RAF Benevolent Fund – research report copywriting

Growing up in a military family can’t be easy.

Of course, there are many benefits, but coping with serving parents and frequently moving homes and schools must be challenging.

So, the RAF Benevolent Fund commissioned research to identify exactly how children from RAF families are affected by military life and what measures could be implemented to help them.

They then turned to us to write up the research findings in a short, succinct and digestible summary report.

Our role was to structure and write up the findings so that the Fund’s stakeholders could easily understand the research and that key messages really came to the fore.

After reviewing the original research, we drew up a detailed page and skeleton plan. This structured the summary report around key messages and outlined content and ascribed word counts to each section.

Once this was tweaked and approved by the Fund, we prepared a public-facing first draft which drew heavily on the experiences and testimony of the children themselves.

The report was written to the Fund’s tone of voice and deliberately engaged readers in a way that academic research rarely does.

The end result was ‘Growing up in the RAF’, a punchy and accessible research report of less than 5,000 words which gives voice to children’s experience of growing up in RAF families. It highlights important policy and funding actions to help, support and improve their health and wellbeing.

The Fund was delighted with the result. It hit the spot with policy makers too. At the report’s launch the government minister at the UK’s Ministry of Defence said that it was a useful reference for the UK Armed Forces Strategy and Action plan they are putting together to enhance the services that are offered to armed forces families.