What Should Think Tanks Do?: A Strategic Guide to Policy Impact 9780804789295

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W H A T T H I N K

S H O U L D

T A N K S

D O ?

T H E

W O O D R O W

W I L S O N

C E N T E R

The Wilson Center, chartered by Congress as the official memorial to President Woodrow Wilson, is the nation’s key non-partisan policy forum for tackling global issues through independent research and open dialogue to inform actionable ideas for Congress, the Administration, and the broader policy community. The Center is the home of dialogue television and radio, The WQ digital magazine, and Woodrow Wilson Center Press. Jane H ­ arman serves as the Center’s director, president, and CEO. Conclusions or opinions expressed in Center publications and programs are those of thet authors and speakers and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Center staff, fellows, trustees, advisory groups, or any individuals or organizations that provide financial support to the Center. For more information about the Wilson Center, please visit www .wilsoncenter.org.

T H E

A U T H O R

Andrew Selee is Vice President for Programs at the Wilson Center and twas the founding director of the Center’s Mexico Institute. He worked as professional staff in the U.S. Congress and with development projects in Mexico prior to joining the Center. Selee teaches courses at Johns Hopkins University and George Washington University and has published extensively on U.S.Mexico relations, immigration policy, and local governance. His op-eds have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Dallas Morning News, and other media. Through his volunteer commitments, he has served on several local and national boards of nonprofit organizations. He holds a Ph.D. in public policy from the University of Maryland.

W H A T T H I N K

S H O U L D T A N K S

D O ?

A Strategic Guide to Policy Impact

A N D R E W

S E L E E

stanford briefs An Imprint of Stanford University Press Stanford, California Woodrow Wilson Center Press Washington, D.C.

Stanford University Press Stanford, California ©2013 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved. No part of this brief may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press. Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Selee, Andrew D., author. What should think tanks do? : a strategic guide to policy impact / Andrew Selee. pages cm Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978-0-8047-8798-7 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Policy sciences—Research—United States—Management. 2. Research institutes—United States—Management. 3. Strategic planning—United States. I. Title. H97.S45 2013 001.4068'4—dc23 2013018886 ISBN 978-0-8047-8929-5 (electronic) Typeset by Classic Typography in 10/13 Adobe Garamond

CONTENTS

Preface    vii      Introduction: 1   What

Ideas That Matter   1

Do You Want to Achieve?   17

2   What

Do You Do That Makes a Unique Contributiont?   30

3   Who

Are Your Key Audiences and How Do You Reach Them?   48

4   What

Resources Do You Need and How Can You Develop Them?   65

5   How

Do You Evaluate Impact and Learn from Your Experience?   83

Notes   97 Interviews   111 Selected Readings   115

P R E FA C E

There is no easy way to plan for impact in the ever-moving terrain of policy ideas. A few years ago, as the director of the Woodrow Wilson Center’s Mexico Institute, encouraged by our board, I started off by trying to figure out how to do this better. I talked to people around the Wilson Center and at other think tanks and mined the business and nonprofit management literature for ideas, but I was troubled by the lack of a good strategy book for think tank professionals. In the end, I decided to take a shot at writing that book, if nothing else so as to learn something myself in the process. What emerged is this brief book, which is designed as a practical guide for think tank professionals—researchers, fellows, program directors, senior leaders, and board members— who want to think strategically about what they do and how they can do it better. For the sake of economy, I limited the research for this book to think tanks in the United States and kept the interviews to a manageable number that I could juggle alongside my day job. While I strove for a fair sampling of think tanks large and small, those inside the Beltway and outside of it, those that have political or ideological ends and those that don’t, it is in no way an exhaustive list, and there are many excellent organizations that are vii

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PREFACE

not mentioned. I hope they will forgive the omission and still find the conclusions useful and relevant for their work. For those who agreed to be interviewed, I am grateful they took the time to be part of this project and share their experience, and I trust that others will find it useful for their own efforts. Several people were crucial in making this book possible. First and foremost, I was fortunate during almost ten years as the director of the Wilson Center’s Mexico Institute to have an exceptional advisory board that invested in strategic planning and worked regularly through the steps discussed in this book. I am particularly grateful to Jose Antonio Fernandez Carbajal and Roger W. Wallace, co-chairs of the board, and to Guillermo Jasson, the chair of the Strategy Committee, as well as to all the other members, who have taken time twice a year to engage in strategic discussions to create, grow, and nurture the Institute. More recently, I have been fortunate to work on many of the same challenges on an institutional level as a vice president of the Wilson Center with Jane Harman, Mike Van Dusen, Peter Reid, Liz Byers, Meg King, and many other colleagues. I have benefited from their wisdom, and I also owe a special debt of gratitude to Barry Jackson, cochair of the Wilson Center’s Strategy Committee. I would also like to thank several people who provided specific guidance in preparing this project, several of whom also read parts of the manuscript and offered helpful advice. These include Don Abelson, Jim McGann, Abe Lowenthal, Demetri Papademetriou, Blair Ruble, Rusty Mikkel, Bill Antholis, John Sewell, and an anonymous reviewer from Stanford University Press. None are responsible for the final product, but all enriched the manuscript with their insights. I am also particularly grateful to Margo Beth Fleming at Stanford University Press for believing in this project and for her crucial advice in editing and positioning the manuscript, and to Peter Reid and Joe Brinley at the Woodrow Wilson Center Press.

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Finally, I am eternally grateful to my wife, Alejandra Vallejo, who has been both my companion in life and a source of intellectual inspiration, and to our daughter, Lucia, who reminds me every day that the truly important things in life are as much the product of serendipity and inspiration as strategy.

I N T R O D U C T I O N : I D E A S T H AT M AT T E R

The Center for Global Development (CGD), founded by development economist Nancy Birdsall, had decided that it needed to do something about preventable diseases for which vaccines could be created but for which market forces alone would not push the research and production of the vaccines to the finish line. After looking at several options, the staff settled on a pilot program to address pneumococcal diseases—pneumonia, meningitis, and related illnesses—that claim more than a million children’s lives a year, mostly among the world’s poor. Led by a nonresident fellow, Harvard professor Michael Kramer, and Senior Fellow Ruth Levine, CGD launched a working group in 2003 called Making Markets for Vaccines to figure out if it would be possible to get an advanced market commitment—essentially an upfront agreement by governments to buy the vaccines once they were successfully produced—in order to spur private research. Working closely with international institutions and individuals knowledgeable about public health programs and the pharmaceutical business, the CGD task force was able to develop a plan to spur innovation in vaccine research, built around a specific example. The report laid out the rationale and concept and, including model term sheets that could form the legal basis for a binding 1

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purchase agreement. The task force’s work led a coalition of governments, some of which had participated in the research process, along with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, to commit over $1.5 billion to purchase pneumococcal vaccines once they were produced successfully. This commitment, in turn, generated a round of private investment into tailoring pneumococcal vaccines for low-income countries, and by 2010 the vaccines were being successfully produced and distributed in countries around the world.1 What was once an ambitious, though not particularly controversial idea, has now become a reality because CGD made sure the necessary research was done and sufficient stakeholder buy-in was achieved to move the issue forward in a practical way. Over the past two decades, a very different organization, the liberal Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP), has had a central role in getting the earned income tax credit (EITC) approved in twenty-five U.S. states. Dedicated to presenting economic data that can support policies to alleviate poverty, CBPP has built a network of state organizations with the capacity to research and promote new policy ideas to help poor families. Nick Johnson, who runs CBPP’s state alliance program, notes that the organization’s efforts on economic and social policy have grown exponentially because of this network, which allows state-level organizations to coordinate with each other and with CBPP, thus enhancing all of the partners’ impact. Johnson notes that it all comes back to “the credibility of the research” and to “clear and compelling messaging,” finding the intersection between the substance of CBPP’s economic work and the ability to advocate successfully for policy changes. Legislation on EITC, which was only an embryonic idea in the late 1980s, has now spread to half the country, largely because of the work of this extensive but wellintegrated network supported by CBPP.2 A few blocks away, the conservative Heritage Foundation set a very different goal. Realizing that the newly created Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was still in a formative stage, it

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decided to help the Bush administration work on how to structure and consolidate the department. Heritage hired James Jay Carafano, a former Army lieutenant colonel with a doctorate in government, to lead the effort. Over the next few years, he would become intimately engaged in every aspect of DHS’s plans. He offered advice and expertise to department staff, held public forums, hosted congressional briefings, prepared policy papers, and conducted endless media interviews to influence the direction of the department’s development. Heritage had realized early on that DHS needed strategic guidance, and it used its ties to Republican lawmakers and Bush administration officials—and a professional expertise that won respect in both parties—to create a role for itself in this process. Carafano’s work would leave a powerful imprint on the new cabinet department as it took its first steps.3 Meanwhile, Geoff Dabelko, who ran the Woodrow Wilson Center’s Environmental Change and Security Program (ECSP) for fifteen years, pursued a different path to shaping policy debates. Created in the mid-1990s to bridge the divide between environmental organizations and the security establishment, which was increasingly worried about environmental threats to stability around the world, ECSP worked tirelessly to bring people from two separate and mutually suspicious policy communities together to share ideas and develop new paradigms to face emerging threats. Over time, the work evolved to include health and population issues and their intersection with environmental concerns and security threats. Ideas developed in ECSP forums found their way into the president’s National Intelligence Estimate on Environmental Security; Tom Friedman’s best-selling book, Hot, Flat, and Crowded; and dozens of high-level meetings in the administration, Congress, and international organizations. The program initially started a written report, but by 2007 the platform went virtual with the widely consulted New Security Beat blog, which has become a reference point for environmental activists, demographers, public health professionals, and security

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specialists, an eclectic but suddenly connected group. This virtual meeting place has generated original and often pathbreaking discussions about issues that otherwise would be limited by disciplinary and professional blinders, and helped create a new field of study that merged security, health, and environmental concerns.4 Each of these four organizations believed that ideas had power to shape public policy in innovative and meaningful ways, and all were committed to ensuring that their efforts would have a profound impact on the issues they work on. And what all four organizations shared, in addition to a desire to generate impact, was a strategy for doing so. These organizations were successful at what they set out to do because they had a clear idea of the change they wanted to achieve, and they got there by finding the set of activities with which they could make a unique difference, through engaging key target audiences and by leveraging needed resources. Moreover, all four had internal feedback systems that allowed them to evaluate what they were doing and to adjust to meet new challenges, which helped them stay relevant over time as circumstances around them changed. This book looks at how successful think tanks develop systematic approaches to planning for impact and how they learn from the experience so that they make the greatest possible difference on public ideas and policy decisions. A S T R AT E G I C A P P ROA C H

Generating and sharing policy ideas—the basic work of think tanks—can change the way that the general public and key audiences think about an important issue, bring new issues to the fore, and provide alternatives for decision makers to consider. However, generating and promoting ideas that can influence policy and public thinking is no easy business. It requires strategic thinking, credible research, and a clear communications plan. Millions of dollars are spent each year trying to accomplish this through think tanks.5 Most have a general idea of what they want to accomplish but not all have a clear plan to ensure success.

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This book looks at how organizations that invest in ideas about public policies—whether entire think tanks or their individual research programs—can be successful by being more strategic in their approach. It focuses exclusively on think tanks in the United States; however, many of its lessons may well be relevant to some of the institutional challenges that think tanks in other countries face. Some of the findings will also likely be useful for others who aspire to achieve policy impact through research programs at universities, advocacy organizations, business associations, and other nonprofits. Getting new ideas into the public sphere or shaping the way that policymakers and the public understand issues requires careful planning as well as solid research and a respected institutional or personal reputation.6 There is no single accepted definition of a think tank, but they are, in political scientist Donald Abelson’s words, “in the business of developing, repackaging and marketing ideas to policy-makers and the public.”7 Or, as James McGann, director of the Think Tanks Project, notes, “organizations that generate policy-oriented research, analysis, and advice on domestic and international issues in an effort to enable policymakers and the public to make informed decisions about public policy issues.”8 As of 2012, McGann had documented 1,823 think tanks in the United States, with 550 in and around the nation’s capital, roughly 30 percent of the total, and another 176 in Massachusetts, 170 in California, and 143 in New York. These numbers suggest that think tanks are concentrated in only a few states, but they are present to some extent everywhere.9 If the United States has the largest concentration of think tanks, they are by no means only a U.S. phenomenon; indeed U.S. think tanks are only a quarter of the total worldwide, according to McGann.10 The specific impact of policy research from these institutions is often hard to gauge. Influence tends to be “highly episodic, arbitrary, and difficult to predict,” observes former Council on Foreign Relations president Leslie Gelb.11 Many other groups, political agendas, and critical events intervene in policy decisions, and may

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have as much or more impact than think tanks, which are in the business of developing and sharing policy ideas. Moreover, Fred Bergsten, founding president of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, notes that almost all of his institution’s greatest successes have been the result of long-term investments in research. “Think tank work at its finest” he notes, involves “ten years from inception of idea to implementation of idea,” even if there are intermediate successes along the way.12 The specific impact of policy research is always somewhat uncertain and needs to be measured with a long time horizon. How then can think tanks plan for impact when much of what they hope to achieve—changing people’s frameworks for looking at issues, developing new ideas for public policy, or building new fields of knowledge—are, by nature, long-term processes whose success can only be measured in years (if not decades) and may never quite materialize in the way that researchers would like? Ruth Levine, formerly of CGD and now at the Hewlett Foundation, notes that the key is to start by “thinking what the outcome should be and then putting together the steps” to get there.13 This means starting out in inverse order—with an intended outcome in mind—and figuring out what might get you there, even knowing that the nature of the policy process may take to you different outcomes along the way. It turns out that this is precisely what successful think tanks do. The most successful policy research efforts almost always start by setting clear goals and then asking a series of crucial follow-up questions about what the organization does best; who its audiences are and how to reach them; what human, financial, and other resources it will need along the way; and how it can keep track of its efforts and measure impact. Indeed, successful policy research organizations are almost single-mindedly obsessed with these questions, whether they look at them through formal strategic planning processes or just through ongoing internal discussions. While there is no guarantee in a chaotic policymaking environment that

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this intense focus on strategy will lead to unmitigated success, creating a roadmap up front can help you get there. We will return in a moment to the key strategic questions that successful think tanks ask themselves, the questions that constitute the foundation for this book. However, it is worth looking first at what policy researchers consider “impact” before we look at how they go about trying to achieve it. A P P R O A C H E S TO I M PA C T A N D T H E P O L I C Y C Y C L E

Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, housed at the New America Foundation, has taken on a multi-trillion-dollar challenge: to create bipartisan options for reducing the country’s federal budget deficit. When asked about how she evaluates success, she notes, only half-­jokingly, that “nothing [we do] has succeeded because we still have a giant deficit.”14 She is, of course, more than a little correct. If we judge organizations dedicated to working on policy ideas by whether they are successful in getting policy implemented, most would probably fail most of the time. But MacGuineas also observes that the Committee has spent years “[g]etting ready so that if the political moment comes along we have everything to get it on the agenda.”15 Judged by less ambitious, but no less important, standards, the Committee has been a resounding success. It has become a reference point for new ideas on how to cut the budget deficit, created a safe political space for Democrats and Republicans to talk with each other about policy options, and built the intellectual foundations for the work that major budget commissions and congressional groups have undertaken in recent years. These efforts only become more relevant as the deficit grows and politicians are looking for new ideas and for neutral ground on which to explore them. Think tanks and policy research programs are dedicated to the belief that ideas matter for politics. Edward Djerejian, the founding

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director of the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy, ob­serves, “Public policy is not only about interests, it is about ideas.”16 Indeed, most policies that are eventually implemented begin as ideas that float around and are discussed among experts, interest groups, and policymakers long before there is a political opening that allows policy to be made on the issue.17 To be sure, think tanks do not have a monopoly on policy ideas. There is no shortage of ideas that come out of traditional academic institutions, advocacy groups, the private sector, and other sources. However, think tanks are structurally set up to produce, analyze, and share policy ideas in agile and often effective ways and to make sure they reach key policy audiences and attentive publics. According to the distinguished economist Murray Weidenbaum, “for very practical reasons, think tanks have a special potential to play a key role in responding to fundamental but urgent issues.”18 This potential derives from their basic design, which includes a mixture of research capacity, convening power, and communication skills that target key policy and public audiences. The first challenge for these organizations is to understand the dynamics of the policy process itself and where their ideas can have the greatest impact. In general terms, the policy cycle has three stages in which policy research can help shape outcomes: framing ideas and issues; providing policy alternatives; and shaping decision making (Figure I.1).19 The first stage, framing ideas and issues, takes place on an ongoing basis. Policy organizations and researchers can often help decision makers, experts, and the general public understand issues and ideas in new ways through analysis and public dialogue. These efforts can include everything from exploring the historical, economic, and political context of issues to providing new information on how issues are seen outside the capital or outside the country. In some cases, policy researchers focus explicitly on educating policymakers in the executive and legislative branches (whether national or local government), but others focus extensively on educating other opinion leaders, grassroots

INTRODUCTION: IDEAS THAT MATTER

Framing Ideas and Issues

Providing Policy Alternatives

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Shaping Decision Making

figure I.1.  Stages in the policy cycle

movements, or the public at large. The Wilson Center’s Environmental Change and Security Program, for example, has largely directed its efforts at framing ideas in ways that help policymakers, advocates, and the public understand them in new ways. Other institutions focus on the second stage in the policy process by providing policy alternatives on specific issues. The Center for Global Development’s research on making markets for vaccines falls squarely into this category, as does the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget’s efforts to develop blueprints for deficit reduction and CBPP’s work to develop a model for the earned income tax credit. In all of these cases, these efforts have sought to develop new ideas that may eventually find their way into actual policies. Rarely do researchers have the ability to choose the timing of how issues move onto the public agenda, so most ideas are developed in the hope that they will, over time, gain acceptance and become influential when there is a political opening that forces policymakers to focus on that particular issue. John Sewell, a senior scholar at the Wilson Center and the former president of the Overseas Development Council (ODC), observes that advocacy organizations and interest groups generally do a much better job at the hard work of raising issues than at putting them on the political agenda.20 Most new ideas take time to mature, and decision making on issues tends to be driven by political events outside of researchers’ control. TheFigure Committee I.1 for a Responsible Federal Budget’s patient search for solutions SELEE to the budget deficit and CBPP’s long-term advocacyWhat for the EITC Think over two decades Should Tanks Do? are far closer to the norm in how978-0-8047-8798-7 new ideas slowly gain influence over time as political events bring issues to the fore.

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Finally, there are a few think tanks that are experienced at the third stage, shaping decision making by influencing policymaking as it happens. Relatively few think tanks are well equipped to do this, because it requires an intimate knowledge of the political system and close, almost organic relations with decision makers. The Heritage Foundation’s work on homeland security is a successful example of this. The Heritage Foundation is particularly well placed to influence decisions as they happen because it has invested heavily in close ties with politicians and their staff who share the same conservative philosophy. Heritage is also particularly adept at producing brief analyses of pending legislation and providing talking points to members of Congress shortly before crucial votes take place. Despite notable exceptions, such as Heritage, most think tanks tend to be most influential in the stages of framing and policy alternatives, while interest groups tend to be most influential during the decision-making phase.21 Think tank scholar Andrew Rich argues that “[p]olicy research can help to define the boundaries of problems and the dimensions of interventions before issues even receive serious debate,” and, as a result, “Opportunities for experts to be influential are greatest early in the policy process.”22 However, clear exceptions abound, as the example above of the Heritage Foundation suggests. “Think tanks, like world class athletes, play to their strengths,” observes Abelson, and different issue areas and specific issue debates open up entirely different possibilities for the influence of those in the marketplace of ideas.23 The preceding discussion highlights the fact that there are two different kinds of think tanks, those that have an ideological or political agenda, such as the Heritage Foundation and CBPP, and those that publicly and consciously eschew ideological identification, such as the Wilson Center, the New America Foundation, and CGD. The first group includes such well-known organizations as the Center for American Progress (CAP), the Cato Institute, the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), and the Institute for

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Policy Studies (IPS), which pursue agendas specifically linked to ideological positions.24 Around the country there are dozens of these organizations, usually with a local or regional focus. They exist to develop ideas that will move forward their particular view of a good society, and they tend to be closely linked with politicians and interest groups that share their vision. These groups often have a greater ability to influence policy decisions themselves, since they are enmeshed in the political networks of politicians who make the decisions, but they have a more narrow partisan appeal. The second group of think tanks, which avoids political or ideological identification, is guided by the notion that reasoned debate and analysis can lead to a better understanding of key public policy issues. Among other well-known organizations that fit into this category are the Brookings Institution, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the Baker Institute, the Peterson Institute for International Economics, the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, the Migration Policy Institute (MPI), the Center for Global Development (CGD), the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), the Pacific Council on International Policy (PCIP), the Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC), and the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). In the case of a few of these organizations, observers may ascribe a particularly ideological leaning to them or to their particular programs, and some may have limits to their objectivity, but they do not have an overall ideological purpose that guides a consistent approach to policy analysis. Rather, all are committed to the notion that research and dialogue can inform policy debates in important ways. Within this category, there are a few organizations, including the RAND Corporation and the Urban Institute, which are dedicated primarily to highly technical analysis of the effectiveness and potential of public policy. While most think tanks focus on ideas, these organizations are more concerned with facts and correlations. Their research often directs policymakers to move in new

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directions and develop new approaches, as we will see later on, but these organizations generally prefer to let their findings speak for themselves rather than propose new ideas for policy. Similarly, the Pew Research Center is part of a separate (and rare) strain of organizations that focus primarily on polling and demographic data, eschewing the battle of ideas in favor of the presentation of data. The Pew Center considers itself a “fact tank” dedicated to the power of information.25 The desire to inform instead of influence, however, does not mean an absence of perspective or a disinterest in impact. As we will see through the examples presented in the remaining chapters, all strategic think tanks, whether they have an ideological agenda or not, seek to have an impact on public ideas and public policy; they just take different routes to get there. T H E F I V E S T R AT E G I C QU E S T I O N S

Successful think tanks and policy research programs all share a single way of approaching their work that helps increase their chances of success. Organizations as distinct as those mentioned earlier all seem to follow a similar template in terms of their thinking, even while they pursue strikingly different objectives and do so with dramatically different formats for planning. This is also true whether they are large, diversified institutions such as the Brookings Institution, the Heritage Foundation, and the Baker Institute; more compact, focused institutions such as the Center for Global Development, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, and the Migration Policy Institute; or even specific programs within institutions, such as the Wilson Center’s ECSP, New America Foundation’s Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, or many university-based research centers. What they do have in common is that they ask—in one way or another—the same set of five strategic questions (Figure I.2).

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What does the organization want to achieve? What does the organization do that makes a unique contribution? Who are the organization’s key audiences and how does it reach them? What resources does the organization need and how can it develop them? How does the organization evaluate impact and learn from its experience? figure I.2.  The five strategic questions

The first question is What does the organization want to achieve? Finding the organization’s core mission—what it aspires to achieve over time—provides the guide that allows everyone within the organization to remain on the same page and focused despite multiple activities and changing strategies. Finding what, specifically, the organization wants to achieve in the short term is critical for focusing these efforts for impact. In large organizations, goal-­setting often addresses big picture changes, while specific goal-setting on initiatives is left to the individual programs or researchers. Achievement-oriented goals that spell out what the organization wants to accomplish are also critical for assessing success and learning from experience. The second question is What does the organization do that makes a unique contribution? Deciding an organization’s comparative advantage requires finding the intersection between what the organization (or program) does well and what needs exist in the policy environment. In some cases, organizations address issues

Figure I.2 SELEE What Should Think Tanks Do?

978-0-8047-8798-7

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that no others have dealt with sufficiently; in other cases, an institution’s unique marker is ideological—it represents a particular viewpoint on the issue or it is uniquely positioned to be neutral when others are not; and in still other cases it can be geographical, if it is the only institution in a particular city or region dealing with the issue. To decide comparative advantage, organizations also need to know what they do well, whether it is developing original ideas, conducting policy analysis, or providing a convening space. The third question is Who are the organization’s key audiences and how does it reach them? For organizations focused on impact, quality work in a unique niche is not enough; the products also have to reach intended target audiences. In many cases, the target audiences are policymakers in specific positions of influence, but just as often they may be key opinion leaders, other researchers, grassroots organizations, the media, or the public at large. Reaching different audiences requires segmented outreach strategies that allow researchers to target different audiences with the most effective formats for their needs. The advent of social media, including blogs, Facebook, and Twitter, has vastly increased the opportunities for outreach, but these new technologies have also created a more crowded marketplace for ideas that organizations have to contend with.26 New technologies, and the increasing number of issues that are truly international, have also allowed think tanks to be increasingly global in their audiences and even sometimes in their structures.27 The fourth question is What resources does the organization need and how can it develop them? Successful organizations share a belief that resources follow vision and strategy, not the other way around, but finding resources to implement ambitious goals is still paramount for execution, and the nature of the institution’s resource engine—what its funding looks like and what kind of staffing it has—often helps shape its goals and the kinds of activities it can undertake. There are four key sets of resources critical to

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any successful think tank or policy research program: human resources, which include staff, scholars, and boards, who constitute the organization’s intellectual capital; financial resources from grants, contracts, project income, individual and corporate donations, and endowment income; partnerships with like-minded organizations, which allow organizations to multiply their impact; and reputation (brand), which attracts attention and talent. Finding the right intersection between what the organization wants to do (question one), what it does well (questions two and three), and what its resource base is (question four) is critical.28 However, there is no area of think tank work with more pitfalls and dangers, ranging from inadequate funding to poor human resource management to funders’ attempts to exert control over programming. Resource management is almost always the most challenging arena of think tank development, but successful organizations find ways to integrate it effectively within their goals and their plan of action rather than do it as a stand-alone activity. Finally, the fifth question is How does the organization evaluate impact and learn from its experience? Successful organizations try to understand their successes and failures and shift their future goals and strategy on the basis of this learning process. One of the most difficult challenges for think tanks and policy research programs, given the uncertain nature of links between ideas and actual policy outcomes, is measuring impact. However, organizations that have clear goals up front can develop systematic approaches to knowing whether they are successful or not—or, at least, if they are moving in the right direction toward their goals. Effective evaluations re­quire separating three sets of measurements and tracking them systematically: inputs (resources), outputs (events, publications, media citations, web hits, and so on), and outcomes (actual impact on policy ideas and decisions). The first two of these usually can be measured quantitatively and tracked regularly. The third one, evaluating outcomes, requires developing a rigorous approach to ongoing qualitative analysis. Successful think tanks and think tank

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programs find creative ways to build periodic assessment into their operations. The chapters in this book address each of these five questions in depth with concrete examples of how actual think tanks and their programs have dealt with each of them. There is an enormous variety of ways in which organizations answer these questions, yet what remains consistent is that all of the most successful institutions and programs appear to follow the same basic process to plan for impact. To be sure, many successful organizations are more consciously focused on some of the questions than on others, but all seem to touch on all of them in some ways. And what is perhaps most significant, as we will see in Chapter 1, is that the most successful organizations don’t just invest in formal strategic planning processes, they build the five questions into their institutional DNA so that they are asking these questions over and over again in their daily work. Strategy is less about stand-alone planning and more about developing a repertoire for understanding the organization’s work as it takes place, with specific planning exercises when the organization is going through a time of change.

1   W H AT D O YO U W A N T TO AC H I E V E ?

When Marshall Bouton took over as president of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs in 2001, he knew he had a major challenge in front of him. The Chicago Council remained one of the premiere foreign policy think tanks outside Washington, D.C., but it had become increasingly inward looking and regionally focused, despite the success of its popular biennial survey of U.S. public opinion on global issues. He soon launched a strategic planning process that involved the Chicago Council’s board, staff, and key stakeholders, and included a consulting role by the private firm McKinsey. The most important question on the table was how to transform the Chicago Council’s identity from an elite local forum for the discussion of ideas to a generator of new thinking for national debates on global affairs that could take advantage of its strategic position in the Midwest. Bouton notes that “in this day and age, you can’t be effective as an organization unless you produce intellectual capital. . . . [you need] both presentation and production.”1 The strategic plan, which ultimately was approved by the board in 2005, revisited the organization’s very essence—what its mission was—and set a series of ambitious, achievement-oriented goals for the following five years. 17

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Central to the new strategy was the idea of positioning the Chicago Council as both a locally grounded and a nationally relevant policy organization. As a result of the planning process, the Chicago Council began to designate half of its funding to global and national projects, although many of these remained firmly rooted in its geographical concerns, issues for which the Chicago Council had a comparative advantage. Two of its major task forces, for example, focused on food policy, a significant concern in the country’s heartland, and on Muslims in the United States, given the high proportion of U.S. Muslims living in the upper Midwest. Both received extensive national and international attention since they also dealt with issues of national and global importance, although they built on issues of concern to the organization’s local membership. The Chicago Council has consciously used its identity in the heartland to position its research agenda. According to Bouton, “We’re not located in the political capital, Washington, or the international capital, New York, but we are still the premiere commercial city, located in the heartland, and it makes sense to leverage that location.” Indeed, the Chicago Council found that this planning process thoroughly transformed the institution. Its revenues rose from $4.8 million to $7.3 million in five years; attendance at its “Chicago Forum” programs jumped by more than 50 percent; membership increased by 49 percent; and its task forces, studies, and policy briefs received national attention and positioned the Chicago Council as a major force in international policy discussions.2 Indeed, the capstone event for its research on food policy was a major conference on food security in Washington, D.C., in 2012 that featured the president of the United States, the secretary of state, and three African heads of state, as well as other luminaries, and set the stage for concrete decisions on food security at the meeting of G-8 leaders later that week. By gaining clarity on its mission as an institution, discovering its comparative advantages, and setting ambitious but reachable

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goals, the Chicago Council was able to position itself for a new role in public debate and to have both a local and national impact on issues of concern to its members. REVIEWING AND RENEWING THE MISSION

Every successful journey starts by asking why. Organizations that know what motivates them and what they hope to achieve over time—their big-picture goals—are far more likely to make an impact than those that do not. Having a clear mission statement that captures the aspirations of the organization is an essential starting point for any planning process, whether it is a structured strategic planning exercise or a more ad hoc process. Indeed, the central role of having a clear mission to achieving success is true in think tanks, in other nonprofit organizations, and even in business.3 The first crucial step for the Chicago Council in setting off on a new course was to rethink its mission statement. The old mission statement read, The Chicago Council on Foreign Relations is an independent, nonprofit, nonpartisan organization committed to building global awareness in Chicago and the Midwest and contributing to the national and international discourse on the great issues of our time.

The revised statement approved in 2005 read, The Chicago Council on Foreign Relations is a leading independent nonpartisan organization committed to influencing the discourse on global issues through contributions to opinion and policy formation, leadership dialogue and public learning [italics added].4

The new mission highlighted two changes that the Chicago Council board and staff wanted to make to their role. It would be a “leading” organization and it would be “committed to influencing the discourse on global issues,” not merely “committed to building global awareness.” The revised mission statement pointed

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in the direction in which the organization hoped to go and set a roadmap that it could follow into the future. The Brookings Institution underwent a similar strategic planning process soon after Strobe Talbott took over the presidency of the institution in 2002. Brookings, however, decided not to address the decades-old mission statement directly as much as try to understand the core values that make the institution tick and are the basis of the mission statement. Through a series of discussions first among the institution’s senior leadership and then throughout the institution, staff settled on a set of three concepts that encapsulated the core values: “quality, independence, and impact.” This became a useful motto for the organization’s external relations, but more important, the leadership and research staff used this exercise to develop an understanding of their living mission in today’s context. Each word was the subject of extensive reflection and consensus building, as managing director Bill Antholis, who helped Talbott lead this planning process, observes. The term quality had implications for both hiring personnel and setting quality standards for institution outputs. Independence meant more than nonpartisanship, a term that was discarded during the process; it implied that researchers had to begin from a position of independence that leaves aside preconceptions and easy answers. Meanwhile, to understand impact, participants actually developed an entire theory of change, which was published as part of the first long-term strategic plan. Researchers are now asked each year to develop an impact statement for their work, which identifies how their efforts relate to this theory of change. The Brookings’ form of strategic planning departed from the traditional model of rewriting the mission statement itself and instead encouraged staff to reinterpret the mission in terms that had contemporary meaning for their work.5 In many ways, Brookings’s approach stands as the gold standard for how to transform an institution of its size and history within a few years by getting people to focus on the key elements of what it

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is they do and why they do it. Far from an academic exercise, this effort to rethink core values eventually led to a five-year strategic plan and to significant changes in the way the institution operates, including developing a set of cross-cutting initiatives and beefing up Brookings’s outreach efforts. By starting with a conversation about what the institution’s core values were—the mission’s meaning in today’s world—staff were able to arrive at a set of practical steps that they then needed to follow to implement the core values.6 It often makes sense for programs within a think tank to have their own mission statements, consistent with the institution’s overall mission, especially if they have their own internal planning processes. The Woodrow Wilson Center’s Mexico Institute, for example, has a mission statement that dates from its beginnings in 2003, but in 2008 the Institute’s advisory board revised it as the first step in a long-term planning process. As with the Chicago Council, the main question was one of moving from an emphasis on “presentation” (convening events) to “presentation and production” (convening and developing new ideas). The board added a phrase about “developing new policy options” to the existing mission statement to emphasize a new direction in developing innovative ideas for policy that could cut across national and party lines. That change had significant implications that helped sharpen the Mexico Institute’s focus on new ideas, expand the range of impact, and eventually bring in new sources of funding. While not all organizations need to spend time talking about their mission statement, it is a critical thing to do at the beginning of a process of significant institutional change—perhaps the most important thing to do. However, during normal times successful organizations often find other ways of embedding the mission in everything they do, keeping it present as a guide for their efforts. That does not necessarily mean plastering it on every document (although some organizations do put a short-hand version of it on their documents), but rather making sure that the organization’s

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core purpose is at the center of the organization’s reflections on goal-setting. Many successful organizations live their mission rather than discuss it,7 but it may still be worth pulling the actual statement out from time to time, dusting it off, and making sure it remains a relevant source of inspiration. S E T T I N G A C H I E V E M E N T- O R I E N T E D G O A L S

When the Wilson Center’s Mexico Institute decided to change its mission to include a greater focus on “policy options” it also set a number of ambitious goals. These included creating a major task force on U.S.-Mexico relations during 2008, an election year, and conducting a series of additional specific studies on four topics (security, economic integration, migration, and border issues) decided by the board in consultation with staff. The plan also called for a specific media outreach plan, and a new speaker’s forum for high-level public figures from Mexico. All of these goals were clear and measurable, and had targeted dates for implementation. The Institute thus turned an aspirational statement, the mission, into a series of action statements, the goals, which provided a clear roadmap for implementation.8 If the mission statement provides the organization’s purpose for existing, the goals lay out the specific things that the organization wants to achieve in the short to medium term. For a policy research organization undergoing change, or simply looking at its next year of activities, these are often new initiatives and special areas of emphasis. As Paul Brest and Hal Harvey, the authors of Money Well Spent: A Strategic Plan for Smart Philanthropy, write, “Your chances of success are greatly increased by having well-defined goals and a sound strategic plan to achieve them. The goals should describe what success should look like. . . . ”9 Having goals that are achievement-oriented also helps in evaluating success and learning from experience. As we will see in Chapter 5, evaluating impact depends a great deal on deciding prospectively what impact looks like at the

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outset. It is hard to measure success if you do not start off with an idea of what you want to achieve. Similarly, when the Chicago Council revised its mission statement, it also set four practical goals in its strategic plan that flowed from its new purpose: (1) strengthen its forum in Chicago; (2) expand its contributions to national and international discourse; (3) develop a broad, sustainable base of long-term financial support; and (4) reposition itself in the perceptions of national and international leaders. Each of these goals was then broken down into component parts that set tangible markers for what success should look like.10 For the Brookings Institution, goal-setting included two major initiatives considered priorities by fellows and staff: first, developing a new outreach strategy and, second, creating five cross-cutting issues that would bring together fellows across different programs to work together. Considerable details were dedicated to what these changes would look like and what they entailed. In the second Brookings strategic plan, a different set of four cross-cutting issues were agreed on for the next five years on the basis of issues that had then become salient. Brookings, unlike the Chicago Council and the Wilson Center’s Mexico Institute, is a highly complex organization with a budget over $80 million a year and five semi-autonomous programs that, in turn, include several centers, each with its own purpose and individual goals. In the largest think tanks, goal-setting at an institutional level is often less about setting specific program directions than it is about determining general directions and specific benchmarks for the health of the institution as a whole. In these organizations, specific programmatic goals are often best set at the level of programs or centers, which generally have their own specific purposes and planning processes within the larger institution. In contrast, the Chicago Council, which is a medium-sized think tank, has greater ability to set specific goals at the institution-wide level, and the Wilson Center’s Mexico Institute, which is a program

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within a larger institution, can be quite specific in its programmatic goal-setting. If mission statements inspire people to action and point the compass in the direction along which common efforts should go, achievement-oriented goals actually lay out the specific path to follow and provide clear targets. Institutions without a clear mission and goals often find themselves headed in several directions at once and lacking a sense of common purpose that gives structure to the many efforts undertaken, even if they are each worthy in their own right. D E V E LO P I N G A S S E S S M E N T TO O L S

Before setting goals, it is useful to undertake a series of assessments that help the organization position itself. Most of these exercises are the subject of the next three chapters, which are about deciding on unique programming lanes, identifying key audiences, and setting in motion a plan to build the resource base. However, before we go any further, it is worth laying out the series of questions an organization may want to ask before it sets its goals. First, What does the organization do well and not do well? Knowing the relative strengths of the organization is crucial to setting realistically ambitious goals. Everything from geographical location, institutional mandate, staff skill sets, ideological orientation, and past experience helps determine what organizations do well. It is sometimes worth pushing the organization to move into new kinds of activities, as the Chicago Council and the Wilson Center’s Mexico Institute did by beefing up their intellectual production activities, but this requires developing new institutional muscles. Organizations that do this need to consciously dedicate staff and financial resources to developing these new capacities. In some cases, organizations would do well to accept their limitations and concentrate on what they do best. The Center for Global Development (CGD) does an admirable job of producing

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innovative ideas for policy that can help reduce child mortality and poverty in the developing world, but it consciously hands off the advocacy work to other organizations once it has developed the ideas and built a degree of initial support among key stakeholders. The Wilson Center, which is not only a think tank but also a presidential memorial to Woodrow Wilson, steadfastly avoids controversial issues that could put its status as a federal trust in jeopardy. The Chicago Council, which is a member-driven organization, likes to make sure it has a base of members who will provide support for an initiative before it starts. In doing an assessment on institutional strengths and weaknesses, it is also worth asking specifically about whether there are institutional opportunities or threats that may emerge in the future. Leadership changes, shifts in funding availability, and other organizations entering or exiting the field can affect the organization’s ability to meet its goals effectively. These types of changes can sometimes be positive opportunities, such as the availability of new funding streams or the addition of new talent that enhances institutional capacity, but they can also be potential threats, such as economic downturns and leadership changes that set progress back. Second, organizations need to assess, What are the needs and opportunities in the organization’s field? Figuring out which issues best respond to the organization’s mission is a key element of strategic thinking. Reflecting ahead of time about what events may drive policy discussions in the organization’s field of work—elections, major policy debates, international events, or likely crises— helps in identifying opportunities that the organization can take advantage of in its programming.11 The decision by the Wilson Center’s Mexico Institute to do a major study on U.S.-Mexico relations during an election year is an example of this kind of approach. Nick Johnson notes that the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) tries to find out “Where’s the intersection between our expertise and the policy opportunities and threats?” CBPP constantly reevaluates its work to adapt to a shifting policy environment

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nationally and in states around the country. This too is one of the great successes of the Heritage Foundation. It is, according to vice president James Jay Carafano, a “soup to nuts” operation, with both robust long-term planning and the ability to pivot quickly to respond to issues as they emerge. Heritage has a long-term blueprint for its strategy, “Leadership for America,” which is based on ten major national challenges, but it also makes sure to assign staff to cover current events and future issues as they emerge. Carafano calculates that staff spend roughly 60 percent of their time on the long-term strategic issues and another 40 percent responding to current issues as they emerge.12 Third, strategic planning needs to take into account, Who are the intended audiences for the organization’s work? Unlike academic institutions, which seek to produce new knowledge for the sake of expanding the horizons of a field, policy research actively seeks to put practical information and analysis in the hands of opinion leaders, who shape policy debates, and decision makers, who make the final choices. As we will see in Chapter 3, the decision about who the target audience for a particular project is—and it varies widely from organization to organization and project to project—can strongly influence the goals and the means chosen for reaching them. Finally, organizations cannot plan without knowing, What are the resources available to sustain the work? As we will discuss more extensively in Chapter 4, key resources include funding, staffing, and reputation, as well as partnerships with other organizations. Finding the intersection between what the organization wants to do (its mission), what it can do well and is needed in the field, and what resources are available to do this, is a central challenge for any policy research organization, as it is for any nonprofit or for-profit organization.13 Analyzing resource availability before setting goals is a wise idea. Organizations that have large endowments or strong core funding from outside donors may have greater liberty to set goals without worrying about funding, but even in these cases,

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funding is never infinite, and for most organizations it is a key constraint for carrying out their preferred activities. Ideas should always precede funding, not the other way around, but realistic expectations about funding are still essential for setting realistic goals. S T R AT E G I C P L A N N I N G O R P L A N N I N G S T R AT E G I C A L LY ?

Not all organizations spend their time on strategic planning, and some of the best and most strategic think tanks and policy research programs actually eschew formal planning processes. In general, strategic planning, with a review of the mission and major goals, is very useful when an organization is going through a moment of change. This was the case with the Chicago Council and the Brookings Institution when they launched their strategic planning processes. They have continued to do strategic planning and have both gone through a second round of strategic planning as of this writing. The Wilson Center’s Mexico Institute assiduously reviews its strategic plan every year, and many other institutions do the same. However, many younger think tanks, such as the Peterson Institute for International Economics, the Baker Institute, the Center for Global Development, and the Migration Policy Institute, do not spend a lot of time reviewing their mission statements, in large part because the founders of the organization are still actively leading them and most of the staff was either present at the founding or came on board within a few years after that. The mission is lived rather than reviewed. At some point, as the organizations grow and evolve, each may well need to come back to its original mission statement and discuss it, but for now the mission is so well embedded within their work that no one feels a need to stop and talk about it. They plan strategically without ever doing strategic planning. What these organizations often do instead is set goals around particular projects, and they have a dense institutional inner life that allows them to constantly check in about whether specific

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projects are consistent with their overall purpose. The Center for Global Development, for example, vets each new project extensively before launching the first steps, trying to make sure it is consistent with the CGD’s purposes and will have a real impact on an important issue. Even the communications plan is designed up front, a couple of years before the findings of the project will be ready for release, and efforts are made along the way to build interest through targeted outreach, including blogging and interim publications, that helps ensure a broader response for the final product. “Communications and outreach are thought of at the front end,” says Sarah Jane Staats, CGD’s director of policy outreach.14 Thomas Carothers, vice president for studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, notes, “In think tanks there is a tension between asking people to take part in group activities and giving them the freedom to pursue their own activities.” Yet strategic organizations find ways of doing this.15 Carnegie, for example, has an almost weekly meeting of members of its management team with monthly meetings of all fellows and quarterly meetings of all staff from its five offices around the world. Like Carnegie, strategic organizations build a dense inner life and conscious feedback loops within the organization that allow for frequent sharing of ideas, agenda setting, and evaluation. In the Heritage Foundation, the board and senior leadership develop the long-range plan, while each center develops its annual plan on the basis of the budget cycle. Similarly, the Brookings Institution has found a way to make its long-term strategic plans relevant to individual researchers in a large institution by asking them to turn in a program plan each year that includes a description of how they will fulfill the three core values of the organization: quality, independence, and impact. The Wilson Center asks individual programs to produce two-year strategic plans to guide their efforts and to report back every six months on progress.

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Strategic planning—starting with mission review and goalsetting—has much to recommend it, and it is certainly a critical tool for organizations going through moments of transition. However, there are plenty of other ways of maintaining a focus on the mission and setting achievement-oriented goals without launching a formal strategic planning process. But while the choice of process may vary, the constant is that any institution or program, no matter the size, needs to have a clear sense of its overarching purpose (mission) and to regularly set goals that lay out what it wants to achieve.

2   W H AT D O YO U D O T H AT M A K E S A UNIQUE CONTRIBUTION?

When Jeff Faux founded the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) in 1986, he wanted to create a think tank that could use solid economic analysis to counter the success of the Heritage Foundation and its work providing the intellectual foundations for the “Reagan Revolution.” EPI sought to “rebuild the consensus implicit in the New Deal and Great Society for the future,” Faux says. “For us the point was not that there were poor people but that the sector that was feeling the pain was much bigger.” The new institution focused on working class issues, including the decline of manufacturing and the effects of trade on jobs. It received considerable support from labor unions but intentionally maintained an independent position vis-à-vis the labor movement. From the beginning, EPI was based on economic analysis. Given the discredit that liberal ideas faced in the 1980s, “We had to have something that was more than just a position paper,” according to Faux. “The way you get into the serious debates is with serious numbers.” Providing timely, factual analysis that supports its positions, EPI has grown in just over two-and-a-half decades from a two-person operation to a significant think tank with eight researchers with doctoral degrees, a large research support staff, and a major communications office. EPI’s flagship 30

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publication, The State of Working America, published almost since the beginning, has become a key reference work for economic statistics, and EPI data are widely quoted in many mainstream economic publications that may well differ with the think tank’s conclusions.1 While EPI has focused primarily on economic analysis to support liberal economic proposals, Rick Hess, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), has become a leading voice on education policy by developing new ideas that have an impact on education policy in the medium to long term. Although he considers himself a conservative at a conservative think tank, his work is widely consulted by a range of education reform advocates, including many who consider themselves ardent Democrats and passionate liberals. Hess has little patience with shifting policy debates and the short-term calculations of political Washington. He consciously shapes his research to address “how people are going to be thinking about these issues down the road.” He looks for new ideas that could be picked up eventually by foundations, state governments, school districts, congressional staff, and opinion leaders in education policy. He tries to “offer a way of thinking of these issues,” innovations that he feels can energize public education. A prolific author, Hess has written and edited over two dozen books on education policy. When he edits books, he deliberately looks for a mix of scholars, education entrepreneurs, and education providers to bring different conversations together. His goal is to lay down “intellectual markers” on issues that he feels can generate systematic change over time. He and his colleagues at AEI’s Education Policy Studies program, which he directs, also convene two working groups that meet twice a year, one on higher education and one on K–12 education. As with his writing, his goal is to bring together a cross section of practitioners and scholars, private sector and public sector leaders. And although he is emphatic that he does not actively pursue media attention or

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immediate policy impact, the reality is that his work has become a reference point for many on Capitol Hill and in the media that follow education reform issues.2 While both EPI and AEI’s Education Policy Studies program seek to influence public debate, the Pew Hispanic Center, created by the Pew Charitable Trust, has consciously eschewed taking positions and instead focused on providing polling data and facts about the growing Latino population in the United States. Roberto Suro, a former Washington Post reporter, became the Pew Hispanic Center’s first director in 2001. Suro quickly found that statistics, even without interpretation or policy recommendations, could transform the public understanding of issues and sometimes even change policies. Hundreds of federal, state, and local officials dived into the Pew Hispanic Center’s frequent reports to understand how the Latino community was growing and what Latinos thought about key issues. The media, hungry for impartial analyses, covered each new Pew Hispanic Center report with great interest, often making them front-page stories. Perhaps Suro’s most important revelation was that state and local officials, as well as local civic groups, seemed to take the greatest interest in the Center’s work, even though the center was based in Washington, D.C., and had intended to focus on national-level data. This led him to reorient the Center’s research to include even greater state and local-level detail to provide accessible and relevant local data. Without ever taking a stand on a controversial issue, Pew had discovered that credible and accessible information had the power to shape public policy debates.3 Each of these three organizations has taken a unique approach to addressing issues in their fields. There are other liberal think tanks, but none as skilled at economic data on issues affecting working-class Americans as EPI (with the partial exception of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP), which has a complementary skill set but slightly different focus). There is an endless number of experts in education, one of the country’s most

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pressing and contentious fields, which also represents a significant percentage of GDP, but most are advocates or innovators, not analysts. Rick Hess has positioned his work at AEI as an ideagenerator that can influence practitioners, funders, and policymakers, one that is conservative in a field dominated by more liberal thinkers. The Pew Hispanic Center initially had to position itself amid a vast field of Latino advocacy organizations, immigration advocacy organizations, and Latino political groups, but it has done so by being the only one focused exclusively on producing polling data and fact-based research without taking a position in contentious political debates.4 What has made these three think tank efforts so important is that they found their unique lanes in which they could make an original contribution to the field. However, there is a significant difference between advocacy and non-advocacy think tanks on the way they understand their unique lanes. Pew, when it was setting up its initial centers, consciously thought through the issues about which it could make a useful and unique contribution to research. The Carnegie Endowment, the Wilson Center, the Baker Institute, the Brookings Institution, the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), and the Chicago Council, among other established think tanks, go through a similar process when they decide to set up new programs or their existing programs decide to expand into new areas of expertise. In contrast, Jeff Faux, when he founded EPI, was less concerned with finding a niche in the market of ideas than with what he could contribute to the cause of promoting a working-class agenda. A think tank was the solution to a political and ideological purpose rather than a search for a niche in the policy research world. Similarly, when Edwin Fuelner and his colleagues founded the Heritage Foundation in the 1970s, they were not looking for a niche in the policy research world but for a way to generate knowledge that would support a strong conservative movement. Fuelner and Faux were not trying to find a unique niche among policy researchers but rather the missing link in their

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respective political movements, and even today they see their unique position as a function of a larger effort at broad political change. However, whether think tanks and their researchers are motivated by political agendas or by research imperatives—or sometimes a mixture of both—the challenge of strategic positioning—that is, finding the unique contribution that the institution or program can make—is the same. Abe Lowenthal, the founder of both the InterAmerican Dialogue and the Pacific Council on International Policy, observes that think tank leaders need to “first decide what impact you want to have and in what sphere” and then “have a domain that one can aspire to, possibly succeed at, and maintain a reputation at being the go-to place in that.”5 Think tanks succeed, in large part, when they become the “go-to” institutions on particular policy issues or for particular constituencies in the policy community. FINDING UNIQUE LANES

One of the essential challenges for think tanks and their programs is to find their unique contribution to their field, the unique lanes that allow them to have a special impact on policy debates. This is a challenge not only for think tanks but also for all nonprofits and corporations. According to Michael Porter, “Strategic positioning . . . means performing different activities from rivals, or performing similar activities in a different ways.”6 In the metaphor created by W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne it means finding a “blue ocean” where there are no other boats, rather than battling with others in the red waters already filled with competitors, each offering the same products. According to Kim and Mauborgne, “The only way to beat the competition is to stop trying to beat the competition” by finding “uncontested market space.”7 There are several ways that think tanks and their programs can make a unique contribution within fields that generally have more than one voice trying to develop public ideas that can have an impact on policy. The first is finding an issue that no one else is

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working on. When the Pew Hispanic Center was formed, it was the only institution focused on producing objective polling and research data on the U.S. Latino population. The Wilson Center’s Environmental Change and Security Program, similarly, was the only think tank program specializing in bringing together the environmental, health, and security fields, though many other policy and academic institutions have excellent scholars who intersect with these issues from one side or the other. The Center for Global Development (CGD), the Migration Policy Institute, and the Peterson Institute for International Economics have become anchor institutions within the fields of development, migration, and trade studies, respectively. There are many other scholars and analysts who do excellent work on these issues, but no other institution has the same set of concentrated resources on their particular issue, and, as a result, these three have become hubs in powerful networks working on these issues. Yet another approach, exemplified by the Economic Policy Institute and AEI’s Education Policy Studies program is to find a unique approach to an issue that others are working on. EPI became a leading progressive voice on economic policy because it concentrated its resources in producing timely economic data, something no other liberal think tank had done with the same degree of focus.8 AEI’s Rick Hess has found a niche within an otherwise crowded field, both as an analyst among advocates and as a conservative in a field dominated by more liberal voices. The Heritage Foundation, the Center for American Progress (CAP), and the Cato Institute each have carved out particular niches as the leading conservative, progressive, and libertarian think tanks in Washington, D.C., respectively, and each nurtures its own separate networks of smaller think tanks around the country. All three of these institutions consciously try to cover as much ground as they can on major policy issues of the day, even when an issue is covered by others, because they provide unique ­perspectives to the discussion as the anchor institutions for their political philosophies.9

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Hess’s experience at AEI also points to another effective way of finding a unique niche: he has chosen to focus on medium- and long-term policy ideas rather than the day-to-day debate over education policy, on which most education organizations focus their efforts, positioning his program at a unique stage in the policy cycle compared to other organizations. Many think tanks would love to be both generators of big ideas for the future and effective influencers in day-to-day policy discussions, but rarely can the same organization do both well. Although congressional staff and journalists still seek him out for his perspectives on current debates, Hess has consciously tried to keep his own research agenda focused on a longer time horizon. Many of the larger and older think tanks, including Brookings, Carnegie, and the Wilson Center, as well as some of the larger new ones, such as the Peterson Institute for International Economics, probably do far better as idea-generators for the medium- to long-term frame, while the consciously politically oriented think tanks, such as EPI, CBPP, and Heritage, are far more adept at intervening during the decision-making moments in the policy cycle, but individual programs in these institutions often choose different time horizons for action. Finally, geography can present a compelling comparative advantage for some institutions. Having a home office in Washington, D.C., of course, provides opportunities for national policy influence, but several institutions outside Washington have used their location to significant strategic benefit. Much as the Chicago Council on Global Affairs has built its programming around issues that are important to its home base in the commercial heartland, the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy, located at Rice University in Houston, has intentionally pursued programming based on its location in America’s fourth largest city. Founding Director Edward Djerejian notes that “we base our strategic direction on where we are and who we are.” Early program initiatives at the Baker Institute included energy policy, aerospace policy, and medical reform, taking advantage of Houston’s connection to the oil industry, NASA, and one of the country’s largest medical

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complexes, respectively.10 The Baker Institute has since expanded far beyond these issues, but these have become core programs that provide a public identity to the center rooted in Houston’s comparative advantages. The Pacific Council on International Policy (PCIP) has also used geography to its advantage. In addition to its work bringing global debates to Southern California, PCIP works hard to give Southern California a place within national discussions. According to its president, Jerold Green, PCIP’s mission is “to empower Los Angeles and Southern California and get us a seat at the table” on major foreign policy debates in the country.11 Sometimes PCIP does this by addressing issues that are already on the national stage, such as Middle East policy, by bringing a uniquely Californian voice to the table. In other cases, PCIP focuses on issues of specific local interest, such as the U.S.-Mexico border or the voice of Latinos in foreign policy. North of PCIP, in San Francisco, the Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC) focuses exclusively on policy issues that pertain to California, the country’s largest state, ranging from education to water to fiscal reform, and its target audience is, almost exclusively, policymakers in the state, from state legislators and state agencies to city councils, school districts, and local water boards.12 The variety of ways that policy research organizations can differentiate themselves and make a unique contribution to the issues they care about is almost infinite. Finding what makes the institution or program unique in what it does, however, is critical, perhaps the most critical step in ensuring long-term relevance for its work. S O W H AT D O YO U D O ?

As we discussed in the Introduction, essentially there are three steps in any policy cycle in which policy research can be useful: framing ideas and issues, providing policy alternatives, and shaping decision making. Most think tanks focus their efforts primarily on the first challenge, framing ideas and issues; a smaller number focus on new

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ideas that provide policy alternatives; and very few actually have the ability to shape decision making itself, which is primarily the province of politicians, interest groups, and individual citizens. The way organizations go about implementing their agendas for policy research generally falls into three categories: promoting the flow of public ideas, producing original analysis, or generating new ideas for policy. In terms of the steps in the policy process, the first two activities are generally related to framing policy discussions, while the third—generating ideas—is focused on providing policy alternatives. However, all three activities can seek to intervene in different moments of the policy cycle. The Heritage Foundation and CBPP, for example, are particularly adept at holding public dialogue events on specific issues right as they are being discussed in Congress in order to influence decision making. Books produced by CFR experts, while focused mostly on framing an issue, often include new ideas for policy. The activities an organization pursues and the lanes it chooses to own are determined in part by its mission and goals but also by its financial and human resources. Think tanks, which have a significant number of in-house researchers, are likely to be more inclined to publish new research. Membership organizations usually will be highly sensitive to their members’ wishes and look for ways to develop programming that engages them as well as informs the general public. Well-funded organizations are likely to be able to turn on a dime and address emerging issues, while those that are less well funded will stay more focused on the lanes they can support financially. We will return to this crucial point in Chapter 4. Although the mission and goals should help determine both what the organization does and its resource model, the inverse is often the case as well. Promoting Public Dialogue

On many an evening in Los Angeles you can join a discussion among a very hip group, mostly thirty- and forty-somethings, at

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one of the city’s many interesting cultural spaces—the Getty Museum, Peterson Automotive Museum, the Arclight Hollywood, and the Skirball Cultural Center, among others—to listen to prominent thinkers tackling pressing questions, and then stick around for a glass of wine afterward. Speakers in recent years have included economist Paul Krugman, smart power scholar Joseph Nye, civil rights activist Julian Bond, veteran diplomat Leslie Gelb, filmmaker Lawrence Bender, conservative foreign policy scholar Robert Kaplan, health expert Shannon Brownlee, and Mexican author and former foreign secretary Jorge Castañeda. This is Zocalo Public Square, a wandering think tank that has taken the art of public dialogue and repackaged it in a more contemporary, more fluid form. If you are not lucky enough to live in Los Angeles, or to catch the roadshow in Phoenix, San Francisco, Washington, D.C., or even Shanghai, you can always check out a written event summary in the online web magazine, which carries on the dialogue daily by publishing thoughtful yet accessible journalism around ideas developed in the public forums. The brainchild of prolific journalist and author Gregory Rodriguez, a California-based fellow at the New America Foundation and a professor at Arizona State University, Zocalo takes its name from the central plazas in Latin American and Spanish towns where people meet to gather. The notion of the plaza nurtures Zocalo’s events, which seek to bring people together with each other and with a broad range of ideas. The settings and topics are eclectic—ranging from politics and foreign affairs to literature, music, and film. At the core of the project, run by Rodriguez and a small staff, is the idea that it is important to create the chance for people to meet and discuss ideas in a neutral forum, especially in today’s highly segmented cities. Like Zocalo, think tanks and policy research programs across the country specialize in bringing people together to engage in public dialogue. The World Affairs Council of Dallas-Ft. Worth, the Pacific Council, the Chicago Council, the Baker Institute, and dozens of other think tanks around the country serve as key venues

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for people to gather and hear the best analysis on current events and policy-relevant research. The Brookings Institution, the Carnegie Endowment, the Wilson Center, and CSIS each host several hundred meetings a year, as do dozens of other organizations in Washington, D.C. Some of these meetings, of course, relate to ongoing research work that the institutions carry out, but many are simply opportunities to keep a flow of information going about the latest research and writing on important policy issues that the organizations consider relevant. Public dialogue remains a central feature of most think tanks, and it is the primary function of some of them. The notion that a free society requires a free flow of information, and that attentive publics in particular issue areas need to have access to the best analysis being produced, undergirds this function. One interesting twist is to take the show on the road, leading study trips abroad instead of bringing people to the think tank’s home community. Jerold Green, the president of the Pacific Council on International Policy, for example, has taken high-level delegations to China, Myanmar (Burma), Iraq, Afghanistan, South Sudan, Cuba, and North Korea, among other places, as a way of bringing U.S. opinion leaders to the key forums where debates are happening around the world, rather than simply bringing the forums to Los Angeles. Producing Original Analysis

Few thinkers have had more influence on the course of U.S. efforts to support democracy around the world—both governmental and nongovernmental efforts—than Thomas Carothers, vice president for studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “People who are attracted to this issue are by nature activists, so they don’t sit around and think about it,” he observes, “ . . . so there has been room for someone to step back and reflect analytically about these issues. . . . ” His books, papers, and commentary have helped shape the contours of the debate on democracy assistance

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for two decades. He notes that he spends much of his time “popping bubbles” on the latest democracy-assistance fad; identifying the missing elements of existing strategy; and bringing different groups together, especially practitioners and scholars and increasingly the U.S. and European practitioner communities.13 By producing a long stream of books, policy reports, and short articles on democracy assistance, Carothers has succeeded in helping democracy practitioners around the world rethink their practice and helped lay down the foundations for a more professional and theoretically grounded effort. Similarly, the Center for Global Development’s Initiative on Rethinking Foreign Assistance plays a crucial ongoing role in analyzing U.S. aid policy by producing an ongoing blog on foreign aid and occasional reports that analyze the degree of success of various aid initiatives. Its products include the MCA Monitor, which tracks the efforts of the Millennium Challenge Corporation, and the USAID Monitor, which tracks efforts at USAID, as well as a working group on Rethinking Foreign Assistance. According to Connie Veillette, a former Republican Senate staffer who ran the initiative for several years, the effort seeks to be “constructively critical” about the implementation of foreign aid programs and to provide ideas for improvements.14 CGD’s work on foreign aid is widely influential within the U.S. government as a way for government development agencies and their contractors to understand the impact of their efforts and adjust course. Many of the leading think tanks spend much of their time and effort on analysis of existing policies and the context for policy, and many of the larger policy institutions, including CFR, the Brookings Institution, the Carnegie Endowment, AEI, and the Peterson Institute, strongly encourage their fellows and staff to write accessible books that can help shape policy and public thinking about critical issues. Jim Lindsay, senior vice president at CFR, observes that “CFR, like Brookings, is very much a book culture.” The institution expects its fellows to have book projects

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and even encourages fellows to reduce their programming load at times to focus on their writing.15 Fred Bergsten, the founder of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, notes that he has always recommended to his institution’s fellows that they try to have both a book project and a shorter policy project ongoing at any given time.16 One innovative approach to generating original analysis has come from an unusual source, the private-sector-affiliated Council of the Americas in New York City, which started a quarterly magazine called Americas Quarterly in 2009. The magazine solicits original analysis on a range of issues in the Western Hemisphere. Editor-in-Chief Chris Sabatini describes it as “a mixture of Foreign Policy and Foreign Affairs with a dash of Vanity Fair,” and its flair for colorful cover images and eye-catching art on the inside bear witness to the mix. The magazine combines business respectability with a concern for poverty and inequality and a substantial dose of hot-button social issues, such as gay marriage, women’s rights, environmental sustainability, and human rights. Sabatini notes that he hopes to create a forum for dialogue that both builds on and contributes to the “post-ideological collective spirit” apparent in the Americas. One of his greatest successes, he maintains, has been finding new voices that the magazine can bring to the fore next to the older established authors.17 The quarterly occasionally goes beyond the written word, picking up issues from its pages, such as social inclusion or reform of the inter-American human rights system, to carry out public forums that try to move the ball forward on these issues. Sabatini notes that this is “publication as think tank activism,” combining the written word with public debate.18 The two largest think tanks in the United States in terms of annual budget, the RAND Corporation and the Urban Institute, almost exclusively dedicate themselves to highly technical analysis of policy problems, including evaluations of existing programs and of future policy options. Unlike Brookings and CFR, however, RAND and Urban Institute studies tend to emphasize independent

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scientific research and eschew providing any subjective views. One of RAND’s most notable successes in recent years was in providing data, at the request of the secretary of defense, on how the military would respond to the elimination of the existing “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy on gays and lesbians serving in the military. The secretary of defense eventually decided to revoke the policy, and RAND vice president Jack Riley notes that “his decision to do that was in part emboldened by the report from the Pentagon working group, which in turn drew heavily on our report, which showed that changing the policy would not likely have an adverse impact on the institution of the military.”19 RAND has also had a recent impact on policy debates through its studies on successful (and unsuccessful) drug policy interventions and its research into traumatic brain injury among combat soldiers. While think tanks are by no means the only source of analysis on major policy issues—university professors, government research units, advocacy organizations, and private contractors also produce policy analysis—they are often the most credible and most consistent source of analysis in key fields, and there is significant evidence that skilled policy analysts at think tanks have often been able to move the needle on key policy issues through their work.20 Developing New Ideas

When the U.S. Institute of Peace, the Baker Institute, CSIS, and the Center for the Study of the Presidency organized the Iraq Study Group, they probably could not have imagined the impact it would have on public debate about U.S. engagement in Iraq and on subsequent policy decisions. Chaired by former secretary of state James A. Baker III and former congressman (and then Wilson Center president) Lee H. Hamilton, the task force developed a new framework for reducing the U.S. presence in Iraq in an orderly way that ultimately became the blueprint for U.S. policy. The credibility of the task force members, the assiduous work

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of the three convening institutions, and the hunger for new ideas within the policy community all helped ensure that the ideas which emerged from the task force would leaving a lasting imprint. Rarely are think tanks so lucky to achieve that level of success, but the development of new ideas for policy remains one of the most important tasks that think tanks and policy research programs carry out. As we have mentioned before, the Center for Global Development’s work on creating market incentives to develop new vaccines has helped spur research and development into vaccines that may one day save the lives of millions of children. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities’ work on the earned income tax credit has created the underlying argument that helped extend this benefit to half the states in the country. AEI’s Rick Hess has played an important role in a series of edu­ cation reform initiatives that have made their way into policy at state and national levels. Dozens of other think tanks consciously invest in new ideas. The Migration Policy Institute (MPI) has been instrumental in developing ideas that have found their way into the current immigration policy reform debate, most notably through the Task Force on Immigration and America’s Future, which left a major imprint on the drafting of comprehensive immigration reform legislation in 2006, 2007, and 2013. Researchers at the Peterson Institute for International Economics have left a powerful seal on U.S. trade policy. The Wilson Center’s Mexico Institute has been instrumental in developing ideas that have found their way into U.S. policy on both security cooperation and border management with ­Mexico. The Chicago Council has played a role in developing the underpinning logic for the Obama administration’s Feed the Future initiative. Think tanks tend to develop new ideas in one of several ways. Sometimes ideas emerge from the work of individual researchers, such as Hess and Faux, who place a powerful imprint on the policy discussion through their own efforts. In other cases, the organi-

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zations convene task forces and working groups, such as the Iraq Study Group and MPI’s Task Force on Immigration and America’s Future, that bring the power and credibility of collective thinking to the table. In a few cases, targeted meetings and conferences can also produce new ideas that begin to circulate among key publics. Nancy Birdsall, the president of the Center for Global Development, notes that one of the most important challenges a think tank faces is how to get ahead of the curve and to think of issues before they become relevant.21 Fred Bergsten of the Peterson Institute observes that “our rolling agenda” is to “contemplate the main issues that are one, two, three years out.”22 Indeed, if there is one thing that think tanks have been most useful for in the policy world it may well be this, finding the next important set of issues long before policymakers and journalists realize their significance and getting them into the sphere of public debate. To do this, Birdsall notes, it is often important to invest in research that may not have an immediate policy implication but could become the next big thing. David Rejeski, who runs the ­Wilson Center’s Science and Technology Innovation Program, calls this the equivalent of “intellectual venture capital,” putting an investment of resources into basic research on new issues that may (or may not) prove to be important in the future.23 Both Birdsall and Rejeski, however, stress that organizations that want to pursue innovation have to have a high tolerance for failure. Not all attempts to see around corners will yield useful results. It’s about “understanding that not everything is going to work, and when it does work, attribution might not be all that clear,” observes Birdsall.24 S U S TA I N I N G LO N G - T E R M I N I T I AT I V E S

Many of the most successful think tanks and think tank programs build their efforts around specific initiatives. While they may hold occasional events that take advantage of emerging issues or special opportunities, such as a speaker passing through town, they

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concentrate much of their sustained effort on initiatives that have staying power, help define the organization’s profile, and allow it to develop clear expertise in a specific area. The Chicago Council has done this, for example, with its food policy initiative, while the Center for Global Development has several high-profile initiatives, ranging from “Making Markets for Vaccines” to “Rethinking Foreign Assistance.” The Wilson Center’s Mexico Institute builds its work around five ongoing thematic initiatives in U.S.Mexico relations, on security, economic integration, migration, border issues, and energy. To be sure, all of these organizations also offer occasional events to promote public dialogue that are unrelated to their major themes, sometimes to take advantage of opportunities to support others’ work or sometimes to put a new issue on the agenda and explore a possible new area of work. Yet the core initiatives, in which the organizations can have the most long-term impact, constitute the backbone of their efforts and take up most of the time, funding, and attention.25 For think tanks that care about production as well as presentation, longterm initiatives provide the opportunity to own a set of issues and try to move the ball forward in policy thinking on them. Depending on the organization and the issue, an initiative can include original research, occasional reports, a book, a task force, public events, private briefings, media outreach, a blog or other social media outreach, and a series of other activities that all help advance a single agenda. CGD has a twelve-step process it uses to develop initiatives, although in reality each initiative develops a life of its own that involves multiple activities.26 CAP similarly has developed an eight-step process for carrying out its initiatives, although each effort takes on its own life as it progresses.27 Creating a sustainable initiative, of course, requires both expertise dedicated to the project and sufficient funding to maintain the effort over time. For larger organizations, expertise and sometimes seed funding can often be obtained in-house. For smaller organizations, it is often necessary to contract outside expertise

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through consulting relationships with experts or appointing a visiting scholar to advise the project, and it is almost always necessary to raise the funds externally. Initiatives also require developing contacts and presence within the policy community around the specific issues the initiatives address, so that the organization becomes a reference point for discussions on these issues. Most smaller think tanks and policy research programs can support only a handful of initiatives at a given time, since an initiative requires the development of significant institutional depth around an issue. However, major initiatives are generally what give a think tank or a policy research program true gravitas and make it a necessary focal point for information, analysis, and new ideas on a specific set of issues. Initiatives define the institution’s unique positioning and can give it a prominent role in influencing policy and public debate.

3  WHO ARE YOUR KEY AUDIENCES AND HOW DO YOU REACH THEM?

When Amy Jaffe, then a fellow and director of the Energy Forum at the James Baker III Institute for Public Policy, wanted to influence the way that policymakers addressed energy conservation, she turned to an unlikely ally: the American Automobile Association (AAA). She had spent a long time in Washington, D.C., before joining the Baker Institute in Houston and was intimately familiar with the usual repertoire of outreach strategies for mainstream think tanks. She had written multiple reports and a couple of books, held congressional and executive branch briefings, and penned op-eds in the national newspapers. But she had become increasingly disillusioned by the impact that pursuing this strategy had generated in creating political change on energy conservation policies. So she decided to take her research directly to the people who put the politicians in their positions in the first place: the constituents. “I had an epiphany. . . . If I wanted to get anywhere making public policy more educated and fact-based, I had to educate constituents. . . . ” Jaffe realized. “If the constituents are knowledgeable then the policy has to be more knowledgeable.”1 Looking for a partner in her efforts, Jaffe reached out to AAA, a mass organization of car owners who should be concerned about the rising price of gasoline and the country’s dependence on tradi48

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tional oil supplies. She soon found herself speaking at AAA meetings around the country, penning articles in AAA’s national magazine, blogging extensively, and reaching people she had never engaged with before as a policy analyst. She took her policy research, usually reserved for elite audiences, to the general public that owns cars and cares about fuel prices. While her work may not have changed policy directly, it has certainly improved the quality of debate by educating a broad cross section of the American public and thus sowed the seeds of change.2 The Center for American Progress (CAP), founded in 2003 as a liberal alternative to the Heritage Foundation, has pursued a mixed strategy, combining a priority emphasis on key policy elites through their inside-the-Beltway programming with a robust and innovative outreach to mass audiences through their press outreach and new-media strategies. CAP uses its close relationships with Democratic leaders and progressive civic leaders inside Washington to get its messages out, and has built a strategy that seeks to “influence the influencers,” according to Alan Rosenblatt, associate director for online advocacy. During the Obama administration, CAP has been particularly effective at developing close working relationships with key audiences within the executive branch, who turn to CAP’s research products for advice and guidance. However, CAP has combined this priority of reaching elite decision makers with a sophisticated strategy for reaching the mass public through blogs, Twitter, and Facebook. Indeed, CAP’s signature online media tool, Think Progress, has become a semi-­ autonomous online news source, with its own newsroom to generate original content, that reaches over three hundred thousand viewers a day, while the Center’s tweets reach another hundred thousand or so. Even among the hundreds of thousands who access CAP’s online tools, however, the Center tracks how influential they are and prioritizes contact with decision makers and opinion leaders who use their online resources. It does this by using tracking technology that would be the envy of corporate

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marketers—and often is. CAP appears to be successfully navigating the tension between prioritizing elite audiences and developing a mass outreach strategy. Indeed, almost half of CAP’s staff works in some aspect of outreach and communications, while the other half focuses on content creation.3 Like CAP, the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), one of the country’s oldest and most influential think tanks, has sought to manage the tension implicit in reaching different audiences. Originally founded in 1921 as a New York meeting place between wealthy business leaders and the foreign policy establishment, CFR has long maintained an elite membership with a rigorous nomination and approval process for new members. Most regular Council events are open only to members, who now span the worlds of business, politics and policy, journalism, academia, and civil society. In addition, CFR also has strong programming that specifically targets members of Congress, Senate chiefs of staff, top business leaders, leading journalists, and other specific groups that are influential in foreign policy decision making. Indeed, few organizations have been as adept at ensuring regular, targeted outreach to key influential groups that shape the policies they work on. Yet despite its elite origins and membership, the Council has also developed a powerful outreach strategy to general audiences outside their membership. CFR fellows are strongly encouraged to write books for general audiences and to comment frequently in the press. The Center’s website contains easy-to-access analysis on key foreign policy issues, updated to reflect the most salient issues of the day, along with pithy commentary by its top fellows, making it an essential resource for journalists and the attentive public interested in foreign policy. CFR Senior Vice President and Director of Studies Jim Lindsay notes that the Council deliberately recruits fellows who have both established expertise and an ability to communicate in writing and in person with general audiences.4 As a result, CFR is generally ranked highly among the most cited think tanks in the media, despite the organization’s seemingly insular origins.5

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What all three of these organizations—the Baker Institute’s Energy Forum, the Center for American Progress, and the Council on Foreign Relations—have in common is a clear idea of the audiences they want to reach and a strategy for reaching them. These organizations are not content only to produce good research; they want people to use their research too. The audiences they target are varied, ranging from members of Congress to car owners, but in all cases the key leaders involved in these efforts have gone out of their way to identify the market segments that would be interested in the organization’s products. In addition to that, they have developed different outreach strategies for different audiences. The same research can well be the basis for outreach to members of Congress, business leaders, journalists, and the public at large, but the way it is packaged is likely to change to suit the particular needs of each group and how they consume information. Institutions and programs dedicated to policy research have a number of different kinds of strategies available to them to reach these different audiences, ranging from books to two-page memos; from public meetings to targeted briefings; and from blogging to media interviews. Developing the right strategies for the right audiences, rather than just throwing research out into the public sphere and seeing where it sticks, is a central challenge for organizations seeking to have an impact on policy debates. Indeed, this feature may be what distinguishes think tanks and policy research programs most clearly from those who do policy research in more traditional academic settings. Think tanks are set up precisely because they want to help shape policy thinking in some way—whether simply by improving the quality of understanding of issues or influencing thinking in a particular direction—and they have built-in capabilities to get their messages to key audiences. Even the kinds of research that fellows and staff at the Baker Institute, CAP, and CFR undertake are shaped in large part by a clear sense of who their audience is and how they will reach them. The communications strategy may well not change their central ideas, but it does

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determine what they think they can accomplish with their research and how they will package and use those ideas in the most effective ways. Form and function are deeply interwoven within the fabric of well-managed policy research institutions. I D E N T I F Y I N G TA RG E T AU D I E N C E S

In the last chapter we looked at how organizations find their unique niche to ensure they focus their efforts on doing what they do best. However, equally important as developing products that have credibility is how these organizations then share their efforts with key audiences that need policy research to perform their roles as decision makers, opinion leaders, and citizens. Sharing the products of policy research requires exercising a different set of institutional muscles from those used to create them in the first place, and not all organizations and scholars are equally adept at making sure their findings are available and accessible to those who could use them effectively. Indeed, many, if not most, researchers are afflicted from time to time with what business authors Chip and Dan Heath have poetically called “the Curse of Knowledge.” Researchers know their issues so well that they tend to alternately share too much detail of their research, beyond what is useful to their intended audience, or present findings with a degree of abstraction that assumes a level of knowledge far beyond what audiences actually possess.6 A first step in effective outreach is determining what specific audiences need to know about the issue, given their level of knowledge and particular reasons for being interested. A second step is figuring out which mediums are most accessible to those audiences— ranging from books to policy reports to blog entries to op-eds. This strategy of creating accessible and relevant materials for key audiences is a significant part of what separates policy research, which is focused on impact, from academic research, which is judged primarily by a standard of new knowledge.7 CFR’s Jim

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Lindsay notes that the key to outreach to policymakers is to “tell them not what you know, but what they need to know.”8 Before an institution or researcher can do this, however, it is vital to figure out who the audiences are, what is often called market segmentation in the business world. To the extent that different institutions and programs have several issues they work on, different issue areas and specific projects may have different target audiences. Organizations may also choose to prioritize certain audiences over others, and a prioritized list is often a way of helping determine how to use limited resources.9 For the Heritage Foundation, for example, Congress and grassroots conservative organizations have always been priorities. The Center for American Progress, in contrast, has chosen to focus more on the executive branch and liberal grassroots movements. The locations of the two think tanks—Heritage on Capitol Hill and CAP a block away from the White House—are symbolic of their different priority focuses. The Council on Foreign Relations, as a membership organization, has a priority focus on its members, but it has also gradually expanded its targeted programming for journalists and members of Congress, with separately staffed programs for each. Meanwhile CFR expects its fellows’ books and media appearances to reach the larger “interested public” on foreign policy issues.10 The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace has pursued a different strategy, consciously trying to reach a global audience for its work on international understanding.11 Concerned that “there was a big rift growing between the United States and the world,” Carnegie decided to launch its “Global Vision,” which includes four separate Carnegie centers in different countries around the world, according to Vice President of Studies Thomas Carothers. Over half of the staff is now of non-U.S. origin, and this global presence within the institution has shaped the outreach strategy. Rather than trying to reach a primarily U.S.-based policy audience, Carnegie focuses on multiple audiences around the world. The webpage is now in four different languages, and everything published on the

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Middle East is in Arabic as well as English. Carnegie has used this broader outreach strategy to build “a bridge in both directions” for global understanding, where U.S. audiences learn from research done elsewhere in the world and global audiences can access the U.S.-based research in their own language.12 Most think tanks and policy research programs, of course, have multiple audiences. Both the Center for Global Development (CGD) and the Migration Policy Institute (MPI), for example, focus some of their efforts specifically on domestic policymakers and others on international organizations and policymakers in other countries. CGD’s work on its “Rethinking Foreign Assistance” program targets congressional decision makers and their staffs; officials at the State Department, USAID, and the Millennium Challenge Corporation; and others who influence U.S. foreign aid decisions, while CGD’s work on its “Making Markets Work for Vaccines” program targeted other national governments, international organizations, and major global foundations as much as it did U.S. policymakers.13 MPI’s work on U.S. immigration policy, including its highly successful Task Force on Immi­ gration and America’s Future, has been primarily targeted at U.S. policymakers and opinion leaders, but MPI maintains an office in Brussels and works closely with European Union governments, international organizations, and others on broader issues of migration flows and migration and development.14 The Woodrow Wilson Center’s Kennan Institute maintains offices in Moscow and Kiev, and its Canada and Mexico Institutes conduct significant programming in those countries even without a formal office. For some organizations and programs, focus can also be divided among geographically diverse audiences within the United States. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) has concentrated much of its work on reaching key actors outside Washington, especially progressive nonprofits and research centers working on poverty-reduction issues, who, in turn, often reach the general public. The Chicago Council on Global Affairs, the Baker Institute, and the Pacific Council on International Policy consciously

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focus both on national issues and on the issues that most affect their specific communities in Chicago, Houston, and Los Angeles, respectively. Given the intermestic nature of the U.S.-Mexico relationship, the Wilson Center’s Mexico Institute targets much of its outreach to state and local governments, immigrant-led organizations, and a broad range of civic, business, and labor leaders across the United States who have particular engagements in issues tied to the country next door. The different ways that organizations segment their audiences also says a lot about how they conceive of their impact within the policy cycle, as well as which policy cycles (local, state, national, or global) interest them most. Deputy Director Marcus Noland notes that opinion at the Peterson Institute for International Economics is divided on where to focus their efforts, with some fellows more focused on shaping the field of international economics (framing issues) while others seek to have an impact on current policy debates (providing policy alternatives), while many do both well. The Peterson Institute’s publications receive almost equal citation in the press and in academic journals, which suggests that researchers focus almost equally on both of the first two steps in the policy process. In addition, some fellows at Peterson are almost exclusively concerned with U.S. policymakers, while others are at least as interested in those who make decisions on international economic policy in other governments and international financial institutions.15 It is hardly uncommon—and in most cases it is desirable—for an organization to have multiple audiences. Knowing who the key audiences are on each project is vital. That then enables the organization to target its outreach specifically to these different audiences. D E V E LO P I N G O U T R E A C H S T R AT E G I E S FOR DIFFERENT AUDIENCES

Amy Jaffe has written books on energy policy; she has testified several times in Congress and prepared countless reports and memos for policymakers; and she has written a regular blog on the

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Houston Chronicle website, in addition to her short articles in the American Automobile Association’s newsletter and speeches before AAA audiences. Each of these efforts requires a completely different kind of communication skill that takes the audience’s particular needs into account. Books are largely read by experts and the attentive public that follows an issue. They allow for the greatest depth of analysis and, if well researched, well written, and well marketed, can help shape the researcher’s field of study or the attentive public’s understanding of it. In contrast, briefs written for policymakers have to distill a significant body of knowledge into a short report (and sometimes even a two-page memo) that addresses the specific actionable issues that policymakers are focused on at the moment. Blogging and short articles for a general audience, including op-eds, have to make a compelling case for action in an accessible and engaging style to people who may otherwise move on to reading something else. While Jaffe’s original research into energy conservation can fuel all three kinds of presentations, each one has to be crafted separately to deal with these three very different kinds of audiences. Longer publications, especially books, tend to be timeless, with a longer shelf life and an opportunity to shape debates over a long span of time, while shorter, more accessible publications and social media tend to be timely, allowing for a quick response to emerging issues. The Council on Foreign Relations has set up its programing to respond to these three different kinds of audiences. Its general meetings are targeted to members of the Council, who are, by definition, part of the foreign policy establishment: current and former policymakers, business leaders, journalists, prominent activists, scholars, and others. However, CFR also produces task force reports, which draw on the expertise of members and other key individuals outside the membership, and are targeted to both members and other key constituencies alike. A Council task force report is likely to produce a congressional staff briefing and maybe one for key members of Congress, individual briefings with key

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executive branch members, a general launch for members (who are part of the attentive public), and a media rollout that reaches general audiences. The Council also maintains a program on foreign policy for all new members of Congress and for any member who requests a briefing on a particular issue; a monthly discussion group for Senate chiefs of staff; and active outreach to the press. It maintains separate staffing for each of these activities. In addition, Council experts are expected to do significant press outreach and to produce books that reach the interested public. The Center for American Progress, in contrast, has developed a bifurcated strategy that seeks to influence inside-the-Beltway policymakers and opinion leaders, especially those close to the executive branch, through personal outreach while also reaching a mass audience through press and new media outreach. Using its close relationship with Democratic leaders and liberal interest groups, CAP makes sure that its reports on key issues reach those who are in a position to influence decision making through targeted briefings. At the same time, CAP has developed an impressive database of subscribers to its newsletters and reports, and a Twitter feed and Facebook page that rival the best political organizations or corporate marketing efforts. CAP is interested not only in the number of people who receive their information but in who they are and whether they become active consumers of the material. As a result, the Center diligently tracks who receives the information (by level of influence), whether they re-tweet or re-post it (active consumers), and whether they return to the CAP website (ongoing engagement). The Center staff are able to measure each of these rigorously, and when they see that particular products are gaining traction with key audiences or “going viral,” they know that they have an opportunity to reinforce the message through additional efforts. Social media strategies are increasingly built into everything CAP does, in the hope that products will not just end up in people’s email inbox but become part of the ongoing political conversation in the blogosphere and in people’s homes and offices.16

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What these examples suggest is that organizations that hope to create impact with their research not only need to know their audiences, but also need to target them effectively with different products. Decision makers generally require information that is actionable; experts require depth; the general public and nonspecialist media require engaging analysis that is specifically relevant to them. Some audiences can benefit significantly from a “high touch” approach, including key decision makers and influential journalists who benefit from personal, targeted outreach. All of this requires a strategic investment of resources—financial and staff—to build, maintain, and grow these relationships over time. CBPP, for example, does weekly outreach to leading journalists who follow budget matters, making their top leadership and experts available for comment in a personal way. This is a significant commitment of time and money that goes far beyond just issuing a press release.17 CFR maintains its commitment to having an impact in Congressional debates by having a specific congressional program that has separate staffing and maintains ongoing relationships with Hill offices. Other general audiences can be reached through mass marketing strategies, including email lists, blogging, Twitter, and Facebook. Lisa Singhania, former managing editor at the Baker Institute, notes that she was originally skeptical about social media, but that they have transformed the Institute’s outreach and given it a presence among younger audiences who are not necessarily part of traditional outreach strategies that are based on public meetings and email lists.18 As a result, there are few think tanks today that do not do at least some blogging and have an occasional Twitter feed. CAP has, perhaps, taken this effort further than any other, with an elaborate strategy for social media that involves heavy staffing and the best available technology for measuring who gets the Center’s products and what they do with them, but even smaller institutions can make low-cost investments in social media.

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It is worth noting that in large institutions, such as CFR, the Baker Institute, and CAP, the institution’s strategy for outreach helps create the platforms that specific programs and researchers can use. However, these are only tools. It is what individual researchers do with these tools that matters. Amy Jaffe developed specific relationships with AAA to reach a broader audience of the general public interested in energy issues. Rick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute has developed a strong personal relationship with journalists, congressional staffers, and foundation representatives who follow education issues. The Wilson Center’s Environmental Change and Security Program has developed its own far-reaching blog, Facebook page, and Twitter list that reaches its unique mix of security, population, and environmental experts. Researchers and program directors know their subject and the network of other experts—including those in media and policymaking—that follow the same issues. In many cases, some of the most important target audiences in policymaking, journalism, foundations, and interest groups are also important colleagues with whom there is an ongoing relationship to exchange information and support each other’s work. Institutions as a whole can build platforms that greatly maximize outreach potential, but these personal relationships with colleagues who are critical actors within the researchers’ own fields are often as critical to any targeted outreach efforts on a specific issue. This interplay between organizational strategy and the more organic relationships that emerge in the process of researchers being fully immersed in their fields is central to any outreach efforts. P RO D U C I N G E F F E C T I V E C O M M U N I C AT I O N S

When Haleh Esfandiari, director of the Woodrow Wilson Center’s Middle East Program, emerged from captivity after five months as a political prisoner in solitary confinement in Iran, she saw an opportunity to turn her painful ordeal into a teaching moment.

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She wrote a book, My Prison, My Home: One Woman’s Story of Captivity in Iran, that chronicled her experience but also told the history of Iran and tried to explain to a foreign audience the challenges that her country of origin was facing. The book became a bestseller and received positive reviews in the New York Times and the Washington Post for its combination of personal narrative and historical insight. Though born from a difficult ordeal, it produced one of the most effective pieces of communication on current issues in Iran, combining strong analysis about the internal political debates in Iran with a compelling personal narrative that captivates the reader. Esfandiari has hosted several other visiting scholars at the Wilson Center who have taken the same approach. Robin Wright, a prizewinning New York Times journalist, has written her best-selling books about the Middle East, Dreams and Shadows and Rock the Kasbah, while on a joint appointment at the Wilson Center and the U.S. Institute of Peace, and the late New York Times reporter Anthony Shaddid wrote his powerful book, Night Draws Near, about everyday life in Iraq under occupation, at the Center.19 All these books combined personal stories—whether of the author or others—that made the reading compelling along with detailed analysis that helped the reader understand the underlying issues. Effective communications find a balance between capturing readers’ interest through a hook that they can identify with and strong analysis based on real expertise. Even matter-of-the-fact documents, such as memos, congressional testimony, task force reports, and blogs, need to find a hook that engages the intended audience and then provides the factual analysis that they need to make a decision or shift their opinion.20 In strictly policy documents, the hook is often related to an issue that is on the audience’s mind or their immediate agenda for action. This form of effective communication requires thinking of two key components: What is it that interests the particular audience in this subject? and What is the core message that needs to be communicated to them?

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Best-selling authors of books such as Esfandiari, Wright, and Shaddid have the opportunity to develop these questions more fully, because books allow for multiple stories and multiple messages. However, even a two-page memo or a five-minute congressional testimony can find an engaging hook that responds to the audience’s need to know something about the issue at hand. Increasingly, technological advancements have allowed organizations to repackage the same messages in different ways that can engage different audiences. A single piece of research can produce a published book, a policy report emailed to a list, a policy memo hand-delivered to specific policymakers, an op-ed in a newspaper, a podcast on the website, and several entries in a blog and tweets in the Twitter feeder. Each may have slightly different hooks depending on the intended audience and even present somewhat different core messages that pull from different findings in the research. Of course, not all research products need to be repackaged this many times, but larger projects often merit this kind of detailed rollout. The Wilson Center’s Science and Technology Innovation Program, for example, has built an outreach repertoire that spans everything from scientific journals and congressional briefings to mass-market outreach through websites, social media, and stories in the mass media. The Program’s work on everything from nanotechnology and synthetic biology to serious games that can be played to resolve real-life problems has made the rounds in all the usual places for a think tank—the institutional webpage, congressional meetings, major media citations, public events, and policy reports that are circulated to key stakeholders in science and technology discussions. But the Program has also managed to find some unusual new venues for its work. It pioneered a relationship with American Public Media to develop the “Budget Hero” game, which has been downloaded over a million times off the two organizations’ websites, and it has seen its work featured in such unusual—but widely read—places as Parade Magazine, Family Circle, Consumer Reports,

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and Elle. Of course, not all research deserves this full treatment, but some of the best products do. While good policy research tends to get lost if it does not have an effective communication strategy, even the best strategy is completely useless unless it is backed by solid, credible research. Lisa Singhania of the Baker Institute notes, “You can have the bells and whistles, but it comes down to content.”21 Credibility is what separates successful think tanks and policy research from the pool of people commenting on a topic in the blogosphere. In a period when new technologies have leveled the playing field among people who have an interest in a topic, think tanks and policy researchers need to rely on their reputations as credible sources for expert analysis to differentiate themselves from the pack.22 Having a strong outreach strategy is essential for impact, but it is only useful if the organization has already invested in quality research in the first place. SOCIAL MEDIA AND NEW OUTREACH TOOLS

One of the newest and most powerful developments around for organizations that want to disseminate policy research is the menu of options that have come with the proliferation of Internet-based tools for outreach. Most think tanks post their research on their institutional websites as a matter of routine, but there are a number of other tools that help organizations get the word out in a more agile and more effective way. Institutional websites, after all, tend to attract those who follow the organization but do not necessarily create buzz in the field. Several organizations have experimented effectively with targeted institutional blogs, which feature a constant feed of new data and analysis on a specific issue or set of issues and attract people who follow the field. Journalists and policy advisors in search of a one-stop shop for information on an issue are particularly drawn to blogs, and these sometimes become key focal points

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for an exchange of ideas among those who follow a field. Twitter and Facebook are interactive ways of getting a message out to a larger audience, if they are used routinely and well. One key to using blogs and social media, however, is that they be as interactive as possible. The Center for American Progress makes sure that its tweets are interactive, allowing people outside the institution to respond and engage, and then replying to messages as often as possible, which creates the feeling of an ongoing conversation among the Center’s fellows and staff and those who follow them, rather than a one-way information dump. The more that new media outreach engages the intended audience in a back-and-forth dialogue, presents breaking analysis that cannot be found elsewhere, or features leading voices in the field all in one place, the more that such media can become reference points for those who follow an issue or set of issues—and the journalists and policy advisors who suddenly may need information and want to know the one place they should go for it. The Wilson Center’s Mexico Institute blog, for example, includes not only the news of the day about Mexico but also new data sources; studies from other organizations; and commentary by Center staff, affiliated researchers, and guest collaborators. One of the advantages of social media for small organizations is that they are a relatively inexpensive way to get ideas across without a large budget by harnessing expertise outside the organization. Steven Dudley, the co-founder and co-director of InSight Crime, a small research organization that tracks organized crime trends in the Western Hemisphere, has used social media almost exclusively as a way to reach the organization’s audience and build its brand. On an issue that is constantly evolving, its research can be updated daily and new trends can be discussed and dissected via its web portal, Twitter feed, and Facebook page. This allows the small research team to feature analysis from an ever-changing cast of external contributors who are part of their broad network of research partners.23

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Although hardly a startup, the Baker Institute has found a way to vastly expand its audience through a strategic partnership with the Houston Chronicle, the hometown newspaper, in which Institute fellows and staff blog on the Chronicle site. This brings in nontraditional audiences who might otherwise not go to the Institute’s website, and it provides the Chronicle with an inexpensive source of top expertise. As with all other forms of outreach, an organization cannot use social media and blogs effectively if it does not have access to good content in the first place. However, the revolution wrought by the Internet is such that even small policy research programs can employ a virtual outreach strategy to get their message out, in addition to or in place of traditional forms of outreach. If for large think tanks social media provide a way of reaching a broader and more diverse audience, for smaller and newer organizations, social media offer an inexpensive and effective way to break into the marketplace of ideas.

4   W H AT R E S O U R C E S D O YO U N E E D AND HOW CAN YOU DEVELOP THEM?

When Demetrios Papademetriou and his colleagues founded the Migration Policy Institute (MPI) in 2003, there was no guarantee that the small organization would survive beyond its infancy. Originally a program at the Carnegie Endowment that had simply grown too big to stay within the organization, MPI remained, at its birth, a precarious institution, a gamble that an organization dedicated to studying a single issue, migration, would find traction within the larger policy world and, perhaps of even greater concern, the funding world. Almost a decade later, however, MPI has grown to be a large think tank with offices in Washington, D.C., New York, and Brussels, and consultants, fellows, and affiliated scholars around the world. Its annual budget is now over $6 million, and it has even started building a small endowment. Several of the senior staff and fellows have made names for themselves as the top experts in their fields, and dozens of nonresident migration experts want to be affiliated with MPI. The organization, once a small startup, now partners with major think tanks around the world and conducts research on migration for international organizations, the European Union, and several national governments. Entering MPI’s

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head office in the Dupont Circle area of Washington, D.C., you can almost feel the whir and buzz of the growing organization. MPI has succeeded, in part, because it has developed a strong substantive record of migration research; a knowledge base on several key countries, including the United States, European countries, Mexico, and several countries in Asia; and a keen understanding of policy processes and cycles in all of these places.1 However, its other secret to success has to do with its particular approach to resource cultivation. MPI has built a talent pool of researchers and stakeholders, which gives it depth and projection, and it has also built a series of key external relationships, including with partner organizations, funders, scholars, and corporate leaders, which have helped build the brand and leverage funding. These relationships include a unique approach to foundations, in which the organization does not seek project funding but rather institutional funding, getting several leading foundations to invest not only in specific projects but in the overall success of the organization. Recently, MPI has also moved actively into major gifts, recruiting from among its extensive network of collaborators to grow its funding base. Equally important, MPI has cultivated key researchers and professionals, both senior and more junior experts, who form the basis of its internal capacity, and it has built a network of nonresident fellows who can provide additional intellectual capital on key projects. The organization has also consciously grown its reputation, establishing itself as a reference point in the field, through both quality research and careful branding. And finally, it has used a network of institutional relationships to accomplish all this, building ties to other migration-related organizations, but, more important, to other major organizations that lack migration expertise and can benefit by partnering with MPI on joint projects. This four-pronged approach—creative fundraising, passionate human resource development, intensive cultivation of the brand, and strategic use of partnerships to build a network of allies and advo-

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cates—comprises the four components of a successful resourcedevelopment strategy. Organizations that can develop a virtuous cycle of resource development find that it builds on and enhances their mission. It ceases to be a separate activity, carried out by development, human resource, or communication professionals, and becomes a central part of their overall daily activities. Nonprofit management experts Shirley Sagawa and Deborah Jospin describe organizations that can achieve this cycle as “charismatic organizations” because they “attract people by achieving powerful results and building a community others want to join.”2 Charismatic organizations, such as MPI, attract ample funding, develop top-level staff, forge strong outside partnerships, and build a reputation far beyond their size. Successful resource development takes time, but it eventually becomes so ingrained within the institution that it almost feels effortless after a while, simply part of the ongoing activities of the organization and an essential part of its efforts. AT T R A C T I N G F I N A N C I A L R E S O U R C E S

Few activities cause more anguish among think tank staff than fundraising. For researchers who have joined the organization to pursue policy-relevant research or to make a difference on an issue they care about, raising money is often the last thing they want to do. It turns out, however, that anyone can be a good fundraiser, and fundraising does not need to be a separate activity alien to the substantive work of the organization. Indeed, good programming and good fundraising can and should go hand-in-hand.3 Fundraising is, at its core, about building a network of people who share the organization’s mission and want to participate, either actively or vicariously, through its work. According to Peter Drucker, “Fund development is creating a constituency that supports the organization because it deserves it. It means developing . . . a membership that participates through giving.”4 For some think tanks and policy research programs this means finding foundations that share

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the same values as the organization; for others it may mean building relationships with corporations, labor unions, or major donors who want to be associated with the organization’s work. For still others, especially those with clear ideological agendas, it means building a constituency of thousands of donors, large and small, who see themselves as part of a broad movement. For a few, such as RAND Corporation and the Urban Institute, which specialize in technical expertise, it even can mean building a partnership with key government agencies that value the institution’s work. In all cases, however, it means more than just asking for money. Fundraising is about joining others to the cause that you are pursuing and making them stakeholders in your efforts. It is, ultimately, about building partnerships with others who can add value to the organization’s mission. As we will see further on, there is no shortage of pitfalls in fundraising—and it is often the most difficult part of a think tank leader’s job—but there are enormous rewards to developing a successful model that fits the organization. According to Peter Hakim, president emeritus of the Inter-­American Dialogue, “Fundraising and managing these organizations is just like playing tennis. . . . you have to be patient, waiting for the right opportunity, and but you also have to be persistent, never giving up, and you have to go after every damn ball!”5 In other words, it requires a mixture of discipline and opportunism, consistency and creativity. There are five kinds of funding that sustain most think tank programs and the institutions themselves. The first and most flexible is endowment funding. Institutions that are lucky enough to have built a major endowment, such as the Brookings Institution, the Peterson Institute for International Economics, or the Carnegie Endowment, have annual interest earnings that can support the institution’s central infrastructure and fund some key programming priorities. Even though these institutions often still depend heavily on outside sources of funding for much of their programming, endowment income is especially useful to sustain key priorities or

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to venture in new directions. As Marc Noland of the Peterson Institute notes, solid funding streams can help start new projects without the need to wait for grants. “We still go to foundations, but we don’t have to wait to start,” he notes, something that proves particularly useful when the organization wants to address an emerging crisis and long before a grant application is likely to be reviewed and approved.6 It is generally the traditional Washington- and New York-based think tanks that have endowments; however, even the Migration Policy Institute, a smaller and much newer organization, has developed the beginnings of an endowment that is based on funds the organization received from the MacArthur Foundation, which awarded MPI an organizational genius grant. And while most endowments are institution-wide, there are notable examples of specific programs that have been endowed by donors, allowing them a long time horizon to plan their efforts. The Saban Center for Middle East Policy at Brookings is a prominent example of this, on the basis of an initial major gift from media entrepreneur and philanthropist Haim Saban. Indeed, some think tanks have aggressively pursued donors who want to name the institution (for example, the Peterson Institute) or programs or chairs (such as the Saban Center at Brookings), much as universities do, as a means of attracting larger gifts. In some cases, naming rights are tied to endowment donations; in other cases, naming rights may convey for only five years with the gift used as principal for operating expenses during that period. A second approach, which is most common among institutions with clear ideological agendas, such as the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, and the Center for American Progress, is to build a resource base from thousands of individual donors who give regularly to the institutions, much as they might give to a political party or an advocacy organization. Heritage pioneered this approach in the 1970s with the notion that thousands of donors would not only sustain the institution but also become

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stakeholders in the causes that Heritage espoused. They built a symbiotic relationship with their donors, now over a quarter million, both learning from their interests and channeling information and analysis back through them.7 The Cato Institute, which receives the vast majority of its funding from individual donors,8 has followed this model, and the Center for American Progress, created in 2003, appears to be emulating it successfully as well. In each of these cases, the institution has built a broad donor base both as a funding strategy but also as an outreach tool to create a network of advocates and affiliates. The remaining three approaches, which probably sustain most think tanks and their programs, is to secure foundation grants, major gifts from corporations and individuals, and government grants. While the mechanics involved in raising funds from each of these three different sources is quite distinct, the underlying assumption is the same. Think tank leaders and program directors are successful at raising funds when they can find ways of building sustained, ongoing relationships with allies who want to be part of the organization’s work. MPI’s experience with foundations is particularly illustrative in this sense. Even thought MPI is a grant recipient of several foundations, it also advises several of the same foundations on their priorities and programming around migration. Rather than a donor-client relationship, MPI has built an ongoing partnership with foundations that share similar objectives and that also value MPI as a partner in their work. “We have natural, organic relations with foundations,” notes Papademetriou.9 The same dynamics often hold with government donors, who appreciate the expertise that think tanks bring to the table and value an ongoing relationship with a research-based organization. The Wilson Center’s Environmental Change and Security Program, for example, has an ongoing relationship with USAID that allows them considerable freedom to develop their own research agenda but also gives USAID staff access to knowledge production that the government agency cannot develop itself. The donor, in this case,

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does not want just a contract for services, but rather an independent organization that can produce knowledge in the field, which they can tap. The RAND Corporation’s National Defense Research Institute performs a similar function with the Defense Department. In regular meetings every few months, RAND staff and senior defense officials set the priorities for research. Although the funding itself more closely resembles service contracts, the joint agenda-setting is actually much more of a give-and-take around which issues deserve priority. Both RAND and the Defense Department are stakeholders in the process.10 The key to major donations from individuals and corporations, of course, is having a strong board that is willing both to give and to tap its own network of contacts. This is most effectively achieved with institutional boards, which usually include major donors and those with access to other outside donors. However, some programs within organizations can develop advisory boards that become a source of expertise, guidance, and funding. The Wilson Center’s Mexico Institute, for example, has a strong advisory board that both conducts strategic planning and helps raise funds from individual and corporate supporters. Major donors who serve on boards and who are directly involved in setting the strategic priorities of the organization have a stake in its future success and develop a dynamic, two-way relationship with the organization’s work. As an integral part of setting the agenda, board members are then also empowered to ask others in their own networks to be generous in their donations for a cause they believe in. Although historically many organizations have had a bias against large boards, there is actually no substitute for having a large and enthusiastic group of board members who are actively engaged with your organization’s mission and can help tap resources— financial, political, legal, and substantive—beyond the usual reach of the staff. Reynold Levy, the president of Lincoln Center in New York, who is a big proponent of this, argues, “If the chief executive and board chair view directors not just as serving governance

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functions but as the vital center of a network that exerts influence, gathers intelligence, and devotes resources to the cause, then engagement of a large group of fully invested trustees is not only desirable, it is achievable.”11 Managing a large board—whether it is a legally invested board of directors or an active advisory board, requires considerable direct engagement by the organization’s top leadership. Indeed, it requires the organization’s president or the program director to spend considerable individual time with each member and to make sure to tap each one’s particular strengths and ability to contribute to the cause. Moreover, it requires ingenuity to create a system of task forces and committees that allows members to participate in the life of the organization between meetings if they choose to. However time consuming this may be, the rewards—both in fundraising potential and in outreach to key outside constituencies— can be significant. Abe Lowenthal, the founding president of both the Inter-American Dialogue and the Pacific Council and an astute observer of think tanks, notes that “governance is an underinvested area in think tanks” and “people at think tanks need to have a reference group with whom they can discuss their strategy and a board that can fulfill that role.”12 It is worth noting that the strongest organizations have highly diversified funding sources. This diversification both expands the number of stakeholders who want to be associated with your work and helps cushion against downturns in any particular sector. A mixture of individual, corporate, foundation, government, and endowment funding is ideal in terms of sustainability; for many organizations, a combination of any two or three of these is probably enough to ensure a stable and sustainable income stream to make sure that programming continues at a high level. One of the major problems in relying on a single source of funding—or even a single model of funding—is that donors often have their own agendas. Foundations go through leadership changes and shift their priorities. Corporate donors, if they are not sufficiently diversified, have their own agendas that can conflict with

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independent programming. Government agencies also have ideological or programmatic preferences that can limit independence. Even endowment funding is subject to the vagaries of the market in the return it provides for operational expenses. The world of think tanks is littered with cases of institutions and policy research programs that either went out of business because their major funder changed priorities or found their mission bent in unhealthy directions by a funder with a personal or corporate agenda. Diversification is a hedge against these sudden shifts that can prove lethal for research agendas. Diversified sources of funding also help ensure that organizations can invest in their own internal processes—staff development, adequate infrastructure, technology platforms, good financial management systems, and long-term planning. Indeed, one of the most challenging aspects of organizations that depend on project-by-project grant funding is that they have little ability to invest in these internal improvements that are necessary to sustain the quality of the organization itself.13 Having sufficient unrestricted funding to do this—whether from an endowment, institutional grant support, or corporate and individual donations, is an essential part of developing a virtuous cycle of internal capacity building. Finally, the most important lesson from organizations that have been successful at fundraising is that fundraising is not a standalone activity but an integral part of the organization’s overall mission and activities.14 It is about finding stakeholders who can help further the organization’s mission through their support and become true partners in this effort. D E V E LO P I N G H U M A N R E S O U RC E S

Organizations are only as good as the people they are made up of. This is as true in think tanks as in other areas of the nonprofit world, in business, or in government. Indeed, it may be even more important for think tanks and policy research programs, since

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much of what they have to offer is precisely the quality of their researchers as contributors to public discussions in their fields. Bob Gallucci, president of the MacArthur Foundation, notes that it is “people at institutions that develop reputations [who] have an impact.”15 As a result, the brand of a policy research organization and the quality of its products are only as good as the thought leaders it can attract as both permanent staff and fellows, as well as participants in task forces, at conferences, and on boards. For think tanks, intellectual capital is as important, if not more, as financial capital, though clearly the two are deeply interconnected. Different think tanks have distinctly different approaches to attracting research talent. The traditional model, pioneered by the Brookings Institute, the Carnegie Endowment, and CFR, has been to have a substantial number of in-house fellows who are the primary producers of research and commentary, backed by an army of research associates who help them conduct research. In these organizations, fellows (some of whom are called senior fellows) generally come with significant credentials, either long careers in public service or substantial academic credentials or a combination of both. Other organizations, such as the Migration Policy Institute and the Wilson Center, have permanent staff directors, who produce most of the research, backed by younger research staff, some of whom also write in their own names. Program directors have both research and administrative roles, which require them to juggle a mixture of activities, much like center directors do at Brookings. University-based institutions, such as the Baker Institute at Rice University, often depend on a mixture of full-time fellows who are based at the institute and the university’s existing faculty, who serve as adjuncts and dedicate a part of their time to the institute’s activities. The nature of research staff—who do the intellectual production—helps shape the ethos as well as the direction of the institution. Probably most think tanks use visiting and nonresident fellows in some capacity. The Wilson Center, the Brookings Institution, CFR, the Carnegie Endowment, MPI, CGD, and dozens of other

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think tanks make extensive use of visiting scholars. Several also have affiliated researchers who are not part of the permanent staff but have access to office space, funding, or simply the reputation of the organization as they do their work. Abe Lowenthal notes that many organizations bring in visiting fellows to lead programs for which they do not have in-house talent, or they take advantage of leading thinkers in the field who will contribute to the organization’s mission by conducting their own research on behalf of the institution. Indeed, one of the advantages of having nonresident fellows and visiting fellows, he notes, is that it may be possible to recruit some of the best talent in the field, who might not otherwise be willing to leave their principal occupations in academia or the private sector. And it may also be possible to get journalists and former policymakers, who want a short-term opportunity to research and write at a think tank but do not plan to leave their principal occupation forever. Using nonresident and visiting scholars effectively requires extensive attention by staff to make sure they are integrated into the organization’s work. Lowenthal observes that recruiting nonresident fellows on a project basis works well “if you have a staff that knows how to think through the conceptual architecture of issues . . . and ensure the quality follow-through.”16 In attracting top-level talent, some think tanks, such as Brookings, seek out well-known researchers and former public officials who combine both a record of scholarship and meaningful public service.17 Others, including the Public Policy Institute of California and the Heritage Foundation, look for younger scholars and newer voices who can develop over time within the institution.18 Most institutions, in practice, probably combine a mixture of both well-known policy voices and up-and-coming scholars, but different institutions have clear preferences for one or the other. Demetrios Papademetriou notes that the leaders at MPI “look for people who have a natural curiosity for the topic.” The organization recruits people who start off with great skills, but it consciously helps them to develop these further. “I always go after

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people who are well prepared and have strong egos,” he notes, because “they will never forgive themselves for failure.”19 Staff at MPI work long hours, but they all know they are part of the broad mission of the organization and all handle extensive responsibilities, often, for the younger staff, above what might be expected at other think tanks. Still another challenge is how to nurture and develop young talent who come to the organization in order to pursue a career in policy research. While most of the focus in research is on the big names who are the senior fellows or program directors, younger researchers often play a critical role in developing some of the cutting-edge research that think tanks can become known for. For larger think tanks, such as Heritage, there are often opportunities to move up in the ranks from a junior researcher to a fellow. 20 Fred Bergsten of the Peterson Institute notes that they “look eagerly and aggressively to keep and promote from within” and have had a few experiences of talented junior researchers moving into more senior roles.21 Investing strategically in an institution’s intellectual capital is critical for success. In past years, it was common for junior staff to head off to graduate school or other jobs after a couple of years at a think tank, but in the new economy, in which people appear to be seeking greater job security, there are enormous opportunities to retain younger staff by providing career paths within the institution. At the same time, it is often equally important to find ways for senior staff, including center and program-center directors, who have both intellectual and administrative responsibilities, to take sabbaticals to conduct research and write for publication. A few think tanks have adopted explicit policies on this or developed ad hoc ways of doing it, as a way of investing in the institution’s intellectual capital. However, developing human capital is not only a question of attracting the best research talent but also a challenge that pervades the entire organization, from the person who answers the

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phone to the junior staff who do research to staff that conduct outreach, development, and administrative functions. Indeed, other areas of think tanks—outreach, development, and administration—are often as critical to the success of the organization as the quality of research itself. Fundraising, outreach, and administration are all critical elements in making sure that quality research is produced and reaches key audiences in a timely manner. Having a performance management system is also essential to ensuring a productive and energetic workforce. This means that staff have clear goals for their efforts and are rewarded and promoted according to established policies that are tied to their performance on their goals.22 Performance management systems provide the right reinforcements, rewards, and, when necessary, corrective action in a timely way in accordance with how well staff meet their established goals.23 Rewards can include praise, promotions and, in some cases, bonuses and special awards, but they can also, depending on the employee, include nonfinancial rewards, such as opportunities to sit in on high-level meetings, travel to a conference, or the chance to co-author an article. Organizations should have clear established procedures for promotion and financial or time-off awards, which supervisors can use to reward employees and, when needed, encourage better performance. However, for research staff in particular, nonfinancial rewards, including recognition, may at times be equally important. In think tanks, like other research organizations, there is an implicit tradeoff between the need to foster creativity by giving research staff a free rein to conduct research and produce ideas and the need to deliver specific results that can be explained to board members, funders, and other internal and external audiences. The ideal approach in most institutions tends to be some form of accountable autonomy, which allows senior research staff to set their own goals for the year and then report back on progress with minimal day-to-day supervision. At the Brookings Institution and the Carnegie Endowment, senior fellows and fellows

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fill out one-year plans of work. At the Wilson Center, program directors develop two-year program plans. Other institutions have similar arrangements. The annual (or more frequent) feedback helps senior researchers and directors clarify their thoughts and think strategically, and it provides opportunities for constructive feedback. They are accountable for devising a good strategy and for producing meaningful results, and given significant autonomy in between to do that. “Think tank leaders were never trained to manage this special type of organization,” Abe Lowenthal observes. They were recruited because of their knowledge of their issues, their expertise, and perhaps their ability to communicate clearly with key target audiences.24 Along the way, however, they are expected to position their organization or their program strategically; raise and manage money; hire, supervise, and nurture staff; and sometimes recruit and manage a board. Some think tank leaders come to their jobs with previous experience in these functions; others acquire these skills on the job. Either way it is never easy juggling all of these multiple functions. But juggling them is also part of what makes life as a think tank leader enriching and an enjoyable opportunity. T H E I N TA N G I B L E R E S O U RC E S : BU I L D I N G PA R T N E R S H I P S A N D E N H A N C I N G T H E B R A N D

The two crucial resources that think tank managers deal with on a day-to-day basis are people and money, but there are two others that may be at least as important in getting work done and messages communicated. The first is brand recognition or reputation. The brand that a think tank or a policy research program develops over time is what allows it to attract top talent both for staff and for visiting guests; it is what makes it a reference point for the policy community and the media; and it is what attracts donors to commit funds to the organization’s work.

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Some institutions, such as the Brookings Institution, the Carnegie Endowment, or CFR, have outstanding brands that attract attention regardless of what they do, but their impact on specific issues still depends significantly on the quality of the research within those fields. In other cases, outstanding programming can simply create a brand out of thin air, as happened with the Center for Global Development, the Migration Policy Institute, the Baker Institute, and the Peterson Institute, which made their reputations within a matter of years through strong research, targeted outreach, and development of a staff and boards with considerable recognition. Other institutions, such as the Chicago Council or the Pacific Council, have excellent regional reputations, but then have had to build a national brand to break into the crowded national field of think tanks. For small research centers at universities, often the university’s reputation can help buttress and build the center’s brand.25 Brand recognition is developed first and foremost through the reputation of the thought leaders who are at the organization; the quality of the products they produce; and the board members who lend their time, insight, and other resources to the organization. But developing (and maintaining) a reputation also requires strategic communications, which ensure that people who can use the organization’s work—or might want to support it—actually receive information at the time and in the way they can most use it.26 For larger organizations, the reputation of the institution as a whole and of its specific parts—whether centers or individual researchers—is often an interactive relationship. An institution with a particularly strong brand can help individual researchers develop their profiles more quickly. However, the inverse is also true. Great research at less well-known institutions can help develop the brand of the organization as a whole. One clear example was the study on food security launched by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, which helped that institution burnish its national reputation through its direct impact on global policy. Similarly, the Energy Program at the Baker Institute has been a

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flagship that has helped put the institution as a whole on the national map among think tanks. The relationship between a strong brand and strong products is mutually reinforcing, and either one can help build the other. Another intangible resource that a think tank can leverage is its network of relationships that help it produce analysis, disseminate findings, and build links to key individuals and groups that can provide support to its efforts. Indeed, strategic efforts to build key partnerships with other organizations can provide multiplier effects for the organization’s work in ways that no stand-alone effort could do. As Crutchfield and McLeod Grant observe in their pathbreaking book Forces for Good, “organizations seeking to scale their social impact should look to a network of allies, not just to the departments within their organization’s four walls, as the engine of change.”27 Multiplying one’s network of partners helps multiply the impact of the message as well. When the Wilson Center’s Mexico Institute decided to focus on the future of the U.S.-Mexico border, it struck up partnerships with three other institutions, the Tijuana-based El Colegio de la Frontera Norte (Northern Border College, COLEF), the North American Center for Trans-Border Studies (NACTS) at Arizona State University, and the Council of State Governments (CSG). For COLEF and NACTS, the Wilson Center offered a foot in the door into the capital of the United States and the prestige of a nationally known U.S. organization; for the Wilson Center, COLEF and NACTS offered detailed knowledge of the border region and a network of relationships among border stakeholders the Wilson Center could never hope to replicate alone. For all of them, CSG provided a close tie into U.S. state governments and state legislators, including those at the border. Together these organizations, now known as the Border Research Partnership, have carried out a series of ambitious research projects on the border that have had real-world policy implications. None of the institutions—or even

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any two of them—could have done this successfully and with the same level of policy impact. Similarly, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) has benefited immensely from its partnerships with like-minded organizations in its State Alliance program to address policy issues throughout the country. While it has a prestigious reputation and excellent outreach in Washington, D.C., its ability to affect policy in state capitals across the country without these partnerships would have been almost nonexistent. For the partners in states around the country, the credibility provided by CBPP and its national-level connections have proved invaluable in promoting their own research and outreach locally.28 Sometimes partnerships with other organizations that are not think tanks can help take advantage of important complementarities. The Wilson Center, for example, has a high-level roundtable series known as the “National Conversations” that is co-sponsored by National Public Radio (NPR). Pioneered by the Center’s vice president for communications, Peter Reid, this partnership helps provide accessible content for NPR’s news and analysis programs and gives the Wilson Center a megaphone to amplify the critical findings that emerge from the conversations. In other cases, organizational partnerships help put together institutions with different abilities to move policy ideas at different stages in the policy process. John Sewell, formerly of the Overseas Development Council, calls this the “Cuckoo Principle,” laying your eggs in someone else’s nest, as cuckoo birds are wont to do. In other words, sometimes think tanks know that they cannot carry out their own ideas alone, and it is worth working with other organizations that have different capacities to carry on their work to the next stage. For example, the Center for Global Development, which developed the idea for Making Markets for Vaccines, made sure to partner with governments and foundations that could take the idea to the implementation stage.

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Some think tanks build partnerships deliberately within their model of change. This is true of the Center for the Study of Immigrant Integration (CSII) at the University of Southern California, run by Manuel Pastor, which focuses on building the capacity of grassroots organizations through research. Pastor notes that “our theory of change is we don’t think we change policy; we work with the organizations that change policy. . . . We provide the research scaffolding and convening power” for these other organizations.29 The Center also does considerable outreach to foundations to help them orient their policies toward grassroots organizations that work on immigrant integration issues. Similarly, CBPP, the Heritage Foundation, CAP, and the Cato Institute also see themselves, at least in part, as integral parts of larger movements in which they supply information and analysis to facilitate grassroots organizing around the causes they believe in. There are, of course, inherent tensions between carrying out one’s own programs alone, which emphasize the organization’s brand, and partnering with others to strengthen research and outreach, but the best organizations combine both strategies. It is always important to have a few solo projects that provide the institution’s stand-alone brand, but these usually can be easily mixed together with other collaborative efforts. Indeed, partnering is one of the least expensive ways to leverage resources and multiply the effect of an organization’s work.

5   H O W D O YO U E V A LUAT E I M PA C T AND LEARN FROM YOUR EXPERIENCE?

When Fred Bergsten, the founder and long-time president of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, thinks about the impact his institution has had on global economic issues, he thinks about the long term. Many of the Institute’s most important contributions to public policy, including those related to exchange rate systems, trade regimes, and incorporating rising powers into the global economic system, have taken years to reach fruition. Bergsten and his colleagues have set up a series of regular arenas in which to plan and evaluate their impact—a board of directors, a corporate advisory board, an academic advisory board, staff meetings, and strategic sit-downs to exchange ideas with top economic journalists—and in each they try to trace both the progress they are making on specific issues over time and the way these issues are metamorphosing even as they try to shape the policy dialogue. The RAND Corporation, meanwhile, has an annual review that allows it to look at its whole program in the light of current debates. Each year, senior leadership assembles a “year in review” report that looks at three key issues: (1) Are we addressing the issues at or near the top of the national policy agendas and are we helping shape the agendas? (2) Is our research and analysis reaching key decision makers? (3) Have our products and services contributed to 83

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improvements in policy and practice? According to Jack Riley, RAND’s vice president for the National Security Research Division, the year in review report helps staff focus not only on whether they have been successful in their current efforts, but on whether those efforts are even addressing the right set of issues in which RAND should be contributing to the debate. This constant exercise of evaluating outcomes against shifting needs in the field helps link the evaluative process—the last step in any planning process— back to the first one, mission and goal-setting. It closes the loop by helping set the goals for the next year in light of the shifting policy terrain on which think tanks have to build their plans.1 At the Center for Global Development (CGD), evaluation is done on a project-by-project basis. When CGD launches a new initiative, staff start by assessing the outcome they want to generate. What would success look like? Since CGD generally chooses issues to address that have practical outcomes—ones that go beyond raising general understanding—it often can set concrete goals for what the ideal outcome would look like. Sometimes the institution even brands these initiatives with names that can both get the attention of policymakers and be easily tracked if the project takes flight and gains acceptance in the larger community of practitioners. With the “Making Markets for Vaccines” initiative, it was able to track the project’s advances in public opinion and later in government action because the name stuck and was adopted by others in describing the effort. Like many organizations, CGD tracks the outputs from its projects but also conducts in-house assessments of outcomes and, in some cases, commissions outside evaluations of impact by external evaluators to see whether its efforts are succeeding.2 While CGD tackles projects with specific, practical outcomes, many think tanks and their programs also address issues that have somewhat less tangible, but no less important, outcomes. The Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA), for example, has pursued a major campaign to raise awareness about public secu-

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rity concerns in Latin America and the challenge for institutional reforms to the police and judiciary systems in several countries of the region with particularly high crime rates. WOLA staff meet twice a year in a two-day retreat to assess the outcome of these and other efforts, and they also meet weekly for a mandatory staff meeting to check in on advances in their initiatives. The communications staff keep rigorous track of key output indicators, such as website traffic, media hits, congressional testimony, and reports produced, but the most important discussions always center on how to interpret these numbers in terms of the overall objectives of the initiative. They discuss whether they are reaching the right target audiences, whether the coverage in the press is touching on the core messages they want to get out, and whether other organizations, including policymakers, have adopted these efforts as their own. As WOLA’s executive director Joy Olson observes, there is no single indicator that can tell them whether their work is successful, but what is critical is the discipline of regularly reviewing quantitative measures in light of each initiative’s intended purposes.3 She notes, “Think tanks should judge themselves on thinking big and contributing to policy change. If not, what’s the point?”4 The proof that WOLA is succeeding is not merely in whether the organization is holding meetings or getting media coverage, but whether it is managing to move a public agenda forward effectively. The rigorous discipline of looking at tangible indicators, coupled with a subjective but systematic review of the policy environment, each week and then more in depth twice a year helps the organization to assess whether it is having the impact it set out to achieve. There are few issues more difficult for strategic discussions in think tanks than measuring impact. This problem is endemic in nonprofit organizations in general, but it is even more acute in institutions that seek to influence public policy. A think tank can always track its activities and usage statistics—reports produced, webpage visits, media hits, congressional testimony, and so on—but

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these are measures of outputs, not outcome. How do you measure impact on public policy when policy processes are determined by multiple factors outside of anyone’s particular control? Indeed, the best a successful policy research program can hope for is to help contribute to the understanding of an issue and perhaps participate at a critical moment, as one of many external actors, in the decisionmaking process.5 The difficulty in evaluating outcomes, however, should not be a barrier to developing a systematic approach to doing so. As the experiences of CGD and WOLA show, the essential steps in conducting evaluations are to decide ahead of time what success would look like by setting achievement-oriented goals and then developing a consistent process for tracking the outcome of the efforts vis-à-vis those goals. To do this, it is almost always necessary to use a mixture of quantitative measures and qualitative interpre­ tation, applied with consistency and rigor. Jim Collins observes that if your outcomes are measurable, then you should measure them, but if not, then you need a systematic approach to assembling the evidence: It doesn’t really matter if you can quantify your results. What matters is that you rigorously assemble evidence—quantitative or qualitative—to track your progress. If the evidence is primarily qualitative, think like a trial lawyer assembling the combined body of evidence. If the evidence is primarily quantitative, then think of yourself as a laboratory scientist assembling and assessing data.6

As the cases of both the Peterson Institute and RAND show, in conducting evaluations it is important not only to figure out if you have met your goals, but also whether the external environment has shifted and new goals are necessary for the future. For organizations that inhabit the moving terrain of highly variable policy debates, it is worth doing a rigorous analysis at least once a year of what has changed in the outside environment. This is critical to understanding both the impact that the organization has had and how it will have to reposition itself in the coming year.

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Mission Review and Goal Setting

Evaluation of Outputs and Outcomes in Light of Shifting Policy Terrain

Program Planning in Unique Lanes

Resource Development to Implement and Sustain the Plan

Audience Segmentation and Communication Strategy

figure 5.1.  The strategic planning cycle

Evaluation is, of course, the fifth and final step in planning for impact, but it is also the step that helps you start the planning cycle all over again with goal setting. As Figure 5.1 suggests, planning is not a linear process that begins with mission and goal-setting and ends with evaluation, but a constant cycle in which the results of one set of efforts feed into the next set of plans. MEASURING INPUTS AND OUTPUTS

There are at least two essential steps in any evaluation process. The first is creating concrete measurements that give you a quantitative idea about the inputs and outputs of your efforts; the second is engaging in a more qualitative evaluation of what this information means in terms of actual outcomes.7

Figure 5.1 SELEE

What Should Think Tanks Do?

978-0-8047-8798-7

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Keeping track in a systematic way of key inputs that make the work possible—finances, staffing, boards, visiting scholars, and other elements—helps you to know how the organization is evolving structurally. Abe Lowenthal points out that it is often crucial to keep detailed track of your inputs according to the goals you want to achieve. For example, if shifting the balance of funding from different sources is a major goal, then tracking the source of funding (major gifts, institutional grants, programming grants, and so on) is essential. If staff diversity is a goal, then tracking the changing mix of staff backgrounds is crucial. The measurement of inputs ideally should both give you a snapshot of how the institution is evolving and tell you whether it is meeting key targets.8 Equally important is tracking the key outputs, such as meetings, publications, media citations, congressional testimony, briefings for policymakers, and web hits. These are not necessarily indicators of success, but they provide a tangible way to monitor what the institution or program is putting out, something that can be evaluated in tandem with more qualitative assessments of outcome. How an organization chooses indicators says a great deal about what it values, and quantitative measures have a subtle way of shaping future behavior. “You are what you measure,” quips David Rejeski, the director of the Wilson Center’s Science and Technology Innovation Program.9 Staff tend to gravitate over time toward activities that are measured. If senior leaders at a think tank care about media quotes or op-eds, they should expect program directors and fellows to move in the direction of media outreach over time. If they measure web visits and Twitter followers rigorously, they should expect staff to become more web savvy. If they measure the number of meetings, books, or policy reports, those can also become benchmarks for success in the minds of key staff. Choosing the wrong outputs— or failing to combine output selection with a serious process for evaluating outcomes that are based on these outputs—can shift programming in unhelpful directions. Conversely, choosing output measures that reflect what leadership would like to see happen

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can, over time, influence programming, especially if combined with serious evaluation of how these measured outputs contribute to desired outcomes. With outputs, it is often helpful if statistics are available on a regular basis and not just at the end of the year or the evaluation cycle. Having a regular way for staff to track web traffic and social media outreach, for example, helps them know whether their efforts are resonating with their key audiences, and it often creates a healthy competition among colleagues to perform. However, statistics always need interpretation. A rise or fall in web traffic, for example, may simply reflect the changing salience of an issue rather than a change in what the organization is doing. Keeping track of media exposure, including citations in the press, may also be particularly useful for organizations that prize media outreach. However, as Joy Olson of WOLA notes, media hits alone do not spell success. Of course, almost any media exposure may be helpful for raising the institutional brand, but for program directors who want to achieve impact on particular issues, it is just as important to know whether the message that is getting out is the one you want to communicate. As with most output measures, the real relationship of the numbers to your desired impact depends on the subjective assessment of outcomes. Most organizations also track publications by fellows and staff. The Peterson Institute for International Economics, which prides itself on having a foot in both the academic and the policy worlds, encourages and documents both academic writing and short policy reports produced by its fellows. For the Center for American Progress and the Heritage Foundation, which seek more immediate policy impact, the production of shorter policy reports is paramount. The Council on Foreign Relations expects fellows to produce books, at least from time to time, and it keeps track of this and encourages it. Quantifying inputs and outputs is a key first step in any evaluation system. It is also particularly useful for funders, who often like to have statistics on what the organization is doing. Indeed,

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for most programs within think tanks, reports to funders often drive the tracking of inputs and outputs. For institutions as a whole, however, it is important to have a consistent system that tracks inputs and outputs, and this helps feed into the more important exercise of evaluating outcomes. E VA LUAT I N G O U TC O M E S

The only real way to understand the impact the organization is having is to systematically try to understand the quantitative output data and observed qualitative evidence in the light of the desired outcomes. The starting point for evaluating outcomes is with your original goals. What kind of outcome were you hoping to generate in the first place? Was it a specific policy result you were after, a new idea that you wanted to get adopted by key opinion leaders, or an area of policy debate in which you wanted to improve the quality of public dialogue? What is the evidence, qualitative as well as quantitative, that this happened? Were there unintended consequences (an idea going viral unexpectedly, or a politician or opinion leader adopting it but in a modified form)? If you succeeded, partially, completely, or beyond your wildest dreams, why? If you failed despite your best efforts, why? Rarely is success (or failure) a winner-take-all proposition. Rather, it is an opportunity to learn about what is working—and what errors of design or external obstacles are in the way—so that future efforts can be even more effective. In reality, success in policy research is not always the result of strategic planning, nor is failure a sign of its absence. In the messy world of politics and policy, serendipity almost always plays as much a role as actual effort and strategic vision. At best, strategy helps optimize the use of resources and gives you a better chance of success, but it rarely guarantees a perfect outcome. In evaluating the success of a particular initiative, it is worth factoring in these outside elements as much as assessing your own efforts. You need to know how your best efforts interacted with the policy environ-

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ment you operate in, even though you can only control one of those two variables. While strategy does not always guarantee success for specific initiatives, which depend in part on the shifting policy environment, it should show results for institutions or programs as a whole, and, of course, it should improve the odds of individual initiatives succeeding too. If the institution or program wanted to raise its profile in the media, start a social media strategy, contribute policy reports during a critical time, did it succeed? How well? On what issues can the organization’s footprints be noticed and how can you document this? There is no easy way to do qualitative evaluation, except that it is, as Collins argues, much like building a legal case. If there is no smoking gun—that is, clear evidence that a policy initiative you proposed was adopted—then you have to prove what happened beyond a reasonable doubt by assembling the fragmentary circumstantial evidence. Where were the organization’s ideas and efforts present, what agendas did they help move forward, and what evidence supports your conclusions? “What matters is not finding the perfect indicator,” Collins notes, “but settling upon a consistent and intelligent method of assessing your output results, and then tracking your trajectory with rigor.”10 Fred Bergsten of the Peterson Institute observes, “You occasionally get very tangible payoffs . . . but it’s generally more imprecise, intangible.”11 Assembling a consistent case from imprecise evidence is difficult, but by no means impossible. It involves what Bob Gallucci of the MacArthur Foundation refers to as looking for “the footprints” of the organization’s work in public ideas or in policy decisions.12 John Sewell, formerly the president of the Overseas Development Council (ODC), argues that it’s worth looking at three key indicators: “First, have we been able to alter the terms of the debate? Second, have we been able to directly affect policy outcomes? Have our analysis and recommendations resulted in actual policy changes? Third, have we been able to reconfigure the politics

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of the particular issues and change the constituencies—organizations and interest groups—who are advocating for policy changes?”13 These are particularly high standards. ODC was, at the time he wrote this, the leading organization in the field and could often find its “footprints” in public discussions and even policy decisions. Not all think tanks or think tank programs can hold themselves to that high a standard on a consistent basis. But all should want to find some evidence that their efforts are paying off, in some measure, on the way policymakers and the public address the issues they work on and, perhaps from time to time, make decisions about them. In performing qualitative evaluations of outcome, it is crucial to have a reference group that can review the evidence you accumulate. Generally staff put this together, but at some point having a board, advisory group, or senior management in the think tank review the evidence will help sharpen your argument. For institutions as a whole, boards (if they are well-constituted) generally perform this task as part of their accountability functions. In individual think tank programs, advisory boards or annual (or semiannual) program meetings with senior management are helpful for reviewing impact with the program staff. Part of outcome evaluation is an internal staff exercise, but it is always helpful to have other eyes reviewing self-reported impact results to ensure intellectual honesty, increase the exchange of ideas, and get outside input into future planning. BUILDING IN FEEDBACK SYSTEMS

Most think tank leaders, including most program directors, are pulled daily in multiple directions. In a given week, they may be designing programs, raising funds, hiring and supervising staff, giving media interviews, convening a task force, planning a meeting, writing an article or a book chapter, giving a talk to an outside group, responding to calls from policymakers and colleagues, and trying to keep up in their field, maybe even with a bit of

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original research of their own. It’s an exhausting, exhilarating, and fragmented process, and it leaves little time for the niceties of developing output dashboards or convening evaluation meetings, much less organizing meetings to review the mission, set goals, and devise an outreach strategy. Most of the time the five steps we have laid out in this book seem to happen simultaneously with limited sequencing or time to devote to each. Trust me, I understand. I started this book originally as a way to keep up with the strategic planning steps I had committed to with our board. I was really just trying to create order out of the chaos of my days. Perhaps the most important lesson from truly strategic institutions and programs is not that they do things in a neat, perfect order but rather that they have built feedback loops into their work that allow them to do the five steps of a strategic process on an ongoing basis with little extra effort. While organizations undergoing a major period of transition or realignment should consider conducting a formal strategic planning process, most of the time think tanks do their best strategic thinking by creating routines that integrate these steps into their ongoing work. There may be an annual cycle for evaluating the year’s successes and setting goals for the next year, funding deadlines that drive planning, or periodic board meetings, but most strategic planning in between takes place on the run as you are trying to make other things happen. The cases of WOLA and CGD described earlier are illustrative. WOLA takes time twice a year to hold a two-day staff retreat to evaluate outcomes and adjust planning. Staff do not do a sequential planning of the five steps, but rather do all five in each retreat, reviewing output and evaluating outcomes to date, while adjusting their goals, programming, communication strategy, and resource plan as they go. It is a regular discipline, and it keeps them focused on their objectives. And even more important, these twice-a-year meetings are embedded in an ongoing process of weekly meetings when staff are expected to discuss their major initiatives and accomplishments and think about impact. The

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discipline of doing this weekly is what allows the twice-yearly meetings to be successful.14 The Center for Global Development, meanwhile, builds a research team for each initiative, which includes both inside and outside members, who set the goal for the effort and are responsible for periodically evaluating its outcomes and adjusting strategy as needed. But CGD also has weekly planning meetings at which research and communications staff review what is coming down the pike and look at how to get the most impact out of each effort.15 And both have regular board meetings that require staff to present their case to a committed audience that is less involved in the day-to-day institutional activities. For RAND, the annual report serves as a key focusing point to evaluate the institution’s efforts over the preceding twelve months and ask how it can position its work in the coming year. The Peterson Institute has an ongoing set of arenas—a board of directors, an academic advisory board, and a corporate advisory board—that allow its leaders to ask how the institution is doing and what new issues are emerging over the horizon that they should be addressing. The leaders at both Peterson and RAND are conscious that they need to position themselves continuously in a moving policy terrain that requires constant adjustments in focus to catch the next round of issues that are emerging. For many organizations, board meetings are particularly useful drivers for conducting assessment and planning activities, since leadership has to report back to the board on advances. The Wilson Center’s Mexico Institute, for example, uses its semiannual advisory board meetings to review all five of the questions in the strategic planning cycle, with a major assessment at the last meeting of each year. Of course, each meeting ends up focusing with different degrees of intensity on the different steps, and one of the steps almost always dominates the discussion depending on whatever the latest need is. However, all get touched on in some way. Meanwhile, the Wilson Center’s overall institutional leadership

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uses board meetings as a time to gather data on input, output, and outcomes from staff that it can present at the meetings. Strategic planning should not be a straightjacket that ties an organization to a rigid process that constantly interrupts its work. Rather, planning is about finding a systematic way of touching on the key steps of a strategic planning process within the organization’s ongoing work. It is important to keep the mission front and center and to set clear goals early on. At some point, staff (and boards, when appropriate) need to figure out a programming plan that guarantees the organization’s unique lanes for operation; a communication plan to get information and analysis to the right audiences in the right way; and a resource plan to develop the right human, financial, and reputational resources to carry out the work. And, of course, all of this needs to be evaluated periodically in a way that ensures consistency with the original goals and allows the organization to adjust its efforts as needed. However, the most strategic organizations build these steps into everything they do on an ongoing basis. They create the space within their regular efforts to conduct planning and institutional learning as they engage in their work. And usually they find creative ways to build in spaces for reflection with outside stakeholders and key constituencies. Doing this takes time—especially meeting time—but in the long run it also saves time by making sure that all efforts are maximized for impact. Building strategy into an institution or program’s work also helps it generate buzz among funders, colleagues, and target audiences by giving others the correct impression that this is a well-managed organization that can be turned to as a source of knowledge and effective action. Strategy is not just a luxury for organizations that have time to do it, but rather a necessary step for achieving even greater impact in the world of policy ideas. Investing in it reaps enormous returns for the investor. And for think tanks and think tank programs that are concerned about planning for impact, it is an essential ingredient of success.

NOTES

INTRODUCTION

1.  Lawrence MacDonald and Ruth Levine, “Learning While Doing: A Twelve Step Program for Policy Change,” Center for Global Development Essay, February 2008, and interviews with Nancy Birdsall, Lawrence MacDonald, and Sarah Jane Staats of CGD and Ruth Levine, now of the Hewlett Foundation. For information on the implementation, see the webpage of GAVI Alliance, www.gavialliance.org/funding/pneumococcal-amc/. 2.  Interview, Nick Johnson, Vice President for State Fiscal Policy, Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. On CBPP, see also Leslie R. Crutchfield and Heather McLeod Grant, Forces for Good: The Six Practices of High-Impact Nonprofits (San Francisco: JosseyBass, 2008). 3.  Interview, James Jay Carafano, Vice President, Foreign and Defense Policy Studies, E. W. Richardson Fellow, and Director, The Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Institute for International Studies, Heritage Foundation. On the origins, mission, and structure of the Heritage Foundation, see also Crutchfield and Grant, Forces for Good, and Edwin Fuelner, “The Heritage Foundation,” in James G. McGann and R. Kent Weaver (eds.), Think Tanks and 97

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Civil Societies: Catalysts for Ideas and Action (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2000). 4.  In 2013, Roger-Mark DeSouza, an expert on both environmental and population issues, took over from Dabelko, who became a tenured professor at the University of Ohio. 5.  James McGann estimated in 2007 that think tanks spent somewhere between $800 million and $1.3 billion a year. See James G. McGann, Think Tanks and Policy Advice in the US: Academics, Advisor and Advocates (New York: Routledge, 2007), p. 46. 6.  On this point, see John Kingdon, Agendas, Alternatives, and Public Policies, 2nd ed. (New York: Longman, 1995), especially chapters 1 and 3. 7.  Donald E. Abelson, “The Business of Ideas: The Think Tank Industry in the USA,” in Think Tank Traditions: Policy Research and the Politics of Ideas, ed. Diane Stone and Andrew Denham (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2004), p. 215. 8. McGann, Think Tanks and Policy Advice in the US, p. 11. Think tank scholar Diane Stone defines think tanks as organizations that “collect, synthesize and create a range of information products, often directed towards a political or bureaucratic audience, but sometimes also for the benefit of the media, interest groups, business, international civil society and the general public of a nation.” Diane Stone, “Introduction: Think Tanks, policy advice and governance,” in Stone and Denham (eds.), Think Tank Traditions, pp. 2–4, quote on p. 3. In a recent book, sociologist Thomas Medvetz argues that “situated at the crossroads of the academic, political, business, and media spheres, think tanks have generated effects in each setting,” but they have also been increasingly coopted by each of these. He argues that think tanks in the United States are less independent than they once were and are more subject to multiple pressures and influences from each of these spheres. Indeed, think tanks often represent concrete interests from one or more of these spheres in different ways through their work, an issue addressed, if briefly, in Chapter 4. Thomas

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Medvetz, Think Tanks in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), p. 14. 9.  James G. McGann, The Global Go To Think Tanks Report 2012 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, International Relations Program, Think Tanks and Civil Societies Program, 2013). 10.  McGann has documented 1,836 think tanks in Europe and the former Soviet Union, 1,234 in Asia and Oceania, 721 in Latin America, 554 in Africa, 339 in the Middle East, and 96 in Canada. McGann, Global Go To Think Tanks Report 2012. 11.  Donald E. Abelson, A Capitol Idea: Think Tanks and US Foreign Policy (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 2006), p. 167. 12.  Interview, Fred Bergsten, Founding President, Peterson Institute for International Economics. 13.  Interview with Ruth Levine, Linda Frey, and Paul Brest, Hewlett Foundation. 14.  Interview, Maya MacGuineas, President, Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, and Fellow, New America Foundation. 15.  Interview, MacGuineas. 16.  Cited in McGann, Think Tanks and Policy Advice in the US, p. 80. 17. Kingdon, Agendas, Alternatives, and Public Policies. 18.  Murray Weidenbaum, The Competition of Ideas: The World of Washington Think Tanks (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2009), p. viii. 19.  Adapted from both Kingdon, Agendas, Alternatives, and Public Policies, and The Brookings Institution, Strategic Plan 2007–2009 (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 2007), p. 40. The Brookings Institution “Theory of Change” looks at three phases: agenda setting, debate shaping, and policy designing. Kingdon refers to four: “(1) Setting the agenda, (2) the specification of alternatives from which a choice is to be made, (3) an authoritative choice among those specified alternatives, as in a legislative vote or a presidential decision, and (4) the implementation of the decision” (pp. 2–3).

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There is nothing sacred about the three categories I have chosen. Rather, the key is for an organization to have its own theory of change that allows it to understand where in the policy cycle it wishes to have impact. 20.  John Sewell, Globalization, Civil Society, and International Governance (Washington, DC: Overseas Development Network, February 1998). 21. Kingdon, Agendas, Alternatives, and Public Policies. 22.  Andrew Rich, Think Tanks, Public Policy, and the Politics of Expertise (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 108, 138, and 139. 23. Abelson, A Capitol Idea, pp. 227 and 230. 24. Rich, Think Tanks, Public Policy, and the Politics of Expertise. 25.  Interview, Roberto Suro, founding Director, Pew Hispanic Center, and currently Professor of Communications and Executive Director, Tomás Rivera Center, University of Southern California. 26.  Interview, James Lindsay, Senior Vice President and Director of Studies, and Maurice R. Greenberg, Chair, Council on Foreign Relations. 27.  I am grateful to Blair Ruble for this point. On the growing trend toward global audiences, see Stone, “Introduction,” and James G. McGann with Richard Sabatini, Global Think Tanks: Policy Networks and Governance (New York: Routledge, 2011). 28.  According to Jim Collins, excellence comes from finding the intersection between “What you are deeply passionate about, what you can be the best in the world at, and what best drives your economic engine.” Collins, From Good to Great in the Social Sectors: A Monograph to Accompany Good to Great (New York: HarperCollins, 2005), page 17. On this point for businesses, see Jim Collins, Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap and Others Don’t (New York: HarperBusiness, 2001).

NOTES TO CHAPTER ONE

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CHAPTER ONE

1.  Interview, Marshall Bouton, President, Chicago Council on Global Affairs. 2.  Data taken from Chicago Council on Global Affairs, “The Development of the Council, 2003–2010,” report to the board prepared for strategic planning, 2010–2016, used with permission. 3.  Peter F. Drucker, Managing the Non-Profit Organization: Principles and Practices, 2nd ed. (New York: HarperCollins Business Edition, 2005); Shirley Sagawa and Deborah Jospin, The Charismatic Organization: Eight Ways to Grow a Nonprofit That Builds Buzz, Delights Donors, and Energizes Employees (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2009); Jim C. Collins and Jerry I. Porras, “Building Your Company’s Vision,” Harvard Business Review (September 1996); Simon Sinek, Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action (New York: Portfolio/Penguin, 2009). 4.  Cited in the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, “Transforming the Chicago Council for a New Era,” Strategic Plan 2005– 2010--Final Revised Draft Framework, approved by the board of directors on June 23, 2005. 5.  Interviews with William (Bill) Antholis, Managing Director, and Ted Piccone, Senior Fellow and Deputy Director, Foreign Policy Studies, Brookings Institution; Brookings Institution, Strategic Plan, 2003–2008 (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 2003). See also two speeches by Strobe Talbott: “Ideas, Policy, and Politics: The Role of Independent Research in Partisan Times,” speech at the University of Virginia, May 2006, available at http://www .brookings.edu/research/speeches/2006/05/ideas-policies-and -politics-talbott; and “The Angels of Our Nature: Restoring Unity of Purpose and Civility of Discourse in America: The Challenge to Think Tanks and Universities,” February 2011, available at http:// www.brookings.edu/research/speeches/2011/02/07-civility-talbott. 6.  Interview, Antholis. 7.  Leslie R. Crutchfield and Heather McLeod Grant, Forces for Good: The Six Practices of High-Impact Nonprofits (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2008), p. 18.

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NOTES TO CHAPTER TWO

8.  Woodrow Wilson Center Mexico Institute, “Strategic Plan 2008–2013,” approved by the Advisory Board in June 2008. 9.  Paul Brest and Hal Harvey, Money Well Spent: A Strategic Plan for Smart Philanthropy (New York: Bloomberg Press, 2008), p. 2. 10.  Chicago Council, “Transforming the Chicago Council for a New Era.” 11.  I am grateful to Guillermo Jasson, chairman of CrossFields Capital and also chair of the Strategy Committee for the Wilson Center’s Mexico Institute, for pointing this out years ago. 12.  Interview, James Jay Carafano, Vice President, Foreign and Defense Policy Studies, E. W. Richardson Fellow, and Director, The Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Institute for International Studies. 13.  This is a central point of Jim Collins, From Good to Great in the Social Sectors: A Monograph to Accompany Good to Great (New York: HarperCollins, 2005), and Jim Collins, Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap and Others Don’t (New York: HarperBusiness, 2001). 14.  Interview, Sarah Jane Staats, Director of Policy Outreach, Center for Global Development. 15.  At Carnegie, for example, it involves weekly or biweekly meetings among the institution’s president, Jessica Matthews, and her six vice presidents, complemented with monthly meetings among the fellows and quarterly meetings with all staff, including those at the five international centers abroad. Interview, Thomas Carothers, Vice President for Studies, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. CHAPTER TWO

1.  Interview, Jeff Faux, President Emeritus, Economic Policy Institute, for quotes and history, and public website, www.epi.org for current staffing.

NOTES TO CHAPTER TWO

103

2.  Interview, Frederick M. (Rick) Hess, Resident Scholar and Director, Education Policy Studies, American Enterprise Institute. Additional information from interview with Jonathan Schorr, former Partner and Policy Director, New Schools Venture Fund, and consultation of AEI’s public website, www.aei.org. 3.  Interview with Roberto Suro, Founding Director, Pew Hispanic Center, now Professor of Communications and Executive Director of the Tomás Rivera Center, University of Southern California. 4. The Tomás Rivera Center, located at the University of Southern California, also produced important analysis on Latino issues, but it has only recently reopened under Roberto Suro’s leadership with a mandate to look at issues of diversity and urban space. 5.  Interview, Abe Lowenthal, Professor Emeritus of International Relations, University of Southern California, and Founding President, The Inter-American Dialogue and The Pacific Council on International Policy. 6.  Michael E. Porter, “What Is Strategy?” Harvard Business Review, November-December 1996, pp. 61–78. 7.  W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne, Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make the Competition Irrelevant (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business Review Press, 2005), p. 4. 8.  The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has since become another leading progressive voice on economic policy, but CBPP concentrates primarily on data that can help reduce poverty, while EPI focuses more on the working class. 9. Interviews with Rudy DeLeon, Senior Vice President, National Security and International Policy, Center for American Progress; James Jay Carafano, Vice President, Foreign and Defense Policy Studies, E. W. Richardson Fellow, and Director, The Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Institute for International Studies, Heritage Foundation; and Dan Griswold, Director, Herbert A. Stiefel Center for Trade Policy Studies, Cato Institute.

104

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10.  Interview, Edward Djerejian, Founding Director, James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy. 11.  Interview, Jerrold Green, President, Pacific Council on International Policy. 12.  Interview, Mark Baldassare, President, Public Policy Institute of California. 13.  Interview, Thomas Carothers, Vice President for Studies, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. 14.  Interview, Connie Veillette, former Director, Rethinking Foreign Assistance program, Center for Global Development. 15.  Interview, James Lindsay, Senior Vice President and Director of Studies, and Maurice R. Greenberg, Chair Council on Foreign Relations. Also, interview, Shannon O’Neil, Senior Fellow for Latin American Studies, Council on Foreign Relations. 16.  Interview, Fred Bergsten, Founding President, Peterson Institute for International Economics. 17.  Interview, Chris Sabatini, Editor-in-Chief, Americas Quarterly, and Senior Director for Policy, Council of the Americas. 18.  Chris Sabatini, communication via email, February 18, 2013. 19.  Interview, Jack Riley, Vice President, RAND National Security Research Division, and Director, RAND National Defense Research Institute. 20.  For specific case studies on when and how think tanks have been able to influence policy decision making, see Donald Ableson, A Capitol Idea: Think Tanks and US Foreign Policy (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2006); and James McGann, Think Tanks and Policy in the United States: Advisor, Academics, and Advocates (New York: Routledge, 2007). 21.  Interview, Nancy Birdsall, President, Center for Global Development. 22.  Interview, Bergsten. 23.  Interview, David Rejeski, Director, Science and Technology Innovation Program, Woodrow Wilson Center.

NOTES TO CHAPTER THREE

105

24.  Interview, Birdsall. 25.  Guillermo Jasson, Chairman of CrossFields Capital and also Chair of the Strategy Committee for the Wilson Center’s Mexico Institute, talks about an 80-20 rule, in which 80 percent of effort should be dedicated to major initiatives in which the organization can truly influence thinking on a set of issues, with 20 percent for opportunities and new areas that the organization may want to move into. 26.  Lawrence MacDonald and Ruth Levine, “Learning While Doing: A Twelve Step Program for Policy Change.” Center for Global Development Essay, February 2008”; and interview, ­Veillette. 27.  Michael Werz, “What Constitutes Success?” PowerPoint slideshow shared with the author, and interview, Werz, Senior Fellow, National Security, Center for American Progress. CHAPTER THREE

1.  Interview, Amy Jaffe, former Wallace S. Wilson Fellow in Energy Studies and Director, Energy Forum, James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy. 2.  Interview, Jaffe, supplemented by interviews with Edward Djerejian, Founding Director, and Lisa Singhania, former Managing Editor, James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy. 3. Interviews with Alan Rosenblatt, Associate Director of Online Advocacy; Rudy DeLeon, Senior Vice President, National Security and International Policy, and Michael Werz, Senior Fellow, Center for American Progress. Figures updated by Werz in an email communication, February 16, 2013. 4.  Interview, James Lindsay, Senior Vice President and Director of Studies; additional material, interview, Shannon O’Neil, Senior Fellow for Latin American Studies, Council on Foreign Relations. 5.  Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), “Think Tank Spectrum Revisited,” June 1, 2012, available at http://fair.org/ extra-online-articles/think-tank-spectrum-revisited/.

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NOTES TO CHAPTER THREE

6.  Chip Heath and Dan Heath, Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die (New York: Random House, 2007). 7.  For an outstanding treatment of audience-centric communications, see Sarah Durham, Brandraising: How Nonprofits Raise Visibility and Money Through Smart Communications (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2010). 8.  Interview, Lindsay. 9.  On the importance of having different strategies for different audiences, see Peter F. Drucker, Managing the Nonprofit: Principles and Practices, 2nd ed. (New York: HarperCollins Business Edition, 2005), pp. 157–160. 10.  Interviews with Lindsay and O’Neil. 11.  For an analysis of think tanks that have sought to go more global in their work, see James McGann with Richard Sabatini, Global Think Tanks: Policy Networks and Governance, New York: Routledge, 2011. 12.  Interview, Thomas Carothers, vice president for Studies, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. 13.  Interviews with Connie Veillette, former Director, Rethinking Foreign Assistance program, and Sarah Jane Staats, Director of Policy Outreach, Center for Global Development. 14.  Interview, Demetrios Papademetriou, President, Migration Policy Institute. The Task Force on Immigration and America’s Future was led by MPI and co-sponsored by the Wilson Center and Manhattan Institute. 15. Interview, Marcus Noland, Deputy Director, Peterson Institute for International Economics. 16.  Interview, Rosenblatt. 17.  Leslie R. Crutchfield and Heather McLeod Grant, Forces for Good: The Six Practices of High-Impact Nonprofits (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2008), p. 94. 18.  Interview, Singhania. 19.  Sadly, Anthony Shaddid died on February 16, 2012, as he was leaving Syria, a tragic loss both for his family and for journal-

NOTES TO CHAPTER FOUR

107

ism. He was an outstanding reporter and human being whose insights left an imprint on all who knew him. 20.  For an extensive and enjoyable treatment of effective communications, see Heath and Heath, Made to Stick. See also Stephen Denning, The Secret Language of Leadership: How Leaders Inspire Action Through Narrative (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2007); Durham, Brandraising. 21.  Interview, Singhania. 22.  Jim Lindsay notes that establishment media once served the purpose of “gatekeepers” of which information and information sources were credible. While this frequently excluded legitimate voices, it also maintained a certain degree of quality control. Today, organizations have to develop a reputation as credible to compete in the ever more crowded blogosphere. Interview, ­Lindsay. 23.  Interview, Steven Dudley, Co-Founder and Co-Director, InSight Crime. CHAPTER FOUR

1.  Interview, Demetrios Papademetriou, President, Migration Policy Institute. 2.  Shirley Sagawa and Deborah Jospin, The Charismatic Organization: Eight Ways to Grow a Nonprofit That Builds Buzz, Delights Donors, and Energizes Employees (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2009), p. 4. 3.  On this point, also see Leslie R. Crutchfield and Heather McLeod Grant, Forces for Good: The Six Practices of High-Impact Nonprofits (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2008). 4.  Peter F. Drucker, Managing the Nonprofit: Principles and Practices, 2nd ed. (New York: HarperCollins Business Edition, 2005), p. 56. 5.  Interview, Peter Hakim, President Emeritus, The InterAmerican Dialogue. 6.  Interview, Marcus Noland, Deputy Director, Peterson Institute for International Economics.

108

NOTES TO CHAPTER FOUR

7.  Crutchfield and McLeod Grant, Forces for Good, p. 124. 8.  Interview, Dan Griswold, Director, Herbert A. Stiefel Center for Trade Policy Studies, Cato Institute. 9.  Interview, Papademetriou. 10.  Interview, Jack Riley, Vice President, RAND National Security Research Division, and Director, RAND National Defense Research Institute. 11.  Reynold Levy, Yours for the Asking: An Indispensable Guide to Fundraising and Management (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2009), p. 25. 12.  Interview, Abe Lowenthal, Professor Emeritus of International Relations, University of Southern California, and Founding President, The Inter-American Dialogue and The Pacific Council on International Policy. 13.  Interview, C. R. Hibbs, Independent Consultant and former Program Director, Hewlett Foundation. 14.  Crutchfield and McLeod Grant, Forces for Good, pp. 186 and 192. 15.  Interview, Robert L. (Bob) Gallucci, President, MacArthur Foundation. 16.  Interview, Lowenthal. 17.  Interview, William (Bill) Antholis, Managing Director, Brookings Institution. 18.  Edwin Fuelner, “The Heritage Foundation,” in James G. McGann and R. Kent Weaver (eds.), Think Tanks and Civil Societies: Catalysts for Ideas and Action (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2000); and interview, Mark Baldassare, President, Public Policy Institute of California. 19.  Interview, Papademetriou. 20.  Interview, James Jay Carafano, Vice President, Foreign and Defense Policy Studies, E. W. Richardson Fellow, and Director, The Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Institute for International Studies, Heritage Foundation.

NOTES TO CHAPTER FIVE

109

21.  Interview, Fred Bergsten, Founding President, Peterson Institute for International Economics. 22.  Performance Management: Measure and Improve the Effectiveness of Your Employees (Boston: Harvard Business Essentials, Harvard Business School Press, 2006). 23.  Aubrey C. Daniels, Bringing Out the Best in People: How to Apply the Astonishing Power of Positive Reinforcement, new and updated ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2000); and Aubrey C. Daniels and James E. Daniels, Performance Management: Changing Behavior that Drives Organizational Effectiveness, 4th ed. (Atlanta: Performance Management Publications, 2006). 24.  Interview, Lowenthal. 25.  I am thankful to Manuel Pastor for this point. 26.  For an extensive discussion of brand management and strategic communication, see Sarah Durham, Brandraising: How Nonprofits Raise Visibility and Money Through Smart Communications (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2010). 27.  Crutchfield and McLeod Grant, Forces for Good, p. 126. 28.  Interview, Nick Johnson, Vice President for State Fiscal Policy, Center on Budget and Policy Priorities; and Crutchfield and McLeod Grant, Forces for Good. 29.  Interview with Manuel Pastor, Professor and Co-Director, Center for the Study of Immigrant Integration, and Director, Program on Environmental and Regional Equity, University of Southern California. CHAPTER FIVE

1.  Interview, Jack Riley, Vice President, RAND National Security Research Division, and Director, RAND National Defense Research Institute. 2.  Lawrence MacDonald and Ruth Levine, “Learning While Doing: A Twelve Step Program for Policy Change.” Center for

110

NOTES TO CHAPTER FIVE

Global Development Essay, February 2008; and interview, Lawrence MacDonald, Vice President for Communication and Outreach, Center for Global Development. 3.  Interview, Joy Olson, Executive Director, Washington Office on Latin America. 4.  Joy Olson, follow-up email to the author, January 17, 2013. 5.  On this point, see Donald Abelson, A Capitol Idea: Think Tanks and US Foreign Policy (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2006). 6.  Jim Collins, From Good to Great in the Social Sectors: A Monograph to Accompany Good to Great (New York: HarperCollins, 2005), p. 7. 7.  This point is taken from Collins, From Good to Great in the Social Sectors. 8.  Interview, Abe Lowenthal, Professor Emeritus of International Relations, University of Southern California, and Founding President, The Inter-American Dialogue and The Pacific Council on International Policy. 9.  Interview, David Rejeski, Director, Science and Technology Innovation Program, Woodrow Wilson Center, and correspondence with Rejeski, December 13, 2012. 10. Collins, From Good to Great in the Social Sectors, p. 8. 11.  Interview, Fred Bergsten, Founding President, Peterson Institute for International Economics. 12.  Interview, Robert L. (Bob) Gallucci, President, MacArthur Foundation. 13.  John Sewell, Globalization, Civil Society, and International Governance (Washington, DC: Overseas Development Network, February 1998), p. 5. 14.  Follow-up communication with Washington Office on Latin America Executive Director Joy Olson, January 18, 2013. 15.  Interview, MacDonald.

INTERVIEWS

William (Bill) Antholis, Managing Director, Brookings Institution, March 25, 2011, and December 10, 2012 (in person) Mark Baldassare, President, Public Policy Institute of California, December 13, 2012 (by phone) Fred Bergsten, Founding President, Peterson Institute for International Economics, December 17, 2010 (in person) Nancy Birdsall, President, Center for Global Development, November 19, 2012 (by phone) Marshall Bouton, President, Chicago Council on Global Affairs, June 3, 2011 (by phone) Paul Brest, President; Ruth Levine, Director of Global Development and Population Program; and Linda Frey, Program Officer, Hewlett Foundation, April 11, 2012 (by phone) James Jay Carafano, Vice President, Foreign and Defense Policy Studies, E. W. Richardson Fellow, and Director, The Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Institute for International Studies, Heritage Foundation, March 30, 2011 (in person) Thomas Carothers, Vice President for Studies, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, May 5, 2011 (by phone) Geoff Dabelko, Former Director, Environmental Change and Security, Woodrow Wilson Center, March 25, 2011 (in person) 111

112

INTERVIEWS

Rudy DeLeon, Senior Vice President, National Security and International Policy, Center for American Progress, April 20, 2011 (in person) Edward Djerejian, Founding Director, James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy, June 28, 2011 (by phone) Steven Dudley, Co-Founder and Co-Director, Insight Crime, April 22, 2011 (by phone) Jim Falk, President, World Affairs Council of Dallas-Ft. Worth, April 6, 2011 (in person) Jeff Faux, President Emeritus, Economic Policy Institute, May 19, 2011 (in person) Robert L. (Bob) Gallucci, President, MacArthur Foundation, April 18, 2011 (by phone) Jerrold Green, President, Pacific Council on International Policy, April 18, 2011 (by phone) Dan Griswold, Director, Herbert A. Stiefel Center for Trade Policy Studies, Cato Institute, February 17, 2011 (in person) Peter Hakim, President Emeritus, The Inter-American Dialogue, March 25, 2011 (by phone) Frederick M. (Rick) Hess, Resident Scholar and Director, Education Policy Studies, American Enterprise Institute, June 1, 2011 (by phone) C. R. Hibbs, Independent Consultant and former Program Director, Hewlett Foundation, August 24, 2011 (by phone) Amy Jaffe, former Wallace S. Wilson Fellow in Energy Studies and Director, Energy Forum, James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy, April 20, 2011 (by phone) Nick Johnson, Vice President for State Fiscal Policy, Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, May 6, 2011 (by phone) Anita Khashu, Independent Consultant, Evaluation and Impact; former center director, Vera Institute, April 21, 2011 (by phone) James Lindsay, Senior Vice President and Director of Studies, and Maurice R. Greenberg, Chair, Council on Foreign Relations, May 26, 2011 (in person)

INTERVIEWS

113

Abe Lowenthal, Professor Emeritus of International Relations, University of Southern California, and Founding President, The Inter-American Dialogue and The Pacific Council on International Policy, December 6, 2012 (by phone) Lawrence MacDonald, Vice President for Communication and Outreach, Center for Global Development, June 7, 2011 (in person) Maya MacGuineas, President, Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, and Fellow, New America Foundation, April 29, 2011 (in person) James G. McGann, Director, Think Tanks Project, University of Pennsylvania, March 11, 2011 (by phone) Marcus Noland, Deputy Director, Peterson Institute for International Economics, May 25, 2011 (in person) Joy Olson, Executive Director, Washington Office on Latin America, February 22, 2011 (in person) Shannon O’Neil, Senior Fellow for Latin American Studies, Council on Foreign Relations, January 31, 2011 (by phone) Demetrios Papademetriou, President, Migration Policy Institute, April 29, 2011 (by phone) Manuel Pastor, Professor and Co-Director, Center for the Study of Immigrant Integration, and Director, Program on Environmental and Regional Equity, University of Southern California, December 13, 2012 (by phone) Ted Piccone, Senior Fellow and Deputy Director, Foreign Policy, Brookings Institution, March 11, 2011 (by phone) David Rejeski, Director, Science and Technology Innovation Program, Woodrow Wilson Center, January 8, 2013 (in person) Jack Riley, Vice President, RAND National Security Research Division, and Director, RAND National Defense Research Institute, April 27, 2011 (by phone) Alan Rosenblatt, Associate Director of Online Advocacy, Center for American Progress, April 22, 2011 (by phone) Chris Sabatini, Editor-in-Chief, Americas Quarterly and Senior Director for Policy, Council of the Americas, February 14, 2011 (by phone)

114

INTERVIEWS

Jonathan Schorr, former Partner and Policy Director, New Schools Venture Fund, April 12, 2011 (in person) John Sewell, Senior Scholar, Woodrow Wilson Center, and former President, Overseas Development Council, December 5, 2012 (in person) David Shirk, Associate Professor and former Director, Trans-Border Institute, University of San Diego, May 25, 2011 (in person) Lisa Singhania, former Managing Editor, James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy, May 31, (by phone) Sarah Jane Staats, Director of Policy Outreach, Center for Global Development, May 13, 2011 (in person) Roberto Suro, Professor of Communications and Executive Director, Tomás Rivera Policy Center, University of Southern California, and Founding Director, Pew Hispanic Center, March 25, 2011 (by phone) Connie Veillette, former Director, Rethinking Foreign Assistance program, Center for Global Development, May 6, 2011 (in person) Michael Werz, Senior Fellow, National Security, Center for American Progress, March 24, 2011 (by phone)

SELECTED READINGS

T H I N K TA N K S

Abelson, Donald E. Do Think Tanks Matter? Assessing the Impact of Public Policy Institutes. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2002. Abelson, Donald E. A Capitol Idea: Think Tanks and US Foreign Policy. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2006. McGann, James G. Think Tanks and Policy Advice in the United States: Academics, Advisor and Advocates. New York: Routledge, 2007. McGann, James G. The Global Go To Think Tanks Report 2012. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, International Relations Program, Think Tanks and Civil Societies Program, 2013. McGann, James G., with Richard Sabatini. Global Think Tanks: Policy Networks and Governance. New York: Routledge, 2011. Medvetz, Thomas. Think Tanks in America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012. Rich, Andrew. Think Tanks, Public Policy, and the Politics of Expertise. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Stone, Diane, and Andrew Denham (eds.). Think Tank Traditions: Policy Research and the Politics of Ideas. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2004. 115

116

SELECTED READINGS

Struyk, Raymond J. Managing Think Tanks: Practical Guidance for Maturing Organizations, exp. 2nd ed. Washington, DC, and Budapest, Hungary: The Urban Institute and the Open Society Institute, 2006. Weidenbaum, Murray. The Competition of Ideas: The World of Washington Think Tanks. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2009. S T R A T E G Y, P L A N N I N G , A N D P O S I T I O N I N G

Allison, Michael, and Jude Kaye. Strategic Planning for Nonprofit Organizations. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2005. Brest, Paul, and Hal Harvey. Money Well Spent: A Strategic Plan for Smart Philanthropy. New York: Bloomberg Press, 2008. Collins, Jim. From Good to Great in the Social Sectors: A Monograph to Accompany Good to Great. New York: HarperCollins, 2005. Crutchfield, Leslie R., and Heather McLeod Grant. Forces for Good: The Six Practices of High-Impact Nonprofits. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2008. Kahan, Seth. Getting Change Right: How Leaders Transform Organizations from the Inside Out. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2010. Kim, W. Chan, and Renée Mauborgne. Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make the Competition Irrelevant. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business School Press, 2005. MacDonald, Lawrence, and Ruth Levine. “Learning While Doing: A Twelve Step Program for Policy Change.” Center for Global Development Essay, February 2008. Porter, Michael E. “What Is Strategy?” Harvard Business Review, November-December 1996. Sagawa, Shirley, and Deborah Jospin. The Charismatic Organization: Eight Ways to Grow a Nonprofit That Builds Buzz, Delights Donors, and Energizes Employees. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2009.

SELECTED READINGS

117

M A N A G E M E N T, B O A R D S , A N D P E R S O N N E L

Carver, John. Boards That Make a Difference. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2006. Daniels, Aubrey C. Bringing Out the Best in People: How to Apply the Astonishing Power of Positive Reinforcement, new and updated ed. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2000. Drucker, Peter F. Managing the Non-Profit Organization: Principles and Practices. 2nd ed. New York: HarperCollins Business Edition, 2005. Haas, Richard N. The Bureaucratic Entrepreneur: How to Be Effective in Any Unruly Organization. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 1999. Lencioni, Patrick. The Advantage: Why Organizational Health Trumps Everything Else in Business. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2012. Performance Management: Measure and Improve the Effectiveness of Your Employees. Boston: Harvard Business Essentials, Harvard Business School Press, 2006. Sand, Michael A. How To Manage an Effective Nonprofit Organization: From Writing and Managing Grants to Fundraising, Board Development, and Strategic Planning. Pompton Plains, NY: Career Press, 2005. C O M M U N I C AT I O N S A N D B R A N D I N G

Denning, Stephen. The Secret Language of Leadership: How Leaders Inspire Action Through Narrative. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2007. Durham, Sarah. Brandraising: How Nonprofits Raise Visibility and Money Through Smart Communications. San Francisco: JosseyBass, 2010. Forman, Janis. Storytelling in Business: The Authentic and Fluent Organization. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013. Halligan, Brian, and Dharmesh Shah. Inbound Marketing: Get Found Using Google, Social Media, and Blogs. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2010.

118

SELECTED READINGS

Heath, Chip, and Dan Heath. Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die. New York: Random House, 2007. Portnoy, Dan, and Brian Morykon. The Non-Profit Narrative: How Telling Stories Can Change the World. Pasadena, CA: PMG Press, 2012. F U N D R A I S I N G A N D F I NA N C I A L D E V E LO P M E N T

Bell, Jeanne, Jan Masaoka, and Steve Zimmerman. Nonprofit Sustainability: Making Strategic Decisions for Financial Viability. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2010. Levy, Reynold. Yours for the Asking: An Indispensable Guide to Fund­ raising and Management. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2009. McKinnon, Harvey. The 11 Questions Every Donor Asks and the Answers All Donors Crave: How You Can Inspire Someone to Give Generously. Medfield, MA: Emerson and Church, 2011. Rothschild, Steve. The Non Nonprofit: For-Profit Thinking for Nonprofit Success. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2012. Saul, Jason. The End of Fundraising: Raise More Money by Selling Your Impact. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2011.