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How to avoid the dead report problem

April 2026

Most policy reports are dead on arrival: whatever their quality, nobody reads or uses them. The difference is rarely the drafting — it is whether the report was treated as a campaign from day one.

Most policy reports are dead on arrival: whatever their quality, nobody reads or uses them. The difference is rarely the drafting — it is whether the report was treated as a campaign from day one.

Most policy reports are dead on arrival: whatever their quality, nobody reads or uses them. The difference is rarely the drafting — it is whether the report was treated as a campaign from day one.

A while ago I discussed, with a friend in the industry association world, the problem of policy reports — written in-house or commissioned externally — that end up “dead” after publication: regardless of their qualities, nobody reads or uses them.

If you are already sitting on a dead report, that is one kind of problem, and not the one I will address here. But if you are in the starting phase and want to avoid it, you have options.

My primary recommendation is to treat the commissioning of any policy report — depending on its intended use and objectives, of course — as a live body for the entire course of the project. Instead of focusing entirely on the drafting itself, consider the policy engagement and communications dimensions of what you are doing from day one, and integrate it all into one strategy and plan.

For example:

Organise the work under a policy commission, with a chair and a secretariat — less complicated than it sounds. That way you can front the report with credible senior names, while letting the experts focus on the drafting.

Create a communications plan for the entirety of the project: the launch and aims of the commission; the presentation of initial conclusions; stakeholder interviews and engagement to gather input from policymakers during the drafting; and the presentation of final conclusions using events, media, social media and stakeholder engagement. Use partnerships with others to spread the word.

Create a post-publication communications and engagement plan, to keep the results alive and tie them to the ongoing policy discussions inside the institutions.

There are many variations. But the basic idea is that if you want a report to make an impact, you need to plan for how that will happen from day one — not hope that its findings are somehow so good that the report “goes viral.”

Some think tanks do this very well. And there is nothing quite so comforting as knowing, six months out, that your big report of the year will meet and exceed its expectations — rather than being a coin toss.