Many practitioners, policymakers, and social scientists share the same underlying goals: eliminate poverty, tackle climate change, create educational opportunity, promote healthy lives, achieve political equality, eliminate racism, increase voter engagement, and so on.

Yet they are part of very different social networks and may not have experience connecting with each other. They may be unsure about who to connect with and they often want guidance about how to connect across diverse spaces.

research4impact (r4i) helps on both fronts. Read below for the opportunities we offer that can help you build new collaborative relationships:

 

***MATCHMAKING***

research4impact connects researchers, practitioners, and policymakers via our hands-on matchmaking. We've built a growing Community of Matchmakers that has initiated over 300 new collaborative relationships between social scientists and nonprofit practitioners, and between social scientists and local policymakers, across the globe.

Most of these collaborative relationships are for informal knowledge exchange, in which the primary goal is to gain new understanding of the problems they care about as well as awareness of the boundaries of what they know and their lived experience. Here's an example of the impact that informal collaborations can have.

Sometimes informal collaboration leads to more formal collaborations in which people co-create new projects with shared ownership, shared decision-making authority, and mutual accountability. Here is an article that describes the process of formally collaborating.

Check out our "Impact Stories" for what others have said about our hands-on matchmaking.

Attn: Practitioners! There's cool research out there that could help you solve tricky problems you're facing. Click here to fill out a super-brief form and we'll respond right away.

Attn: Researchers! Connecting with a practitioner will produce new questions, research ideas, and possibly formal collaborations. Sound useful and enjoyable? Email Adam and let's go!

We typically advertise connections through our newsletters, which inform our 1500+ member community of new opportunities. Our community is growing and wide-ranging, and includes social scientists (political scientists, economists, behavioral scientists, psychologists, communications researchers, and many others), policy analysts, nonprofit leaders, government officials, and others who work on pressing problems in the public and private sphere. Sign-up for the newsletter here! Also, please email us if you have an opportunity you'd like to advertise.

 

***WHAT WE'RE LEARNING***

A key part of research4impact entails not just doing the work of matchmaking, but also sharing what we're learning about the science of collaboration -- how to initiate new collaborative relationships between people with diverse forms of expertise. This includes a series of short articles and one-page briefs. Please take a look, and email us with any feedback or questions.

 

***INTERACTIVE WORKSHOPS***

We offer interactive workshops for those who want to learn how to build new collaborative relationships between people with diverse forms of expertise.

Our workshops are useful for researchers, nonprofit practitioners, government officials, grantors, grantees, mentors, mentees, community members, students, and many others who have knowledge about a problem, want to share that knowledge with others, and want to learn about what others know as well. Our workshop attendees are building new collaborative relationships within their organization, with people in other organizations, and cross-sectorally.

We cover key fundamentals of the science of collaboration, provide a framework for how to put these fundamentals into practice, and then lead a series of interactive exercises to practice. The workshop is typically 1-2 hours. It can be in-person or over Zoom.

So far 900+ folks have taken part in Europe, Asia, and North America. Check out our "Impact Stories" for what others have said about the workshops so far.

Sound helpful and enjoyable? Want more information? Contact Adam (President of r4i) and let's talk!