Which tools can I use to communicate the outputs of my project?

Overview

A result that nobody outside the project can use has not been delivered. This part of the guide collects the instruments NAIAD used to move what it produced out of the project and into the hands of people who make decisions: publications and their summaries, the course material, the demonstration case write-ups, the policy documents, and the working papers that sit between a technical deliverable and a decision.

What is available

Each technical result is accompanied by a short Results in Brief document written for a non-specialist reader, which states what was done, what it produces and what decision it can improve, without the apparatus of the full report. These are the most efficient way for a practitioner to find out whether a method is relevant to them before committing to the longer document.

For a reader who wants the method rather than the result, the guidelines and handbooks set out how each approach is applied, and the demonstration case descriptions show it applied to a real site with its actual data constraints. For a reader who wants to understand the subject rather than a specific method, the Massive Open Online Course covers the whole sequence from the concept of insurance value through assessment to business model, using the demonstration areas throughout.

The policy documents address a different audience again: the roundtable reports and policy briefs are written for the people who set the conditions under which Nature Based Solutions are implemented, and they present the project's findings as recommendations about those conditions rather than as findings about hydrology or economics.

How to choose

The instrument follows the audience and the decision. A technical peer needs the report and the data. A local authority needs the case description and the summary. A ministry or a river basin authority needs the policy brief. A professional moving into this field needs the course. Using the wrong one is the most common reason a good result is never taken up, and the material is organised so that a reader can identify which one they are.