What We Do

IssueLab's mission is to more effectively archive, distribute, and promote the extensive and diverse body of research being produced by the nonprofit sector.

Why It Needs to Get Done

The fact is that each year billions of charitable dollars are spent on nonprofit research, research which journalists, nonprofit practitioners, policy analysts, legislators, students, activists, and grant makers all rely on to make better decisions about programs, about need, and about where to spend donated dollars to garner the most impact.

But despite the widespread interest in this work most nonprofit research remains unpublished, hard to find, underexposed, or only partially archived in issue-specific information silos. 

The nonprofit sector clearly needs a better solution than the current piecemeal approach to managing and sharing one of its greatest assets. 

How We Do It

Knowledge mobilization doesn't just happen by accident. Someone has to be responsible for finding information, cataloging it, and bringing it to the people who need it. IssueLab has accepted this responsibility by:

• Archiving social policy research created by nonprofit organizations at no cost to research producers or    consumers.

• Sharing this valuable body of research with a broader audience through the use of social media,     targeted online outreach, dissemination channels such as RSS feeds and enewsletters, content partners, and open archive protocols.

• Advocating for the broad use of open licenses by nonprofits and foundations and the overall adoption of open access standards, making it more likely that people will pick up and reuse nonprofit materials, that organizations get proper credit for their work, and that this valuable body of research gets included in data harvesting and crowd-sourcing efforts. 

Our Values

IssueLab values the diversity of the nonprofit sector. We seek out and archive hard-to-find research from small community-based organizations as well as large think tanks, valuing research that addresses a wide range of topics using a diverse set of methodological approaches.

IssueLab values the principles of open access. We believe that knowledge sharing is a critical part of social change and that information about social problems and their solutions should be freely available.

IssueLab values the unique perspective nonprofits bring to the study of social issues. Often working on the frontlines of the most critical social issues, nonprofits are in a unique position to analyze the ground-level application of social policies and to document the voices and experiences of the people they serve.