat. Clark Peters shared a link to the Op Ed Project that also has some great trainings for people interested in communicating their science through that approach as well. There is another question that came in. So, what would you say, Heidi, about doing this kind of work as, what are the opportunities for PhDs working outside of an academic research environment, are there any advantages or disadvantages to doing this kind of work, external or internal to academia? I would say, I mean, if this is something that interests you, I think that there's that personal gratification, that what you are doing, you know the research that you were doing, you know if you're working in a think tank or if you're working in a consulting role and expanding the reach that you have with the research that you're doing. It's very personally gratifying. But I think it's also just on a societal level it's so important that more and more researchers get involved in the policy process. And so whether or not you're working with a policy organization that's already doing this work I mean if you're interested in it. There are many roles in policy organizations for people with PhDs, to play this role I mean you you will, there's there's abundant opportunities.
So I would say yes, go for it. Right. I also just want to give two quick examples of how this work has, for lack of a better term, paid off you know, in terms of my desire to have an impact with respect to policy, and one is you know all those years I spent being available, you know to this particular state agency to answer questions about what is the research say on x or y or z, eventually it got to a point where the agency was willing to just fund a doctoral student for me every year to help answer those kinds of questions by coming up with briefs, you know, that summarize the literature on various topics they were interested in. So I have this sort of way of funding now for doctoral students using this mechanism. And it's a win win for everybody. Because there's practical experience that the doctoral students get doing this work with policymakers directly, the policymakers get the research and and I'm not scrambling for funding every year for for my doctoral students. And the other brief story I just wanted to tell is, you know, one of the policy issues I worked on has, had been working on, is how to prevent child maltreatment using economic supports. It, and it's there's a whole sort of spiel I would give on that topic if there were more time. It's there's a whole sort of spiel I would give on that topic if there were more time. But when, when my colleague Lonnie Berger and I actually had an intervention to suggest in this, in this policy arena, it was a Republican administration, and they weren't interested in, simply providing money to families to help with their economic stressors, but they were very interested in supporting that intervention if we added a component around personal responsibility, and the component we added was just simply having a caseworker be available to help families navigate social welfare benefits systems, answer questions about what's the best strategy for paying bills when you don't have enough to pay them all.
And that was a component that was very powerful in the intervention but it met the needs of the administration that was currently in office. It was, it enabled us to go forward with that with that policy solution for lack of a better word, you know. That's a great. And I think that the thing is, that if you do this work I think the goal should be or the thought should be that you're in this for the long haul. It takes time to build these relationships, it takes takes time to establish a reputation. But once you have that you're golden and it's, it is just so rewarding. I love working with policymakers, they are such interesting people. They are approachable, especially elected officials. They are people people, they love to gather information, they love to meet people, I had a legislator once tell me. "I want to be able to go to a cocktail party and share a piece of information so I look like the smartest guy in the room." So any role that you can play and helping them do that. and I know that Greg in the chat. Hi, Greg. This is the you, um, you know he's not saying exactly this but there is something to be said for, you know, the consistent work with, with elected officials and policymakers in general over time. I mean you want them to be the hero of the story so that they can take the information you provide and run with it. But knowing that you're the go to resource is, is really gratifying and it's a rare thing so I just encourage everybody on the call to continue doing the great work you're doing and if you haven't jumped in yet, jump in. Right. In the last few minutes I was hoping you'd just say a little more about your Above the Fray consulting. In June, I'm now living in another state so I couldn't stay on with my job but I just love this work so much so I started my own consulting group, you know, Above the Fray consulting. And so I work with individual researchers, or groups of researchers, or organizations that want to share their research with policymakers at all levels, whether it's local state or federal, so I help with writing projects, presentations, and overall just strategies for communicating with or building relationships with policymakers.
I think a lot of grants nowadays, especially federal grants, are requiring that your proposals include a piece for dissemination. So I think that's kind of where I can play a role in either putting together the proposal or helping you, you know, for the deliverables of your, your grant projects, and also working with, with individuals and organizations who just want to do this work whether or not they're being encouraged to do it by their funder, so. Great, thank you. And I'll just take the last minute here to say a few more words about Prof2Prof. So again, you know, my motivation for creating Prof2Prof came out of my frustration, you know with the fact that the kinds of work, the kinds of things I love to do in this realm weren't necessarily incentivized or rewarded in inside academia. And I wanted to create a space, you know where I could talk about the full range of work that I did as an academic that extended well beyond just a publication, you know, or even a report. So you can use Prof2Prof as a landing page for talking about the work that you do in this realm. You have the option of turning on a public facing profile on Prof2Prof and sharing, while you may not be able to share your actual research articles depending on the copyright you're under, You can talk about your research, and offer the sort of one page takeaways, you know, of your research that could, can be made available to anyone. And also just talk about the various activities you're involved in with respect to your service work that, service does count in academia and this is often characterized as service work. So how do we make it come to life, rather than just listing on our CV that we sat on a committee? So you can use Prof2Prof in a number of ways to I think help change the culture around what counts in academia and that's my that's my hope.
One of my hopes for the site. Excellent. I know we had a poll we wanted to, yes you all are interested in learning more about some of these topics that we kept at a high level at today, so I can, I can launch it. Oh, I just got it. Okay, yeah, I just launched it. Yeah, so this was just sort of a broader overview today but Heidi is well positioned to dive deeper into a number of different topics and so we're interested to just know if you have an interest in any of these topics we have up here, so take a few seconds to get your feedback on that. Yeah. And while we're doing the poll I just want to say I'm just so excited to see so many people interested in doing this work, or who are already doing this work, it's a, it's a playground that I love to play in, so it's it's exciting to, I think, see this, these, this type of effort grow and grow. I think that when I started doing this work in 2000, the whole term evidence based policymaking or evidence informed policy making was pretty new at the time. Now everybody's throwing it around, and so it's just been really exciting to kind of see the arc of how this work has, has evolved over the years and how we've been able to share and really scale up the work that we're doing and up level our efforts so that we are, that we are making the most out of the limited time that we all have to do this work on top of all of our other duties, so many responsibilities. So right so there's almost a perfectly even distribution of interest so that's great you might, you might have four more of these to do. So thank you everyone for coming, like we said this is being recorded and we will communicate with you how you can access that recording and any other material we think would be useful to you following, give us a couple days to get that together, and we'll be sure to reach out to you and and share that information. So thank you all for coming. And thank you, Heidi for sharing your wisdom.
Well thank you, Kristi for Prof2Prof and working with you over the last couple of years has been delightful.