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Reporting your findings

The resources we’ve listed here can help with producing reports and sharing evidence clearly and effectively.

The general guides provide a starting point, but we’ve also listed more specific guides to help with writing reports, presenting quantitative data, and sharing findings through dialogue.

General guides

Impact toolkit - Economic and Social Research Council

This impact toolkit contains advice about reporting findings.

Top tips to communicate research effectively - Scottish Third Sector Research Forum

This three-page document, written in plain language, provides some ideas about different ways to present findings.

Evaluation Support Scotland (ESS)

Evaluation Support Scotland has produced two resources that provide information about communicating the outcomes of evaluations and other types of investigation:

This document gives information about planning a report and putting it together. It also includes guidance about reporting quantitative and qualitative findings and drawing attention to the headline results.

Part two of this document has some useful ideas about how to communicate evidence to change policy and practice. It’s been developed using the experience of practitioners, policy makers, researchers and funders and is highly practical. It provides some principles to consider when seeking to influence policy.

Writing reports

Reporting research findings - Wilder Research

This document provides information on preparing written reports. There are useful tips on presenting both numerical and qualitative data.

Reporting - Better Evaluation

This webpage includes an overview of what sections can be included in a report.

Quantitative data presentation

A guide to presenting statistics - United Nations Economic Commission for Europe

This resource contains lots of advice and tips. There are sections on presenting data in tables and charts with examples of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ presentations, and guidance on writing style and wording.

The ONS content style guide: a guide to communicating statistics - The Office for National Statistics

The guide has several sections. There’s one on language that includes tips on words and phrases to use and avoid. There’s one that sets out how to write and format numbers correctly. There’s also a section on content types, including multi-media content. This gives guidance on social media content, like how to structure tweets. There's also information on when and how to use diagrams.

Sharing findings through dialogue

Community of Enquiry guide - Iriss

This is a practical step-by-step guide to using a Community of Enquiry approach.

There are many other ways to share findings and the DEEP website has more information and resources on dialogue-based methods.

The implementation art gallery, Applied Research Collaboration, East of England

This resource focuses on how to implement findings through a community of practice. It's an interactive website with an accompanying storeroom of links to further resources and a workbook that people can use. The content can also be downloaded as a PDF.