Brief Briefings
How to Write a One-Page Briefing that Gets Read
Benefits
Why One-Page Briefings? Because your audience suffers from CBS (Crazy Busy Syndrome)—a debilitating condition brought on by excessive workloads, increased expectations, deadlines, and crammed calendars.
You are in an intense competition for readers’ attention. Think about your own reading habits in these days of e-mail, Twitter®, LinkedIn®, Facebook® text messaging, cell phones, and your busy schedule. People don’t read briefing papers, they scan them. Break through CBS and, in so doing, get readers to stop scanning, read, and act on your briefing.
This short-course presents practical ideas on how to boil down your extensive knowledge and information into a one-page briefing that maximizes the chance it will get read.
What This Workshop is About
Stressed people push detail out of their minds to deal with the communication avalanche coming at them. Despite this crummy communication environment, your readers still need to make informed decisions. They need a credible, trusted source of information and they need recommendations they can grasp quickly and act on with confidence. In short, they need your one-page briefing. In this course we cover:
Analyzing why an audience might be skeptical about your messaging.
Using planning models to decide what to include and, more importantly, what to leave out.
How to ‘Write Right’—proven ways to use words creatively to capture and hold your readers’ attention.
Five model page layouts that guides, even the most distracted reader, to your most important messaging, even if they are skip-reading around the page.
Presenting your one-page briefing to maximum impact when you have the chance to also guide readers with your oral remarks.
Who This Course is For
People who must summarize extensive detail into the most important conclusions and present credible recommendations. Individuals looking to improve their persuasive writing skills and who need to showcase their knowledge in a minimum amount of words. Professionals who summarize complex information for non-technical audiences. Presenters who must submit decision packages to executive teams, boards of directors, commissions, etc. Supervisors who manage these types of communications for their organization.
What is unique in this course?
The ever-present use of electronic media has changed the way people consume written material. Yet, coupling research results on the way people read electronic media with the tried and true writing methods of newspaper reporters and copywriters is a good way to address this change in reading behavior. This course combines these two elements with good pre-writing planning and model page layouts to design and deliver one-page, written briefings that both communicate and persuade. Working in teams course participants design and deliver their own one-page briefings and receive coaching on how to improve their skills.
What You Can Expect in All Our Workshops
Teaching Model
We use a Tell → Show → Do → Teach-Back Model
Tell: We present what we know about the skills being taught.
Show: We demonstrate how the skills are applied through lecture, exercises, facilitated discussion, etc.
Do: We have participants practice the skills using team assignments, role plays, mock activities, etc.
Teach-Back: We wrap up topics with peer-to-peer and instructor advice on how to apply the new skills in the real-world.
How We Present This Material
We come to you and present at your work site or offer remote teaching using Internet sharing tools when appropriate. We use discussion, exercises, lecture, and mock exercises to combine our experience with your staff’s experience and create a dynamic, fun, and highly interactive training.
Transform Your Staff
Learning is not complete until there is application. We ask participants to discuss how they can maintain the momentum in their organization after we, as trainers, leave. We also share our ideas on how to form ‘Master Mind’ groups and other supports so participants have a community of knowledgeable peers who can help one another successfully apply the skills after the course. We also make ourselves available after the event for short consultations for brainstorming solutions, problem solving, etc. for free.
Customization
Depending on the audience and your specific goals for the event, we will tailor the program to increase its relevance and value. While each of our programs is designed as a specific, interactive training session, we can provide anything from a one-hour keynote presentation to the full event and we can provide greater emphasis on the topics that you think are most valuable.