Roosevelt | 25 Ideas Submission Format

25 Ideas Submission Format

Please send submissions to submissions@rooseveltinstitution.org. Pieces will be accepted on a rolling basis, with a final deadline April 1. The total space is about 650 words per idea. Here is the breakdown.

First page (300 words)

Title: Make it clear that it’s a proposal, not an argument — and what the proposal is. (4-7 words)

The idea: A one sentence summary of what you propose to do, how it helps solve the challenge, and hook that makes your idea great. (~20-30 words)

Key facts: How big is the idea? How much does it cost? What is its potential impact? How many people will it affect? What is the size of the problem we’re remedying? What is the social benefit? (~50-75 words)

What kind of ideas are we talking about?
Don’t be bound by practicality. I’d love it if a hundred years from now someone picked up these things and said, man, those college kids sure were laughed at in their time, but fifty years later when we were trying to make the Martian economy work for working families, man, they had it dead on. Or whatever. We want some stuff to be implementable and get implemented out of this, but we also want some stuff where people are like, “huh, that’s so crazy it just might work.”
It’s OK if it’s not your idea. We can write up ideas that come from our friends, from other folks on campus, or even stuff that’s already going on around us that could be ported to another state. If your campus did something amazing to save on electricity costs, write that up as something other campuses should do or local businesses should do. If your city developed a clever way to encourage carpooling, great, every city should so let’s include that. Obviously it would be cool if some of the stuff was totally new, but it’s a spectrum — we want the zany stuff and we want the very practical stuff that’s even already been implemented in a few places and is ready to go.
So what we don’t want:
Something that’s not an idea. This is not the place for arguments or analyses or reframing or anything like that.
Something that could not be done. I guess that’s the same thing. These are 25 things you can do — that some specific person can do.
Something totally commonplace. We have very little to add to the efforts of, for example, the Sierra Club or Brookings or Center for American Progress or the Senate committee staffs. If we have a new way to do it or a new way to think about it, great, but if someone is already behind something in a big way, we don’t accomplish much by adding our voices. We’re the way-out stage, the political venture capital. We’re not lobbying for tried-and-true stuff — we’re not a presidential campaign, we’re a bunch of college students dreaming of a better world.

Talking points: Your audience here is someone who broadly cares about defeating the challenge. You’ve got to sell your specific idea — you’re both explaining to a legislator or activist how to sell the idea, and subtly in the process selling it to them. Why is your particular proposal a good solution to the challenge? What’s innovative about it? Why is it more cost-effective or smarter than other ways to do things? (~50-75 words)

Front page: The front page provides the background, presenting and selling the idea. Why this idea? What will its impact be? Why this idea? This basically presents the idea, the key facts, and the talking points in a coherent narrative form. (Obviously you don’t need to repeat everything that’s in those three boxes on the same page or it’s just two copies of the same thing on the same page...) (~150-200 words)

Second page (350 words)

History: Where did this idea come from? What like it has been tried? Is anyone currently trying it? Has it been implemented somewhere? Is it plausible or totally out of left field? Is there any historical precedent for this sort of thing at all? If it has been implemented, what are the results?

Analysis: This is basically justifying the facts and figures on the front page. What would it cost, why would it cost that much? How many people would be affected and which people? This is where most of your citations and work comes in. (You should probably have a table or graph or something here. If not, you’ll have to figure out another way to break up the text.) My guess is you’ll have to do a bunch of research to back this section up, and you should keep a copy, because an interested legislator will likely ask for the seven-page version of the idea and so we’ll try to put together additional documentation at about that length.

Audience: (I think we might need a better name for this section. Also, not clear whether we will use section headings or not — we might just let the text flow.) Who benefits from this? Who should care about the idea? What are the target markets? Is this federal, local, state, county, or something that would be implemented by a private business or university or nonprofit? If so, which would be the first states or businesses to adopt it? What makes it more plausible one place than another?

Next steps: If someone is interested in running with this idea, what do they need to do? Are there related ideas bubbling up — if we switch to corn ethanol, for example, other forms of ethanol might come up here. Is this something someone could implement now or is it far out and would require more research to make it happen? If it’s implementable, where do we start and what is the five-step process for getting it done?

Sources: Wikipedia may not be cited

Here is roughly what we expect the final piece will look like.