Writing and Disseminating Grey Literature

A self-paced course from IIHS designed to help academics and practitioners find a wider audience for their grey literature outputs—reports, working papers, evaluations and policy documents. Grey literature represents an enormous body of knowledge, much of which is not read beyond the immediate commissioning audience; the problem is not a lack of rigour—it is a lack of tools and techniques for reaching diverse communities. Writing and Disseminating Grey Literature gives researchers, academics, and development professionals practical tools for articulating grey literature to make it accessible to non-specialist readers, and for building dissemination strategies for digital, print, and multimedia channels to make valuable knowledge widely available. Across nine modules, this course covers how to structure documents for different audiences, write accessibly without sacrificing rigour, adapt content for different channels and formats, and develop a dissemination plan for research outputs. You should enrol, if you are: • A researcher, academic, or student • A development sector professional or practitioner • An NGO or think-tank staff member • A communications officer in a research organisation Why you should enrol: As funders and institutions increasingly ask researchers to demonstrate public impact, the ability to translate rigorous work into accessible formats has become a critical professional skill. This course addresses that gap. By the end of the course, you will: • Be familiar with the landscape of grey literature, and the public-facing formats that can give it a wider reach: data stories, photo narratives, opinion pieces, and infographics • Gain practical, hands-on methods for crafting each of these formats • Know how to pitch your work to media outlets and publications • Understand how to use social media strategically to build visibility for your publications and connect with broader audiences