Effective Briefing Note Writing

Support strong decision making

This course brings together what we’ve learned from four decades of working with briefing note writers, reviewers, and decision makers who use them.

We made a list of all the problems that cause multiple drafts—and then built this course to prevent and solve those problems.

You can book this workshop for a team in-person or online. You can also take our self-paced online course as a single trainee.

Workshop details

We customize our workshops to your organization, team, documents, templates, and style guides

- In-person—1 day (8 hours)
- Live webinar—2, 3.5-hour sessions on Zoom (split over a few days or a week).
- Self-paced—Roughly 8 hours (depending on exercises)
All writers benefit from this session because we teach an entirely new approach to writing briefing notes.
The course is applicable to:
- beginners learning to write BNs
- experienced writers who want to be able to draft faster and create stronger analysis
- reviewers and leaders who assess briefing notes and give writers feedback
1. We meet with you to discuss your group's challenges and goals
2. You send us a series of representative documents
3. We analyze your documents
4. We customize our course material using excerpts from your documents

A step-by-step process to create strong briefing notes more quickly and confidently
Identify the primary issue for a briefing note and communicate it clearly
Build clear, strong, evidence-based analysis
Include the right amount of supporting information
Differentiate between background and analysis
Write for different levels of audience and purposes
Communicate subject-matter expertise to non-specialist readers
Structure content for readability
Write clear, concise content—make every word count

What you’ll learn

Create strong first drafts

Cut drafting and editing time by 50%

Analyze problems and find solutions more effectively

Before taking this course, it took me three full days to finalize a briefing note…After being halfway through and learning new techniques, I finished a briefing note in an hour and a half with limited editing! This course is a huge win for me and the work I do daily, thank you!”

— Federal briefing note writer

I appreciated the tailoring of the workshop materials to our organization, using real-time, current writing examples to analyze and improve. It was readily applicable to my work and very professionally done.”

—The Civilian Complaints and Review

I saw an immediate and lasting improvement in my branch and the organization as a whole. Products became much more concise. The biggest benefit was that it gave people permission to leave extraneous details out. It definitely reduced the time spent on reviews and revisions.”

— Executive Director of the Public Service Commission