So the memo is addressed– it’s a identification of a particular problem. And it’s addressed to a particular decision maker. So you should think of a decision maker who has power to do something about this issue and cares about the issue, basically. So it may be a governor, It may be a senator, It may be the head of an organization– what have you. Somebody who has influence to make a decision about the policy question or the proposal that you’re putting in front of them.
So you’ll start out by identifying the problem and discuss the background, explain why it’s a problem, explain the evidence behind it. And then you will present three options that you’ll analyze according to two criteria. So your options need to be actions that the decision maker could take to address the problems. They have to be specific enough that you are clearly identifying what the action would be so that you can analyze it. And then you will apply your criteria equally to all three options.
So your criteria are the way that you assess or evaluate the options. And then your criteria might be something like cost. It might be an outcome measure like number of people with insurance covered, number of women who get mammograms. Something like that, like a specific outcome. Or it could be a reduction in spending. Something like that. So you might have an outcome measure and then something– you might have a criterion like political feasibility, which is sort of how popular is something going to be. How feasible is it for the political powers that be ? You might have something like technical feasibility. So how easily can this be implemented? How quickly can it be done? Something like that. So you pick two criteria that– whatever you choose. But it needs to be something that can be applied equally to all three of the options so that you’re really comparing apples to apples.
And if you think about cost, you need to make sure that you have cost information or you can reasonably find cost information for all three of those options. And then you need to make a recommendation. So it should be clear from your analysis which direction you’re going. But in the end, you need to make a recommendation to the decision maker about which option they should pursue going forward.
And so the analysis, it needs to be– it’s a short analysis. So it’s going to be concise. It needs to be clear. That’s part of the assignment is to convey this information concisely and clearly in the short amount of time you have. You’ll notice that it does not include a full landscape analysis.
And in a broader more comprehensive policy analysis like you’ve learned about in this class, there would be a landscape section or stakeholder analysis involved. Here you’re taking stakeholders into account in the sense that you’re talking to a particular decision maker. And then some of the criteria, like political feasibility, may require a more in-depth consideration about what stakeholders think. But for purposes of this simplified policy evaluation memo, it’s really about the options according to the criteria and not really the stakeholder analysis.
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