 In the Spotlight
A look at innovative communications
practices
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Online Service Helps Keep Key
Audiences
Current on Nonprofit Research
Have you ever struggled to
find up-to-date information on topics relating to the work
your foundation is supporting? Have you done countless
Internet searches hoping you can locate what you need? Or
has your organization gone to great lengths to distribute
and disseminate reports and other publications but without
certainty it was reaching key audiences?
Help is now available from
IssueLab,
an online service that collects, archives and helps
disseminate a range of nonprofit research.
According to Gabriela Fitz, co-director of IssueLab, each
year billions of foundation, government, and private
charitable dollars are spent supporting research conducted
by nonprofit organizations. Policy analysts, legislators,
journalists, nonprofit
researchers, students, activists, and grant makers all rely
on this research to effectively address complex social
issues.
But, despite the widespread interest in this work much of it
remains unpublished, hard to find, underexposed, and
sometimes impossible to access. She notes that the way that
research is currently organized online makes it impossible
to compare findings across issue areas, to identify which
organizations have done research on a given subject, or to
locate research being housed in different online
collections.
“We all know that nonprofit research deserves a lot more
exposure than it currently gets. We’re talking about an
incredibly diverse body of research that dates back decades
and simply lacks a publishing platform. There is no reason
that this body of work can’t be more effectively made
available to the very people who need it, such as policy
makers, librarians, students, activists.”
IssueLab, which was originally started
with support from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation,
currently houses nearly 800 pieces of research on its
website.
Among IssueLab’s key services and activities are these:
• Aggregating the diverse body of work produced by
nonprofits in an intuitive, user-centric, community-driven
website that provides fast access to actual research, as
well as opportunities to learn about new and related
research.
• Building a digital archive of nonprofit research that is
ready for data mining, data sharing, and data discovery.
IssueLab also plans to connect with other archives and
services later to provide even greater exposure for
nonprofit research.
• Distributing nonprofit research more widely through online
partnerships, monthly e-newsletters, RSS news feeds and
outreach to online communities, journalists and policy
makers.
• Helping end-users, research contributors, and funders
better judge the quality and relevancy of nonprofit research
through self-published peer and end-user reviews.
• Working with foundations to better manage and publicize
the research work of their grantees.
IssueLab encourages individuals who work in the area of
nonprofit communications to subscribe to their monthly eNews
at
www.issuelab.org,
to consider listing their own research with IssueLab at no
cost, and to learn more about their custom data services for
foundations.
For more information on IssueLab, including how to use the
service to find or distribute research
click here.
To subscribe to IssueLab’s monthly eNews,
click here.
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