Create your own custom briefing

Typically, there two ways of creating a custom briefing: 

• Top down: You hand pick the development you want to include in your custom briefing. eg. Every time you come across a development you want to include in a briefing for your team (eg. monthly briefing on your peers) you add this development to your brief. You brief grows over time.

• Bottom up: By using filters, you can add all developments that meet certain criteria in bulk to your brief. eg. You are tasked with an analysis on Partnerships in Higher education in the last 30 days.

In this article, I'll use the example of a bottom up created brief on the topic of 'Higher Education Partnerships in the last 30 days'.

Below you'll find more detail on the following steps

1. Create a new briefing

2. Find relevant developments

3. Populate your briefing with developments

4. Give your brief a structure

5. Add some insights for your team

6. Add additional content

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1. Create a new briefing

In the My Briefings tab in Briefings, you can create the empty shell for your briefing, give it a name and selecting the workspace you want your brief to be available in.

2. Find relevant developments

In the Developments tab in Briefings, you can see a list of recent developments. The Topics, Sector and Geo as well as Time filter will help you find relevant developments for your analysis.

For my example I've chosen developments where the topic is Partnerships, the sector is Higher Education, and the geography is Global and I'm looking at developments from the last 30 days. An overview of all development topic can be found in our article on Development Taxonomy.

3. Populate your briefing with developments

The filters shown above give me 60 results. I can now be selective about the developments I want to include in my briefing or do a bulk select. I've decided to grab all 60 development in bulk by clicking the checkbox next to the counter.

Once you've selected the development you want to include in your briefing. You can click the Add to Briefing button, which will become available. Here you can decide which briefing you want to add them to. If your briefing doesn't show in the top, you can search for the name in the search box.

This process can be repeated with different filter combinations. eg. if you'd also want to include K12 partnerships into your briefing.

TIP: Make sure you scroll to the bottom of the page to load all developments. Initially only 40 developments will show.

4. Give your brief a structure

Once you've filled your briefing with all relevant developments, you can come back to the My Briefings tab and click into your briefing.

I can now see that all developments I've added earlier are now available in my briefing. By default the developments will be grouped by Categories. You can change that by selecting one of the pre-built groupings (Type, Geography, Taxonomy) or create your own Custom structure.

In my example, the Region grouping gives a great insight into partnership activity across the globe.

For more flexibility you can also create your own Custom structure. By clicking on Custom, it will allow you to create your own custom categories (+ Add Category).

After a quick review of the developments, I think for my example a custom Category on Health Degrees would be interesting.

Once the category is created, I can drag/drop developments into my new category. I've used search to help me find developments with the keyword 'health' in the 60 developments in the brief. You can also re-arrange the development within a category. The top most development will provide the image for the category.

You can repeat this step, until you have all Uncategorized Developments assigned to a custom category.

5. Add some insights for your team

Providing your team with a couple of sentences on the insights you have gained will help them quickly understand your analysis. There are two areas where you can add written text.

Can give you brief a Description (via the edit pen icon top right corner in your brief).

This text will show up in the Overview area above the Contents.

You can also add a description to each custom category.

6. Add additional content

Resource - you can add images and links.

Reports - you can browse through HolonIQ's reports index and these to the briefings.

Developments - you might also want to add individual developments to your brief.