I was never particularly good at making mixtapes—my teenage musical tastes were too uncultured, my town too small to support more than your standard country/classic rock/top–40 radio stations, and my working-class parents too poor to support much of a music-buying…
The line between freedom and chaos is astonishingly thin, I’ve recently discovered. Handed the mandate to set up a communications function for The Social Innovation Partnership, I’ve occasionally struggled to stay the right side of that divide. Now a year…
Why are British think tanks so much less transparent than those in the U.S., Germany, Kenya or Georgia? Why don’t British think tanks just go ahead and disclose who funds them, with how much, and for what purposes?
Once upon a time, search engines were about providing links to pages. That time is past. These days, search engines—and by “search engines,” I mean Google—are about providing answers to questions. Don’t believe me? Try it. Go input “what time…
At the National Housing Federation, we’ve recently updated our social media strategy. As the digital world is ever changing, our strategy needs to evolve too. It clearly sets out how we use social media as an organisation and how it…
This post first appeared on The King’s Fund’s website When we published an audit of the coalition’s health reforms recently, we expected it to generate plenty of interest as health has become such a central and bitterly fought issue in this election –…
Why we shouldn’t let them kill the policy brief like they did the press release.
Think tanks exist to find the best ideas for the good of society. How can they do that if no-one reads what they are producing? Or if their only metric of success is the amount of coverage they generate? Think tanks are much more than publishers, but reports are one of their principal outputs – and right now they are not working. This is the problem Think Tank Review was created to solve.
What’s the most generous country in the world? Who does the most for good causes? Answering that simple (but quite difficult) question has led us to provoke debate round the globe and opened the door to some quite profound discussions about how the world is changing and how it could change for the better.
Communications teams should ensure that think tanks are more transparent. At their best, communications teams can connect institutions to the outside world, and bring new ideas in, in addition to pushing ideas out. Moreover, building trust is a critical long-term task for communications teams at think tanks. Getting noticed is only the first step towards having impact. Trust is needed to convert attention into action.
