What are think-tanks for?
It’s not an easy question. Indeed, it seems like it’s a question a lot of think-tanks actively try to avoid thinking about, as they search for the funding they need to stay afloat year to year.
However, if you do sit down to think about this question - no matter how long you think about it, no matter how open minded you are - I don’t think “produce and upload PDFs to their own websites” is going to be an answer you come to view as credible.
And yet… most of the time… this is what think-tanks do. No matter what kind of change think-tankers want to see in the world, nine times out of ten, they conclude that creating a PDF is the way to go about it.
This is kind of insane. Isn’t it? Or am I the crazy one? Surely we can all agree that writing 5-20k words and arranging them in a very particular type of format – is a very specific and unusual thing to do? And it can not – like seriously can not – be the solution to every problem?
Years ago, think-tanks produced pamphlets. Miniature books of policy wisdom, printed and bound to project gravitas. Quite how this came to become the principal output of think-tanks is unclear*, but what has followed has almost been a parable of human small-mindedness. The advent of digital technologies that mean we can now present our ideas in almost any way conceivable should have revolutionised think-tank output.
And yet… given these limitless possibilities… what have we done? We’ve produced little digital books. Little digital books, on virtual A4 paper. We couldn’t even reimagine the size of the margins or the dimensions of the page. We were given the tools to think outside of the box that was the pamphlet, and we have used them simply to construct another box of identical proportions.
That box is called a PDF. And if absolutely sucks. It’s hard to navigate, it’s visually boring, it’s clunky, it’s ugly… but more than this, it just doesn’t make sense within the aesthetics of the internet. You have to leave the website to view the PDF. You leave the realm you are in, and you enter the dull, sterile, un-interactive world of the PDF. It’s an anticlimax every time.
This is a failure of graphic design, yes. However, it is not the fault of graphic designers or of comms and digital teams. It is chiefly a failing of research. Because whilst we can ask our colleagues to upload our reports in new formats - perhaps as webpages, perhaps as slide decks – the real barrier to progress is the fact that we are all still thinking in terms of reports. We are essentially still thinking in terms of pamphlets.
We are still approaching projects assuming that in the end what we will produce is a little book, filed away in a quiet corner of the internet where no one will ever read it, and only those who already know its there will be able to find it. We need to think bigger! We need to be more adventurous. Most of all, we need to remember what we are as think-tankers and what we are for.
We are not here to produce academic work. We are here to affect change onto the world. We shouldn’t be ashamed of this! This is an extraordinary and noble ambition. We should be producing outputs that reflect the scale of this ambition. Accessible, interactive, impactful… these are the words we should be aiming for. And these are not words that describe PDFs.
Thankfully, there are glimmers in the sector that offer a road map to something better. So as a sweetener, if you’ve made it to the end of this PDF-phobic diatribe, here are some bits of research that have stuck in my head over the years as examples of how we might be able to do things a bit differently.
Runneymede Trust – Beyond Banglatown. Okay, this one was accompanied by a PDF, but check out this amazing video Runneymede made to explore migration and local economic change in London.
IFS – How would you fund the NHS. Check out the interactivity!
IPPR – Inside the Black Box. Bloody hell, this one’s accompanied by a PDF too! But I enjoyed movable graphs and data tools here.
A better future for think-tank reports is out there. We’ve just got to get creative.
*At least to me… I’ve never found an authoritative book on the history of think tanks as institutions that could shed light on these kinds of questions – let me know if you have!
I’m glad to know I’m not the only one worrying about this. Working in government, I wonder how much our pdfs are an expansive maginot line of a communication.
However, the _act_ of publishing a white paper is significant; and key passages can be crucial; even if most goes unread. This wouldn’t apply to a slide deck or a Twitter thread.
My instinct tells me this is all about notable activity. There should be other ways to get to that.
When I ran the publishing operation at OECD, we put a huge amount of effort into offering reports as web pages, embeddable pages (so others could include them on their websites and blogs), e-Pub (great for mobile devices) and, yes, PDFs. Given this choice, which format did readers prefer (as measured by downloads and visits)? PDFs by a ratio of huge to very little. Why? Because they are easy to store, print and share - plus the content you are discussing is on the same page as the file your colleague has got. However, I'm with you on novel outputs vs 'reports'. One of our big successes at OECD was the Better Life Index, an interactive tool to explore the question of how to measure the 'quality of life' (as opposed to the GDP 'quantity of life' approach.) As for the challenge of 'filing in a corner of the internet', I left the OECD to create Policy Commons, a tool that scours the corners of the internet to make think tank content easier to find and use. So far, we've assembled 3.2 million reports from 7,500 organizations into a searchable database that's already being used by around 40 major universities and policy institutions on a daily basis. Do check it out! Toby Green, Publisher, Policy Commons