Explain Your Work Clearly Posted on March 19, 2007 Delivering research findings to policymakers is one way to disseminate your work, states Mary Ann McCabe (bio).

Dissemination is becoming more important in the long term to secure funding, because federal agencies and even private foundations are emphasizing the capacity for researchers to explain why their work is important, why it may have public benefit and therefore, why it should be funded.

I think for a policymaker audience, probably there's a few key points. One would be, pick just a few central ideas and provide those ideas in non-technical terms. Don't qualify what you say. That's one of the things that I think non-scientific audiences have the hardest time understanding and that's what we're trained to do in graduate school as researchers is to explain the limitations of our findings. That makes them non-understandable to a policymaker audience and non-useable.

So, it's a leap of faith a little bit for a researcher to not qualify their results in particular, but they kind of have to be able to do that in order to make an impact for policymakers. So, a few key ideas, non-technical language and don't qualify what you say.

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