American Bridge Educational Foundation

Public Interest Research Guide

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Finding Information
    Learn about the research tools available to learn about elected officials
    • Where to Start With Research
      Here you will find some of the general research tools you can use to begin building your research documents
    • Advanced Research Tools
      These tools are more focused, and should be used to answer any questions you have after using the general resources in the previous section
  3. Sharing Information
    Learn how to make your research useful to yourself, to other researchers, and to constituents
    • Internal Documents
      Learn how to format your research notes to make it easy to read and search through quickly
    • External Documents
      Learn how to get your research in front of constituents

Introduction

American democracy teeters on the brink of ruin, dragged down by elected officials who engage in election denialism and who are working to roll back civil rights and pass restrictive voter suppression laws. 

Political researchers are more important than ever under these circumstances. Unfortunately, many of these behaviors go undiscovered or unreported, meaning their constituents are unaware of the extreme anti-democratic policies their elected officials promote. We created this guide to give others the basic knowledge they will need to both effectively research elected officials, and get their research in front of constituents.

Paid research tools are out of reach for many independent researchers and smaller organizations, so we have tried to include free resources wherever possible. Paid tools like LexisNexis also typically have their own extensive how-to guides, so we only include some basic tips and an explanation of what you can expect to find while using those tools.

This guide is split into two main themes – finding information and sharing information. In some ways, finding information is the easy part. This is the information age. There is more out there than you could ever possibly present to constituents.

Sharing information is the hard part.

The sharing information section will go over strategies and avenues to put your research in front of partners and constituents. While it is presented second in this guide – you can’t share information until you have found some – that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t consider those strategies before and during your research.

You should consider who you are trying to educate, why you want them to know what you’ve found, what you hope they will do, and how you plan to get them that information. The answers to these questions will likely determine what is worth looking into and what you might let go, even if it is interesting to you.

The goal here isn’t just to gather research. The goal is to gather effective research.

Finding Information

Where to Start With Research

In this section:

  1. Setting Google Alerts
  2. Using LexisNexis
  3. How to Make Twitter Work for You
  4. Monitoring Campaign Websites

Setting Google Alerts

Overview

  • Google alerts are a powerful tool to stay up to date on everything that is being written about a specific person or topic
  • Use search operators to refine your alert. This will save you time reading the alerts, while also making sure you don’t miss anything important
  • Choose “all results” in the options for your alert. You should decide what is relevant, not Google’s algorithm
  • Google alerts won’t actually catch everything that has been written, but there are other tools that can help fill in the gaps

There are too many news outlets writing too many articles for you to keep up with everything out there on your own. An easy way to keep track of what happens is to create a Google alert related to the elected officials you are trying to research.

If you aren’t already familiar, you can go to https://www.google.com/alerts to set one up. It will function more or less like a standard Google search, except that you will get the results sent to your email at regular intervals. The default is once per day, but, under options, you can choose “as it happens,” which will send you the alert roughly once per hour, or choose once per week. You can, and should, also change the option from “Only the best results” to “All results.” Again — you should decide what is relevant, not Google’s algorithm.

Google alerts are valuable, but incomplete. We’ll talk about LexisNexis next, which is a more powerful search engine that you have to pay for. It has its own blind spots, so it is worth setting up alerts on both Google and LexisNexis.

Note: If you don’t know how to use search “operators” to write more useful search prompts, you can read this short guide at The Guardian, or this document from Daniel Russell. Russell worked on Google’s user interface team to improve their search engine until 2023.

Using LexisNexis

  1. What is LexisNexis?
  2. Nexis Basics
  3. Filter and Source Searches

What is LexisNexis?

Overview

  • What is LexisNexis
  • Basic settings for Nexis

LexisNexis is a paid service that allows you to search for news articles, legal documents, business reports, and other public records documents. It is one of the largest electronic databases of legal and public records documents in the world and allows you to conduct in-depth research faster than would otherwise be possible. If you or your organization can afford an account, it may be worth the cost.

When you create a Nexis account, make sure to update some of the basic settings. Most importantly, set the start page to PowerSearch – that’s the most useful function.

You should also set the default number of search results per page up to 50, which is the max, and set the default order as oldest to newest. Oldest to newest allows you to read the results in chronological order, which will help you understand what happened and when.

Nexis Basics

Overview

  • Downloading search results
  • Basic search operators and where to find them
  • Nexis guides can teach you how to use the service

Nexis allows you to download articles or legal documents in your search results in a single file, which you should do if the results are useful or could potentially be in the future. Documents do sometimes disappear from their database without warning, likely because the host website changed the address or removed it themselves. Downloading the results also lets you read through the results over time, without having to rerun the search and find where you left off.

To download results, click the “Select all” box on the top left side of the results, then go to the next page and do the same. It retains all the results you selected as you move to the next page of results. Repeat this process until you have selected all the results, then click the download button and make sure the “Full documents” is selected.

If you just click the download button without selecting, Nexis will give you an option to download all the results without clicking through. Do not do this – all you will get are headlines and metadata about the results, not the full articles.

If you do have access to Nexis, they have a series of guides to teach you how to use the service effectively, and we recommend you watch those. Nexis has more operators than many other search engines, so be sure to read the search operator help page every time you write a search prompt until you are familiar with the options.

As you learn, there are a few key operators to use in your searches:

  • w/* – the within operator lets you search for words that are near each other. It can be useful when searching people’s names, where articles may include a middle initial and legal filings may refer to them in the “lastname, firstname” format. “w/2” would search for the names within two words of each other.
  • ! – The exclamation mark will search for common variations of a name. “Bob!” will show results for Bob or Bobby, for example.
  • ? – the question mark will return results no matter what character is in that position. It works like a wildcard, and is most helpful when a word has multiple spellings or common misspellings. For example, if you know that people frequently spell “Bernstein” as “Bernstien,” you could search “Bernst??n” to get results for either spelling.

Filter and Source Searches

Overview

  • Nexis has two main search functions: source and filter
  • Where to find the different options for source universes
  • The kinds of information you can expect to find in Nexis

You will almost always use source searches, in which you select the kind of sources you would like to see in your results. You can decide to search all news outlets, or just Virginia news outlets, for example, or choose to only see things published by the EPA. You can see a full list of sources in the “sources” tab found at the top of the page.

Filter searches let you search based on an attribute of the results. You could search for only articles in German, for example. You probably won’t use filter searches often, but it’s worth watching the Nexis guides on filter search so you have an idea of what it can be good for.

You can also create alerts for any search prompt you use in Nexis. These alerts are extremely useful and can fill in some of the gaps that exist when relying on Google alerts alone.

We mentioned at the start that LexisNexis is one of the largest electronic databases for legal and public records information. We will discuss those options a little more in the Finding Even More Information section of this guide.

For now, we will just flag that Nexis gives you access to most legal documents, though it has slightly less functionality than a specialized legal database like CourtListener. Nexis also gives you access to an enormous number of public records documents, like real estate information or Securities and Exchange Commission filings. The Comprehensive Person Report is particularly valuable as a starting point for research into an elected official.

How to Make Twitter Work for You

Overview

  • Twitter/X is still one of the best places to find real-time and on-the-ground reports about what’s happening in the world, even if it has gotten harder to filter out the noise
  • Tweetdecks/X Pro are a great way to filter out some of that noise
  • Tweetdecks also let you sort the people you follow into feeds called “columns,” which is important if you’re researching more than one topic or politician
  • You can even create a column based on a search prompt, giving even more functionality to an already powerful source of information

In spite of its many failings, Twitter continues to be one of the better places to stay on top of the news cycle. No other site can match Twitter’s capacity for live, as-it-happens news coverage and updates – if you can manage to filter out the junk.

Tweetdeck, now known as X Pro, is one of the best ways to make Twitter work for you. It is a paid service from the company that effectively lets you set up multiple custom feeds called “columns.” Each column will only show tweets related to the accounts or search terms that you followed in that column. If you’re going to be following more than one subject or elected official, it is an efficient way to keep those sorted, that way you don’t have to skim past tweets about a senator when you want to see what the governor has been up to.

You can also create columns based on search terms, and advanced Twitter search functions work here as well. This is most useful if there is a search that you will consistently be using – maybe you want to see tweets related to abortion bans in your state legislature. You can create a whole feed dedicated to that search, saving you time in the future.

Monitoring Campaign Websites

Overview

  • Campaign websites aren’t the best resource, but they do communicate some information
  • Changes to a campaign website can be worth investigating, since it may reveal changing priorities for an elected official
  • Website monitoring programs will automatically alert you when a campaign site is changed. Some of them even send you before and after screenshots
  • If you know or suspect a website was changed, but you don’t have screenshots to prove it, the Wayback Machine might have saved earlier versions of the website

Campaign websites will only ever say what a candidate wants people to know about them, but that can be useful in and of itself. If their campaign website says one thing, but their votes, public statements and actions say another, that’s something their constituents should know.

Politicians also tell us something when they change their campaign website – many anti-abortion politicians quickly removed references to “unborn child” language following the Alabama Supreme Court’s disastrous ruling that threatened IVF treatments in the state. Unless you had already taken screenshots of a politician’s campaign website, it would be difficult to prove that they previously supported the unqualified protection of “unborn children” that led to the Alabama ruling. There are a few options to track those automatically.

Website monitoring programs will automatically check a website for changes at regular intervals. VisualPing is a great paid option that even sends you screenshots of the page before and after the change and they have a variety of plans at different prices. If you search “website monitoring program” you’ll find other programs to choose from, including some that offer more limited services for free.

If a change happened before you began tracking a website with one of the monitoring options, you might still be able to find the earlier version via the Internet Archive, also known as the Wayback Machine. The Internet Archive is a nonprofit organization that saves websites, complete with a timeline showing each time the page was added to the archive. The internet is too big for them to save every webpage every day, but it is worth checking to see if they have what you need.

They even save some deleted social media posts, making them one of the few options available to view deleted tweets or Facebook posts that elected officials may have removed after getting pushback.

Advanced Research Tools

  1. Free Databases
  2. Paid Databases

Free Databases

Overview

  • Free databases can be helpful for elected officials at all levels of government, though federal officials have the most information available.
  • Many of these databases are for niche information, which is why we recommend beginning with the more general resources above, and answering your remaining questions using these.
  • We only list a few issue-specific advocacy organizations here as examples, but there is likely a relevant nonprofit for any policy area you are interested in.

Federal Legislators

Voting records and alerts

Unfortunately there aren’t any great resources to easily check a federal legislator’s voting history. Some issue-specific advocacy organizations will keep track of votes relevant to their policy focus, but it’s not common.

The best choice is to search on congress.gov, where you can find voting records by bill number, bill title – although this is not recommended since many bills are introduced under the same name in multiple sessions of Congress – or by legislator. Congress.gov also allows you to set up alerts for specific bills or legislators, which you should do.

Videos from the Floors of Congress

The C-SPAN library keeps the recorded video from the floors of Congress in a searchable database. It can be worth checking to see if your elected official made any statements explaining their vote on a bill, to see how they may have explained a bill they sponsored or introduced, or if you need to confirm a statement they made on the floor of Congress. Congress has guides on how to use the C-SPAN video library.

Lobbyists

House Clerk lobbying disclosure reports will show if your elected official or their staff were formerly lobbyists. If you know a lobbyist is meeting with an elected official in the House, you can also see reports on the lobbyist’s activities here. 

While it’s less common, the foreign lobbyist registration will give you similar information about lobbyists who work on behalf of foreign entities.

Environmental Issues

The League of Conservation Voters Scorecard is an excellent resource. The LCV is a non-partisan organization that releases an annual scorecard grading elected officials and legislatures based on their votes for environmental legislation. The LCV is also one of the rare organizations that publicly tracks votes on legislation related to their focus.

Financial Disclosures

Both the House and the Senate require that elected officials post publicly available, itemized, searchable expense reports for their office’s spending, as well as personal financial disclosures about their income, assets, and major debts. You can find many of them below. Note that while the House publishes financial disclosures, their website search function tends to say the document can’t be found. You may need to reach out to the House Clerk directly for the information.

  • The Secretary of the Senate posts expense reports twice a year in an itemized, searchable file. Note that the Oct 2023-Mar 2024 pdf is over 2,000 pages long – use the search function to find the office of your elected official. There is a summary of expenses, and, below that, an itemized list of expenses for their office.
  • The Chief Administrative Officer of the House publishes an expense report for the House four times a year. Again, note that the Jan 2024-Apr 2024 report is over 3,000 pages long. Use the search function to find the office of your elected official.
  • The U.S. Senate also releases personal financial disclosures for every senator
  • The U.S. House releases personal financial disclosures. Unfortunately, the search function is unreliable at best. You may need to reach out to the Clerk directly using the contact information at the bottom of this page.
  • The Federal Elections Commission publishes campaign financial disclosures. This is often used in candidate research, but it’s important to know who helped get an elected official into office. If they consistently pass legislation or award contracts that benefit their major donors, that’s something their constituents should know about.

All Elected Officials

Education Scores

The Nation’s Report Card rates state schools. This is the best way to compare education between states or over time, and can be useful if someone is pushing policies based on a specific state. You should check to see if that state actually performing better than the national average, or if their scores have improved since they implemented the policy.

This will also be useful for elected officials who work more directly on education policy, either because they are on a school board or because they are on a relevant legislative committee.

Environmental

These resources can be used to check the environmental impact of businesses associated with an elected official, whether they are former workplaces, major donors, or if the official is passing legislation or awarding contracts that benefit a few specific companies.

Lawyers

If an elected official frequently leans on their history in the legal profession, check the state bar associations to see if they are registered or have let their license lapse. This will also show you any disciplinary actions.

While it’s very unlikely, you could also check the DOJ list of disbarred lawyers. Constituents should know if an elected official was disbarred due to criminal or unethical behavior.

Businesses and Nonprofits

If your elected official is connected to a business or nonprofit, is promoting a business or nonprofit as an example of best practices, or has awarded contracts to a business or nonprofit, you should look into that company. Their constituents should know if the official is connected to a business that breaks the law or violates people’s rights, or if their tax money is going to an organization like that.

  • Guidestar provides simple ratings of nonprofits.
  • ProPublica has a searchable database of nonprofit 990 filings. Note that there are many ways to delay filing a 990, and they aren’t immediately publicly available, so the most recent 990 may be a few years old.
  • Good Jobs First maintains a database of regulatory violations by companies.
  • The Department of Labor lists all complaints filed under the TAA, which, among other things, allows employees to file a complaint when they think they lost their jobs due to outsourcing. If the DoL agrees, the employees receive job training and other benefits. For researchers, a DoL judgment saying the jobs were outsourced is solid evidence that a business is leaving American workers behind.
  • The FTC also lists cases and proceedings against companies that violated consumer protection laws.
  • The Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement posts tables of the previous year’s fines here.
  • The Department of Housing and Urban Development posts charges and violations of the Fair Housing Act here.
  • The Securities and Exchange Commission makes business filings publicly available on their website, allowing you to easily check the registration documents of businesses to see who owns or manages them.
Financial Disclosures

Most state legislatures also require members to file personal financial disclosure statements, and may require office expenditure disclosures. Unfortunately, we are unaware of any general resources providing access to state disclosures. You will have to look for your state’s policies on public disclosures.

The secretary of state is often a good place to start, as is the state legislature’s nonpartisan staff.

FOIA/Public Records Requests

Freedom of Information Act requests and public records can be extremely important to giving constituents a full understanding of their elected official’s behavior and beliefs. Keep in mind that FOIA requests can get expensive. Writing a focused FOIA request will be important to keeping the costs down.

  • DocumentCloud is a free database of public records requests from newspapers, many of whom upload documents they received through FOIA requests here after they publish a story.
  • The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press maintains a guide of each state’s FOIA and open meetings laws and has a federal FOIA wiki. Each state guide lists the kind of information you can request under state law, and has a tutorial on how to file a FOIA request further down. Note that government agencies are normally allowed to charge you for the material and labor required to fulfill your request.

Overview

  • We kept this section short for the reasons we gave in our intro.
  • This is not an exhaustive list of paid resources for legal documents, but these are some of the most useful.
  • Please be careful when accessing legal documents. These resources will prompt you if you may not have the right to access the document – never lie about having the right to access legal documents.
  • Real estate documents are generally public information, but please be careful about publishing home addresses. You only need to provide the state or city the official resides in to show they live outside their district.

LexisNexis has a specific legal research tab where you can find court documents related to lawsuits or criminal cases. Searching here can also find cases where an elected official may have been included as a signatory or interviewed as a witness or expert.

PACER is a government run website, Public Access to Court Electronic Records. You need to pay for the records, but it is a “national index for district, bankruptcy, and appellate courts.”

BRB Publications maintains the Public Record Research System, which includes both a database of state and municipal court records and how to get access to documents that aren’t already available.

Real Estate Documents

Most real estate records are public documents if you know where to search. If you have an address, you can see when the official purchased the real estate and for how much.

LexisNexis will tell you the properties an elected official owns in the comprehensive person report, making it easy to see if an elected official recently purchased an expensive property, or if they maintain an out-of-state residence.

Zillow has both a free and a paid version, and may provide photos of the property in addition to a history of owners and sale prices.

Sharing Information

Internal Documents

Overview

  • Organized research is useful research
  • Research bullet points are the basic building block of research on elected officials
  • First look reports give team members and allies outside your organization an overview of key information about an elected official

You may have noticed a few things about this guide. There is a table of contents at the start that links to each section, there are subheadings throughout the guide, and each subheading begins with a bullet point overview of what you’ll find. 

This is also how you should organize your research. 

As we said at the start, there is an overwhelming amount of information available about any given elected official if you know where to look. If you have to read through everything you’ve ever found about the official every time you try to write about them, you will waste too much of your own time. Keep the information organized somehow. 

Grouping your research by topic, placing them chronologically, and including short summaries of each article or resource you’re linking to will make it easy to find what you need, when you need it.

It also makes it possible to share your research with other team members and with allies outside your organization. 

Research should be organized so someone can skim your research and focus time and attention where they need to. If someone was already familiar with Google alerts, they would know to skip past that section and move to the next based on the overview at the opening. If you realize later you need a refresher on using LexisNexis, you can easily navigate directly to that section to find what you need. 

Organized research is useful research.

Research Bullet Points

To keep things organized and easy to skim through, you will want to put your information into research bullet points, or research bullets. Research bullets summarize facts about an elected official in a single, short sentence, then support that sentence with further information and citations. 

The three parts of any research bullet are the headline, the body, and the citation.

The headline is the shortest possible summary of a fact, not necessarily the headline from an article. You want to use as few words as possible while still communicating what the fact is. The goal is to make your research documents easy to skim through for the specific information you want.

Below the headline, you will include a body. The body will almost always be a direct quote pulled from the source material, whether it’s a social media post, interview, video, or article. Remember to include an attribution here: “According to the New York Times…” or “In a Twitter post, [person’s name] said…”

Those attributions will also make it easier for you to know how reliable the information is when you come back to the document. 

If a fact is supported by the New York Times or comes from an official’s own Twitter account, you won’t necessarily need a lot of other supporting sources, as compared to articles from a less reputable outlet or posts from people who might only have second- or third-hand knowledge.

After the quote, you will want to add a citation, which should include the publication or website the quote was found in, as well as the date that it was posted. 

If an article is an opinion or an op-ed, you should include that in the citation, i.e. [Opinion, New York Times; 3/17/24]. Opinion sections typically have less rigorous fact-checking, and represent one person’s view rather than the position of the publication. Unless the elected official is the author, these are like longer, slightly more reputable social media posts. 

Always include a hyperlink in the citation if you can – control+k (Windows) or command+k (Mac) are shortcuts to insert a link in the text you have highlighted. These shortcuts will save you a lot of time when adding citations.

First Look Reports

A first look report is a document that summarizes the most important information you have on an elected official for easy reading. Ideally, someone who was completely unaware of the elected official could read your first look report and have a solid understanding of who that official is and what they have done.

First look reports have two main sections: the overview, which gives a timeline of the official’s life, and the known controversies, which briefly introduces the important information you have found during your research.

The overview will list the official’s education and career path, their family members, notable achievements, awards, and personal and professional affiliations like churches, social clubs, or professional associations. For example, if someone attended Westboro Baptist for 10 years, their constituents may want to know that.

The known controversies section will provide brief, one-paragraph descriptions of any important topics, policies, or events you found in your research. You should provide one or two sources to back up these claims – a research document is only as good if it’s accurate – but you don’t want to overwhelm the reader in a first look report. You just need enough to show they can trust what you’ve told them. 

If you send someone a first look report, be prepared to provide more of your sources if they want to know more about a specific issue.

External Documents

  1. Earned Media
  2. Owned Media

Earned Media

Overview

  • What is earned media?
  • Why earned media is valuable
  • A note on op-eds and letters to the editor

Earned media refers to any coverage of your research that you did not create or pay for yourself. Articles written by journalists or editors, mentions of your reports on talk shows or in interviews, and even references to your research in other groups’ social media accounts and blogs count as earned media. 

Earned media is often considered the most impactful type of media coverage because the information gets to readers from sources they already know and trust. Even if you do great work, you don’t have the reputation, recognition, and reach that your state’s 80-year-old publication does. When they publish an article it goes out to all of their readers, who get that information from someplace they trust.

Op-eds and letters to the editor are a special kind of earned media. While you are writing the content yourself, it is published by a news outlet on their website or even in print, and you’ll need to convince the editors to run your piece.

Writing a Pitch

Overview

  • Pitches are how you get your research published by news outlets
  • How to structure a pitch

Earned media sounds great, but how are you supposed to get a newspaper to publish your research?

The short answer is “pitching.”

Pitching refers to the practice of sending story ideas to editors and reporters to see if they are interested in writing an article based on your research.

A good pitch makes use of the research bullets from before to present a narrative, or story, to a reporter or editor. 

When you see a pattern in your research, you can string several research bullets together to build a narrative. An elected official who breaks one campaign promise has broken one campaign promise. An elected official who has broken three or four campaign promises is untrustworthy. That’s the difference between a fact and a narrative.

The good news is that you should already have your research organized into research bullets. All you have to do is put them together in a single document and add some structure so it’s easy to read. You will need to add a headline, a summary, and, unless the pitch is very short, section heads for the different topics. Remember, organized research is useful research.

The header will give a one-line description of the story you are proposing. In the example above, that might be “Official has broken nearly all of their campaign promises. Can we trust them to do what they say?”

Your summary will tell the reader everything they need to know about your pitch. 

Keep the summary as short as possible – reporters and editors have limited time, so you need to get their attention before they move on. “Elected Official has broken nearly all of their campaign promises. Official promised A, did B instead. Official promised C, did D instead. Official promised E, did F instead.” You’ll add more details for each point below.

After the summary, you will add  your research bullets to prove what you told them. 

If you have more than three or four, break these up into sections with large, bolded section titles that clearly communicate what the section is about. “Campaign Promise A.”

Inside each section, list the research bullets that prove your claims. For this example, we would have a section for each of the campaign promises. Inside each section, we would provide research bullets proving that the official did make that campaign promise, and that they did break the promise like we said. 

Provide two or three sources for each of those claims if you can, even if you think the first citation is unimpeachable. It is better to have too much evidence than too little.

One last note: Your research bullets should be presented in chronological order to make it easier to understand what is happening. You can break that rule if you think it would be better to present the information in a different order, but your basic format will be chronological. This is one reason we included the dates in the citations for our research bullets.

Op-Eds

Overview

  • The value of an op-ed
  • How to submit an op-ed

Op-eds are unique in earned media.

You write an op-ed yourself and submit it after it has been written. If they accept it, editors typically make minimal changes to what you submit, largely confined to grammar checks. 

Op-eds offer you total control over how the story is written and presented, while still giving you the reach, recognition, and trust that a publication has built over their existence.

With that in mind, you should keep in mind that they may take more time and effort from you. When a reporter takes your pitch, they are the ones doing the writing – you are getting free services from a professional writer. Also, most publications have a limit to how long an op-ed can be – typically around 750 words. In most word processors, that’s about a page and a half, single-spaced. A reporter is likely to get quite a bit more space to write with.

Additionally, it can be hard to land an op-ed in a larger publication if you don’t have fame or specific expertise. Editors will judge an op-ed based on whose opinion they get to publish, not just on how well-argued they think the opinion is.

Letters to the editor serve a similar function to op-eds, but are even shorter, typically 200-250 words, and are written as a response to an article or op-ed the newspaper recently published. Fewer words mean less work, but you need to find a way to connect it to another article they have written.

Both op-eds and letters to the editor are frequently submitted through a dedicated section of the “Submissions” tab. If you don’t see it there, you can email an editor directly to ask how you could submit one.

Remember, you will be submitting this as a pre-written article, not in the format of a pitch. Read a couple of their previous op-eds to get an idea of the style that they tend to publish, and try to mimic that format.

Owned Media

Overview

  • What is owned media?
  • Websites, blogs and social media

Owned media refers to things that you publish on platforms that you own or control. It can still get your research in front of constituents, but who sees it and how many depends on your organization’s existing audience.

The most common types of owned media are websites, blogs, and social media.

Your company website is one place where you can publish your research findings. Unfortunately, people will only see it if they know to look at your site, or if your search engine optimization, or SEO, is good enough to put you high on the results page for search engines like Google. 

We won’t get into the specifics of SEO here, in part because there are many other guides to improving your site’s SEO you can find elsewhere. Suffice to say, search engine optimization determines where your website shows up in search results. The better your SEO, the higher up in the search results you will appear.

Blogs and social media have the benefit of discoverability – people may see your posts on Twitter or Facebook even if they aren’t specifically looking for the information you have found. Many blogging sites have a similar system of recommendations for their users and readers, making it easier for people to see your research.

Another type of owned media, the newsletter, is a new and growing type of owned media. Newsletters can grow into owned media that rival mid-sized publications. Some of the largest newsletters have hundreds of thousands of subscribers, who have blogs, articles, and other content delivered directly to their email.

The two largest newsletter platforms are Substack and Beehiiv. Each of them have their own guides and tutorials on how to set up a newsletter and begin writing, so we won’t replicate their work here. You can also find guides written by successful newsletter founders, who will provide tips on developing an effective writing style and recruiting subscribers to your newsletter.

Owned media is an important part of any education campaign, but outside of the rare, extremely large newsletters, it has significantly less impact than earned or even paid media. We recommend you make earned media your first priority.