IIP brought us in to strategize and design the primary public product of their flagship State Attorneys General Project. Their goals were threefold: Translate this richly collaborative work on how State AGs can hold police accountable into a digestible, actionable format for State AGs, their staff, other decision- and policy-makers, systems actors, and impacted communities; develop a new product format for similar IIP work in the future; and position IIP as go-to experts for journalists covering the subject. The IIP team had a wealth of video and photo assets, but ultimately, as is so common in the sector, the main thing was a lengthy PDF.
Approach A dream research project for DfP is to explore the value and uses of PDFs in the policy and advocacy sectors. How do sector-specific audiences use PDFs, what might be better alternatives or evolutions, and how can we tailor information products to improve engagement and uptake? Our hypothesis boils down to “PDFs plus.”
IIP was wonderfully willing to explore this line of thinking with us. Through workshopping and research, we came to the conclusion that layers of engagement was the best approach within available resources: Let’s build a new website landing page for the project to serve as an introduction and executive summary. Let’s include a variety of assets, content types, and calls to action targeted to different audiences throughout. And let’s actually break the one report into four PDFs, creating something more like a desk guide or toolkit.
Impact
The digital product is not groundbreaking by for-profit standards, but it does move the needle on how a policy organization can better engage key audiences. IIP and their funders are very happy with it — always a key goal for us — and they plan to use this work as a template for future communications products. What pleases us most, though, is that this experiment in vivo has been so successful with target audiences, further proving out the idea that investing in a PDF-plus strategy is well worth the additional effort and resources.