Issue briefs are a common policy-writing genre, particularly in the advocacy field. For our purposes, we will define an issue brief as a 12 page document used to quickly inform policy makers about the basics of an issue or a program. Ideally, they provide basic information on an issue in a nonpartisan fashion so that policy makers can quickly come up to speed on issues about which they know little. You may also hear the term issue brief applied to longer documents (46 pages), but anything longer probably shouldnt be described as brief.

Issue briefs are used by advocates at every level of government who are trying to raise the profile of an issue to policy makers. In legislative bodies throughout the country, advocates for causes as diverse as childrens rights, chemical manufacturing, and government agencies tour legislative offices with these two-sided, sharply designed briefs in hand. Each advocate is hoping that their brief will help educate legislators and aides about the importance of their issue. After all, if legislators dont know why they should care about the issue and the basic facts about it, how can they begin to make policy about it?

You may also hear the term policy brief used interchangeably with issue brief. There is no firm rule that distinguishes between the two. In contrast to an objectively focused issue brief, policy briefs often take a stand and advocate for it (Martin, 2014). Sometimes policy brief is used as an umbrella term for both advocacy and objective briefs (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, 2011). In this chapter, we will stick with objective policy briefs, but you can use almost all of the same rules and the formatting tools to write an advocacy brief when the need arises.

As well as being hand-delivered by the advocates themselves, issue briefs are typically posted on organizations websites, distributed to members, and mailed to relevant decision makers.

Problematically for advocates, perhaps no other setting in policy making is as busy as a legislative session. To educate in this context, even some of the standard rules previously covered in this book are up for grabs: Figures and tables can be included without being described in the text, bibliographies can be consigned to a URL, photographs and quotes can be included as evidence. Scandalous? Perhaps in other genres. But in issue briefs, if it is honest and effective, then it is fair game.

Distinctive Aspects of Issue Briefs

The audience for an issue brief is distinctive because they are insanely busy at any given moment and they are being given a document they did not request. Instead, the issue brief is a part of a sales pitch about the issue. Given these constraints, the metric by which your issue brief should be judged is whether or not a reader with no basic knowledge of the issue is able to look at the brief and understand its purpose and the basic facts of the issue in 30 seconds (Ruderman, 2012). Thats the first test: to guarantee that the audience can take in the basics and then decide if they want to learn more. Lets look at some of the aspects of how issue briefs accomplish this task given their constraints.

Narrowly Focused on Communicating One Important Message