 This research project was motivated because monetary policy communication is extremely central to what central banks do. So Ben Bernanke, former chair of the US Central Bank, has said that monetary policy is 98% talk and only 2% action. I think this very nicely illustrates this. So it's important that central banks keep assessing how they communicate and whether there's room for improvement. In particular because they've been changing mandates, they've adopted new tools and because the media landscape is also evolving. And we wanted to contribute to this assessment so we decided to conduct a survey among former members of the ECB's governing council because they are experts in the field and they can pass judgment, they are no longer in office. And they did. We conducted the survey in late 2020 and got a gratifying response rate of 60%, which allows for meaningful analysis and yielded interesting conclusions. So in the survey we covered quite a bit of ground so I'll just highlight a few of our more interesting results. On why to communicate and with whom to communicate, the main reasons that our respondents gave were enhancing credibility and trust and also managing expectations. Our respondents found that communicating with financial markets are probably the most important group but they also found that our communication practices are currently adequate with this group. The respondents found that in general there's a lot of room for improvement in communicating with the general public. We also asked respondents about what central banks should communicate on. So here we found that almost everybody found that communicating on the central bank objective was extremely important. When we asked about how central banks should communicate about the future path of monetary policy, we found a little bit more differences. So two thirds of our respondents thought that communication on the future path of monetary policy should be linked with the economic outlook. While on the other hand a slight majority of respondents felt that central banks shouldn't link the current path of monetary policy to a specific calendar date. There are several policy implications of our results. The survey has shown various areas where the ECB can refine its communication practices. Some measures have already been taken as the outcome of the ECB's strategy review. So the monetary policy statement is a lot shorter and uses simpler language than before. And the ECB's inflation objective likely is also less ambiguous than it used to be. But the survey has also shown that the ECB needs to be aware that there's different counterparts and it needs to think how best to reach each of them. And that process is likely going to evolve over time so it will remain important that the ECB assesses its communication and adjusts if need be.