Most American think tanks are non-party, non-government institutions. Toensure the independence of their research, the capital resources of the Americanthink tank are quite diversified, with most of them from Foundations, Enterprises~ individuals and the government. Different think tanks have different capitalmodels as well. For example, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace couldrun smoothly and choose topics independently without any extra external capitalsowning to its abundant donation fund. Council on Foreign Relations, headquartered in New York, has large membership fees to support its running besides capitals from big consortiums. While, Heritage Foundation largely rely on memberfees.
Most of American large think tanks have their own mature operation mechanisms. The organization structure of think tanks is generally constituted of twoparts, policy research and administration-with the former as the core and the lateras supporting part. Taking Brookings Institute for example, the research part ismade up of five departments covering foreign policy, economic research, city re-search, global economy & development and government research. Every department is led by a vice president, every department is comprised of different researchcenters, and each center led by a Director. Inside the research center, there arepersonnel of different levels-senior fellow, research fellow, visiting scholar etc.
Generally, one senior fellow will have one or two assistants. Such is the wholepolicy research system. The administration part is consisted of capital manage-ment, logistic serwce， media service, management training, publishing house,with each section presided by a vice President, who reports directly to the President. The vice President of the media service section is responsible for the promo-tion of the think tank research findings and they are generally government PR officials or senior personnel with media background.
MarketingWithout a highly effective marketing, it"s hard to optimize the public influences of think tank. As factories producing opinions and thoughts, Americanthink tanks are targeted at government decision makers and the general public. Inthe last 20 years, with the increase of think tanks and the global transmission ofinformation, the American think tank is gradually strengthening the transmissionof its research findings and exerting influences on the public opinions and the government policies by all possible ways and channels. Specifically, the main transmission methods of American think tank are interpersonal communication, organizational communication, and mass communication. Under most cases, these threecommunication, methods are used together to complement and support each other. Interpersonal communication could help to use the research findings to affectthe decision makers directly. Organization communication and mass commumcation, take responsibilities of agenda setting and influencing public opinions, whichcould impact the decision makers indirectly.
The interpersonal communication mainly refers to the transmission of thoughtdepending on interpersonal network of American think tank. "The Rotation Gate"mechanism could best bring the interpersonal communication, method into play.
Organizational communication, another important way for the think tank to transmit its research findings, would often hold large public conference on hot diplomatic policy issues, in which they invite experts to participate in the discussion or de-clare the research findings. Besides, the think tank would hold all kinds of smallor medium scale non-public conferences, which are targeted at certain personnel.
Another way for the organizational communication, of American think tank is byholding all kinds of short-term traimng programs. By organizational commumcation, the American think tanks have set up a platform for the general public, thedecision makers and the professionals to exchange their ideas, as well as a base forthe decision makers to get foreign policy informationDuring the early stage of the American think tanks, mass communication wasignored for a long time. Starting from the 1960s, with the development of infor-mation transmission technology, the growing tendency of globalization and themore and more fierce competition between think tanks, all think tanks have beenpaying attention to the mode of mass communication. At present, most of thethink tanks in the States have department responsible specifically for informationtransmission and all think tanks have their own websites. With the help of thismode, the think tanks could set political schedules, influence public opinions andfurther influence the decision makers, finally, the foreign policy. Mass commumcation can be further divided into three channels, the paper media, the electronicmedia and the Internet, with different channels holding different responsibilities.
