How to Write a Policy Memo That Matters
Here’s the situation:
You’re an expert policy analyst, and a client has asked for your help.
Your client has a problem, and they’re expecting you to have the skills and expertise to
solve that problem for them.
Your client wants your solution to the problem in the form of a policy memo because
they don’t have time to read anything longer.
Where do you begin?
You might think the first step should be to read everything you can get your hands on. Or you
might be more inclined to look for publicly available data sets and brainstorm calculations you
could perform. It’s tempting to think that once you’ve learned as much as you can about a topic,
you’ll be able to come up with a solution to your client’s problem. A better way to begin is to ask
yourself what the client doesn’t yet know. More specifically, what is it they need to know to
fulfill their mission or achieve their goals?
To Write a Policy Memo That Matters:
There are Three Questions your client could be struggling to answer:
1. What is happening?
2. What is working?
3. What should be done next?
Your client could be struggling to answer one of these questions or all three. For example,
imagine your client is a nonprofit organization whose mission is to reduce the amount of meat
consumed by Americans as a way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and decrease the harmful
effects of climate change. What don’t they know that they need to know to fulfill their mission?
1. What is happening? How much meat is consumed annually in the United States? How
many metric tons of greenhouse gas does the production and transportation of meat in the
emit on an annual basis?
2. What is working? What efforts have already been undertaken to reduce meat
consumption, and how effective have those efforts been?
3. What should be done next? What policy options could be implemented to help reduce
the amount of meat that is consumed and thereby reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the
United States?
Three Types of Policy Answers
Once you know what unknowns are keeping your clients from fulfilling their missions or
achieving their goals, you can be more selective in your research, data collection, and analysis to
ensure you are being as efficient with your time as possible. After you know enough to answer
our client’s questions, you can do so in one of three ways:
1. Descriptive
Answers the question: What is happening?
For example: To what extent are women represented on
US corporate boards?
Representation of women on US corporate boards has
increased to about 16 percent, but a number of factors may
hinder further progress.
2. Evaluative
Answers the question: What is working?
For example: How effective is the Choose to Change
Program in reducing arrests for violent crime among
the students who participate in it?
Those who participated in the Choose to Change Program
had 48 percent fewer arrests for violent crimes than their
peers who did not participate in the program, and these
positive results persisted 18 months after the program
ended.
3. Prescriptive
Answers the question: What should be done next?
For example: What policy options could help older
workers who lost their jobs during the Great Recession
regain employment?
In the short term, policies to provide enhanced
reemployment assistance and help address perceived
employer reluctance to hire older works could be most
beneficial.
The Four Elements of a Policy Answer
Instead of getting lost in an internet search or a regression analysis when tasked with solving a
client’s problem, you’ve now determined what questions your client had and then set out to
provide answers to those questions. The next step is to determine which pieces of evidence you’ll
need to make each type of policy answer as persuasive as. In public policy, we can divide
evidence into four distinct types:
Condition
What’s happening?
Criteria
What should be happening?
Cause
Why is the condition happening?
Effect
What might happen next?
As a statistically minded policy analyst, it may be tempting to get hung up on the terms “cause”
and “effect.” Please try not to. We’re not talking about causal effect. Instead of “cause,” think
instead of “correlation” or maybe “contributing factors.” What is contributed to the condition
(i.e., the problem, challenge, or deficiency) you identified? The reason we absolutely need to
know this is because your proposed solution—your policy recommendation—needs to address
the cause of the problem, otherwise the policy answer you provide to your client’s question will
not be at all persuasive or helpful.
A descriptive policy answer needs only a condition because a descriptive policy answer will not
result in a policy recommendation. That doesn’t mean, of course, that it isn’t a valuable
undertaking to provide a client with a descriptive policy answer. Helping a client understand
what is happening can be a hugely important contribution. Evaluative and prescriptive policy
solutions, on the other hand, require you to include ALL four elements of a policy finding if you
want to persuade your client to implement your policy recommendation.
Writing Deductively with Enough Evidence
In the Key Finding section of your policy memo (see Policy Memo Template below), each
paragraph needs to be written deductively, which means that the main point of the paragraph is
presented in the first sentence. The remaining sentences in the paragraph should present the data,
facts, statistics, as well as your analysis and reasoning (and any context needed) to prove the
point you make in the first sentence.
In the example below, imagine that your client is a nongovernmental organization tasked with
efficiently and effectively administering food aid in parts of the world ravaged by natural
disasters or civil wars. They want to know whether it’s best to provide food or cash to those
affected.
Note that the criteria are not explicitly stated here because “what should be happening” is
implied (i.e., people affected by natural disasters and civil wars should be efficiently and
effectively served by your client). In this paragraph, we’re presenting evidence that suggests
perhaps the best strategy is to combine the two methods of food aid delivery:
When food aid needs to be administered in countries were inflation is rampant,
providing it in the form of cash and food has been shown to be more effective than
providing cash alone. In January 2010, Rachel Sabates-Wheeler and Stephen Devereux
published the results of a study they conducted on Ethiopia’s Productive Safety Net
Programme. Their team of researchers conducted a regression analysis on a two-wave
panel survey conducted in 2006 and 2008. The data show specifically that food transfers
enabled higher levels of income growth, livestock accumulation, and self-reported food
security. This may be partially explained by the fact that the cash transfers that were
studied were not indexed, meaning they did not adjust to inflation. A reliance on cash
transfers that are not indexed to deliver social protection in an inflationary environment
“is not an optimal strategy,” the researchers noted, “because commodity-based transfers
retain their value whereas the purchasing power of cash transfers is eroded by rising
commodity pricing” (Sabates-Wheeler & Devereux, 2010). Until nongovernmental
organizations are afforded the flexibility to provide food aid in the combined form
of cash and food, they may be missing out on opportunities to deliver food aid as
efficiently and effectively as possible.
Cause
Effect
Evidence
&
Analysis
Policy Memo Template
To: Your Client
From: Your UChicago ID Number
Date: Month Date, Year
RE: Your Recommendation
Executive Summary
In the executive summary, you will state your recommendation; always start with your main
point first! Then briefly summarize your main findings as answers to your client’s questions.
Essentially, you are explaining why you recommending they take action. End the summary with
a brief statement of what will happen if the client implements your recommendation.
Background & Methodology
Here you will provide context and any historical or technical information the reader may need to
understand your findings—and nothing more. Consider what your reader already knows. You
may also need to briefly explain where your data comes from and how they were analyzed.
Depending on your findings, you may not even need a Background & Methodology section.
Your Key Finding(s) Should Be Presented as a Full Sentence with a Subject and a Verb
In the key finding section(s), you will answer your client’s questions directly. You will also
provide evidence (and the context surrounding the evidence), as well as your analysis of the
evidence in support of your descriptive, evaluative, or prescriptive answer. You may also need to
include information on any limitations associated with your findings and rebut alternative
options, if necessary.
Recommendations
Your recommendations should link the root causes of the requestor’s problem, which you should
have identified in your key findings section, with what needs to be done by whom. Your
recommendations should be feasible, cost effective, and specific without being too narrow.
Conclusion
Your conclusion should place your key findings in a broader context that reminds the reader of
the issue’s importance. Why is important that action be taken immediately? A good conclusion
will weigh loss aversion against hope for the future as motivating factors.
Writing Recommendations That Matter
To be most effective, recommendations to improve operations or conduct further research should
(1) clearly identify feasible actions that need to be taken and (2) provide the appropriate level of
detail to facilitate implementation and subsequent follow up. Other considerations include:
Audience
Address your recommendation to a person or program so
that it’s clear who’s responsible for ensuring the
recommendation is implemented.
Purpose
To be valuable to your client, your recommendations must:
1. Explicitly connect to the description of the evidence.
2. Evaluate between the cause of whatever barriers or
challenges are holding the client back vs. the potential
outcome you would expect to arise from the
recommendation.
3. Be feasible, cost-effective, and measurable.
Explanatory
Statement
Focus on concisely presenting who should do what and
why. Avoid phrasing that reintroduces the barriers or
challenges you uncovered. That information should be
presented in the key finding section.
Lead-in Sentence
If you’re making multiple recommendations, use a lead-in
sentence like: “We are making four recommendations to
improve program operations…”
Your recommendations can then be placed into a numbered
or bulleted list below the lead-in sentence.
Clarity and
Precision
Choose specific phrasing (e.g., explore vs. ensure and plan
vs. implement require different actions).
Avoid being unnecessarily prescriptive. If you want to
recommend that certain steps be taken, those steps should
be introduced with including or similar language.
If, on the other hand, you want to recommend that your
client determine their own course of action to meet your
recommendation’s intent, you can introduce those steps
with such as or similar language.
Writing Conclusions That Matter
To be most effective, conclusions should make it clear to your reader why it is important for
them to act on your policy recommendations now. This section is that last thing they will read
before putting down your policy memo. What is the lasting message you want them to take away
from all of the hard work you put into it?
Purpose
To be valuable to your client, your conclusions must:
Highlight the significance of your key findings.
Explain why corrective action needs to be taken.
Inspire an immediate response.
Tone
Effective conclusions are:
Fair and balanced
Proactive
Compelling
Approach
The conclusion should:
Highlight outcomes that may follow the enactment of
the recommendations: “If you do X, Y will happen.”
Make explicit the stakes of the recommendations.
Things to
Avoid
Do not:
Summarize your key findings only.
Introduce new findings or evidence.
Restate your recommendations.
Being Your Own Best Editor
Revision Questions:
Content
Is the problem you’re trying to solve clearly articulated?
Are you using the applicable elements of a finding to tell your story?
Condition: What’s happening?
Criteria: What should be happening?
Cause: Why is the condition happening?
Effect: What will happen next?
Did you describe the data in context and does that description clearly link
to your key finding(s)?
Have you uncovered the root cause of the policy problem or challenge?
Have you explicitly evaluated the limitations of what is currently
happening vs. the potential limitations of your own findings? Have you
also explicitly defined why your own findings are preferable?
Do your recommendations arise logically from the evidence?
Are your recommendations feasible, cost-effective, and measurable?
Is the tone appropriate for your reader?
Clarity
Do you begin each paragraph with the main point (deductive structure)?
Do each of your paragraphs contain only one point (paragraph unity)?
Does every one of the sentences in each paragraph relate or expand on its
main point (paragraph coherence)?
Is the subject close to the verb and the subject-verb close to the
beginning of each sentence (sentence core)?
Are you writing about people whenever possible?
Are you using the old-to-new principle to transition between sentences?
Are you mostly writing in the active voice?
Do you avoid using jargon and define terms throughout?
Are you using headings and subheadings?
Does your structure and formatting conform to the reader’s expectations?
Concision
Is your memo as long as it needs to be but as short as it can be?
Have you read your memo out loud and backwards?
Have you rooted out unnecessary weak verbs, nominalizations, and
prepositional phrases?
Have you pruned any needless words (“double words,” redundant or
meaningless modifiers, empty nouns, and adverbs)?
Is your writing free of spelling, punctuation, and grammatical errors?
Does your writing contain fragments, comma splices, or run-ons?