Here is how I wrote and published a whitepaper in two months
Presenting today "2022: Année Européenne", a paper analysing 10 major development and events for the European Union over the last year. Here are a few tips and advices on how to write your own.
Disclaimer: This piece reflects only the author's opinion, and not necessarily the opinion of the co-authors of the white paper “2022: Année Européenne”.
If you want to know more about our white paper, you can download it below (in french).
For the past two to three months (from November ‘till last week), I was busy writing an important document.
With my two friends and colleagues Julien Hoez and Philipp Sauracker—you might remember the latter to be a recurrent contributor to this newsletter, and the former is the successful editor of the newsletter The French Dispatch—we embarked on a project to draft, edit, and publish a white paper that would summarize significant events of 2022.
In the coming weeks, we will disseminate our work and make sure as many people as possible have access to it. As part of this endeavor, I thought it would be a great opportunity to report on the work that I carried out for this paper.
What are the steps to create and publish a white paper—or any similar documentation?
Why a white paper?
What is the purpose of a white paper?
In my view—and that’s a personal opinion—a white paper should serve three purposes:
It put your organisation on the map (achieve recognition),
It cements and clarifies your position on a certain topic (or range of topics),
It serves as a support to convince and persuade your audience.
That’s what we wanted to achieve. First, we aim at creating recognition around this organisation we want to create—Repenser l’Europe, at the cross-road between a “think and do tank” and a political foundation. We wanted to clarify our position on the points we covered (the major events of 2022 for the European Union).
Finally, we want to use this document as support for future action. With this paper, we intend to prove that we are not just three talking heads, but that we want to achieve and built something useful and positive. This white paper is the first physical proof of it.
How to write a white paper?
With this in mind, we started drafting our paper.
Quickly, we understood that we wanted to make a recap of 2022. We had the original idea in November, and we realised how important 2022 was for Europe and the world. To summarize between 8 to 12 major events would be a good idea. We settled for 10.
Since there were three of us, we each divided the writing into equal parts, plus one article that we would write together. We focused on our strengths and wrote the parts that resonated with our professional experience or interests.
It took us a month to draft the preliminary version of the texts, and another month to polish them, add illustrations and confirm the sources.
A note on collaboration. We had the amazing opportunity—and I can’t thank him enough—to work with Bernard Guetta MEP, which gave us an interview about European enlargement. To have a big name to collaborate to your work is an incredible asset. It shows trustworthiness, expertise, and curiosity.
How to edit and shape a white paper?
A good design gives your paper 100 credibility points.
If you have the possibility, you should hire a professional designer to edit your paper. We didn’t, so I took care of it myself. I knew what I was doing since I have a background in communications.
I used the software Canva, in which I picked a pre-made template for a business report, that I heavily tweaked to fit our needs. We wanted our articles to be short and easily readable, so we went for a double-page format (see below).
Publishing
This is the most crucial and important aspect of the white paper: having it read.
Our strategy is to use social media and our respective publications to diffuse our paper to a maximum of french-speaking people in our network.
In addition, we opted for a more personalised approach to our key stakeholders (i.e. the people we want to convince about the necessity of our project). To these people, we want to offer the document by hand, in its printed form. Hence the importance of a good design.
In conclusion, I wanted to give you, in no particular order, a few points to consider if you are considering writing your own paper:
Use deadlines. I can’t stress it enough. We could have saved a few weeks by committing to deadlines right from the start.
Divide the work. Don’t try to do everything alone.
Name a coordinator for your project. She will be the one to harass the other team members when deadlines are about to be breached.
A good design is with 100 credibility points. Hire a designer if you can. Use good software if you can’t.
Don’t overestimate your writing capacities. You’ll have to draft and redraft your piece until there is no more mistake or factual errors, that it fits the length agreed, etc. Take it slow.
Don’t forget to source your findings.