 Hi everybody, and welcome to Why Research Matters to Grant Seekers. Today is January 18th, 2013, and thank you everybody for joining us today. Just a little bit about ReadyTalk, which is the webinar tool we'll be using today. If you do have any questions either about the content or about using ReadyTalk or anything like that, you can go ahead and type those questions into the chat pane. Becky from TechSoup will be on there to collect some of your questions and to kind of respond if you do have any trouble using the webinar tool. If you do lose your connection at any time, you can reconnect using the same link that you just joined with. And if you do, you should be hearing the audio through your computers, mic and speakers. There is an alternate phone line if you would like to call in and Becky can share that. If for some reason you do lose that phone connection, if you choose to dial in you can rejoin by redialing. And just as a reminder, we are recording today's session. So the seminar will be both on our website and will be emailed to all the registrants that register for the webinar today. And so if for some reason you do need to drop out early, you will still have access to the recorded session as well as all of the materials and links for today. So again, welcome to Why Research Matters to Grant Seekers. My name is Kyla Hunt. I am the facilitator for today. I'm the webinar program manager here at TechSoup. And with me today is Lisa Brooks and Gabrielle Fitz from the Foundation Center. They're going to be talking about both Social Sector Research and Issue Lab, which is a free service at the Foundation Center. And also of course assisting with chat is Becky Wiegand. And you will see her name pop up in that chat box. So a little bit about today, we are going to be talking about just Social Sector Research in general. We're going to be talking about using research, finding research, sharing research. And we will be talking about this in the context of Issue Lab, which is a really, really fabulous free service that you all can take advantage of. And again, we will be collecting questions via that chat pane. So if you do have any questions throughout the webinar, just whenever they pop into your head, type that into the chat, and I will be collecting those questions to ask the speakers about halfway through the webinar and at the end of the webinar. And in first place, we do not get to all of your questions. We will be collecting them to make sure the presenters kind of are aware of them. And we may be posting some answers in our community forums as well. And I will share that community formally near the end of the webinar. So with that, I want to go ahead and give it to Gabby and Lisa to kind of take it away. Thanks. Great. Thanks so much for the introduction, Kyla, and thanks also to TechSoup Global for hosting the webinar. We are really excited that so many of you could join us today, especially the day before a three-day weekend, and hope that what we have to share with you is useful to your work. And as Kyla said, if you do have to drop off early or you have a question that occurs to you later on, please feel free to email us at any time and we'd be happy to help you out. A little bit of introduction. Lisa Brooks and myself began issue lab in 2007 and then became part of the Foundation Center actually just last year, which was a really great opportunity to actually combine some similar efforts that we've both been doing over these years and consolidate some of that activity and make it easier for our users. So essentially, what issue lab's mission is is to gather, index, and freely share the collective knowledge of the social sector. What we do is we find and gather research and resources from across thousands of organizational websites and online information centers. And then we index those works with a standard taxonomy, making it easier for other people in the field than to find and search and explore and eventually share those resources with each other. And what we do is we actually, as Kyla mentioned, we make all of this work available on issue lab for free. It's both free to find research and download research from issue lab and also to share research through issue lab and our distributed network of partner websites. And so really our purpose is to make the collective intelligence of the social sector much easier for nonprofit and foundation professionals to access and use in your own daily work. So today we're going to spend some time talking about what we even mean by social sector research, how we can use it in our work, in the sector, where to find it, and then also how to share some of the knowledge that your organization may be producing or collecting on your own as well. So that sort of begs the question of what we even mean when we say the term social sector research. What are we even talking about there? We're not so much talking about prospect research really. What we're talking about is the often overlooked R&D function of the nonprofit sector. And it might be useful to start with an actual example. So this is a report called From Page to Stage to Screen and Beyond. It's produced by the Social Impact Research Center, which is a research organization here in Chicago. And it's one of many such reports that organizations share through issue lab. Social Impact Research, and this may be a scenario that's familiar to some of you on the phone, Social Impact Research was hired by a group of youth media organizations to summarize the landscape of youth media activities in Chicago. And they were hired to do that really as kind of a baseline for further evaluation efforts. So this report, which is a pretty simple report really, but it includes a ton of information that you might begin to think about how something like this might be useful to you. It includes everything from a map of youth media organizations working in Chicago to an explanation of some of the challenges that youth in Chicago are facing. So some of the sort of background on the actual social issues that are bringing young people to youth media organizations in Chicago. So this piece of research, just as a place to start the conversation about what we mean by social sector research, this kind of research is actually a perfect example of exactly the kind of R&D we're going to be talking about here today. So the fact is that most people actually think about the nonprofit sector and the social sector as either providing funding or providing services, such as housing, food, or in the case of an organization like Kaboom, the building of local playgrounds. But what most people don't know or recognize, or what they often take for granted really, is that the sector, the social sector also provides knowledge. And that's knowledge about both what the problems are and about how we as a society might organize to solve them. So we don't just provide solutions, we actually as a sector test them, observe them, analyze them, and then try to understand them and explain them to people who aren't necessarily working on what some people might call the front lines or on the ground daily with these issues. And that's something that actually makes social sector research pretty unique, is that it's often produced by the very organizations that are delivering those services. So there's not that divide often between the people who are sort of understanding the issues in action and then testing and observing and describing what they're learning from those activities. So really, we think about this as R&D for social change. This body of research, which is often called gray literature, and it's called that because there's no formal or commercial or sort of widely accessible publishing system for it. This body of gray literature is fast growing and it covers issues about the sector as well as issues that the sector aims to address. And it's a body of literature that's produced by organizations really large and small by associations, foundations, small community-based organizations, large national nonprofits, university-based research centers that are publishing for non-academic audiences really for sort of research in action, think tanks, and then also a whole sort of sub-sector almost of evaluators and research consultants. And the body of research also uses a whole range of methodologies and you'll see this in the work that we include an issue lab and I'm sure you're familiar with through your own use of research in the work you do but it can include everything from rigorous longitudinal surveys as well as community ethnographies, participatory evaluations, or even more academic literature reviews. And it takes four or many forms which should be familiar to you really. Case studies, evaluations, lessons learned, toolkits, white papers. We're often asked or we engage in writing these ourselves or we rely on them to do our work. So you may not ever have really thought of this all as a body of literature, but it is and it's a body of literature and a body of knowledge that's actually incredibly useful to our daily work in the social sector. So I want to talk a little bit about what that means that it's of use in our daily work and sort of the when and how of using research to improve our own work. So really answering the question or considering some different possibilities for how people in positions like yours use social sector research. So the first scenario I'm going to present should be pretty familiar to anyone who's ever written a grant proposal. This is a picture of Adam Eisendras, who's actually the Development Director for the Good Shepherd Grace Center in San Francisco. He uses the Foundation Center services, but I'm using him a little as an example because people in positions like Adam are often asked to write what's known as a need statement in a proposal. Again, I'm sure most of you are familiar with this. But we're essentially asked to explain what is the problem your organization is addressing. We're asked to explain the issue to potential grant makers. And we need to present the facts and evidence that support both the need for the project but also that establishes that our organization, the organization that's applying for the grant, understands the problem and therefore can reasonably address the problem. So this information used to support the case can come from authorities in the field as well as from your agency's own experience. But somebody like Adam needs to be able to answer what facts do we have about the social problem? Is there a need for these services or is that need already being addressed in some other way? What are the gaps in existing services? What makes our program our approach unique? And then finally, how do we know that? This can't just be purely based on hunches. I think that often we do rely on knowledge that comes from experience and what we might call hunches. But what we need to be able to do is to support those hunches with some data about both the problem and the larger context for that problem. So Adam's research could include a combination of recent research on women and drug abuse that provides a bigger context for the problem. His organization specifically addresses those topics in San Francisco. His research might include internal organizational data about growing need or gaps at the community level, comparative data from the city or state about need in local communities, recent white papers on successful or promising interventions and their possible applicability to San Francisco. And then also maybe even research or something like the Foundation Directory online to see who else has been funded by the same grant maker to do similar work. So that's one sort of scenario that might resonate with some of you about how research is directly applicable to our daily work. The next scenario is a little bit different. Another sort of potential use for social sector research. And in this case we're going to consider a case of Mike Rodriguez who is actually the Executive Director of an organization here in Chicago called Enlace that works with a largely Mexican American community on the West Side. And so people like Mike, unlike, I mean he obviously has to do a lot of development work because he's an Executive Director, but we're sort of considering his role in a more strategic programming role for the moment. So people like Mike or people in those positions are often asked to design new programs and interventions that can make a difference. But in order to do so, he really needs to know what other organizations are doing. What are they learning from their work? How does his community compare to others? And again, how does he know any of this? So if Mike is looking, for instance, at developing let's say a new green jobs program for the little village community, he needs to design a program that doesn't reinvent the wheel. And so his research might include a combination of census data about his community regarding youth employment or regarding even the youth population as compared to other neighborhoods and cities. It may also include recent white papers about the potential for growth in this part of the economy. So some research is being done about green jobs and green job development. And then he'd be interested in including examples of similar programs in other cities. Sort of what are their common challenges? What are the lessons that they're learning at really at the ground level so that he doesn't have to go not only through the pain of sort of repeating those mistakes, but also the populations he's trying to serve really can't afford for the organization to make those same mistakes. The last scenario that I want us to consider about the use of research to improve really social sector practice gets to a particular kind of social sector research that I touched on a minute ago, which is really the research that's about the sector. So instead of research that's about the issues we address. So somebody like Katherine McKee, again a user of the Foundation Center Services. She's the president of business development for the arts. You know, people who are in positions like Katherine, sort of at the executive level, leadership level, are often looking for information about what sorts of innovations are being developed and tested, what new kinds of funding models are out there, what are others, again, what are others learning from their own work about sort of important organizational issues. And finally, how do I know that? Again, trying to support hunches or inclinations with a broader context, with a broader understanding of what's happening just outside of her organization. So in short, she really needs to understand what others are doing well, what's around the corner, and how she can improve her own practices. And so her research might be a little different in mics or atoms. It might include case studies about what organizations similar to hers are doing differently, but it may also include research about larger trends in funding and programming models, as well as practical hands-on advice and toolkit for improving practices around tasks like impact measurement, capacity building, or leadership development. And again, you know, sources like the Foundation Center's grant space service actually provide a lot of that. So that gets us to the sort of what is social service, what is social sector research, and when is social sector research useful to us in our work. But it leaves us with questions about how, the how of doing this. So how can I access this research and how can I find it? Finding the research you need, finding the research you need can really feel like hunting for mushrooms. It's sort of a funny metaphor, but if you've ever done it, the fact is that if you don't know where to look or you don't know what you're looking for, you're just relying on luck, which by the way is not a research strategy. So Googling a topic is a great starting place. It's a great sort of launching point for a research project, but it can't be the whole strategy for finding research related to the issues and tasks that matter. Librarians obviously know this, and most of us intuit this, but most of our organizations don't have librarians on staff, and most of us don't have the time to say, you know, this is what I'm getting back off of Google, but I'm not sure whether I can trust it. I don't know whether it's comprehensive. I don't know what it includes, and most importantly, what it excludes. The fact is really that social sector knowledge, because of what we said earlier about it being this sort of body of great literature that's largely not indexed, the fact is that social sector knowledge for all sorts of sociological and technical reasons is highly distributed. It can be found in everything from issue-specific clearinghouses or sector intermediaries like Bridge Span, Center on Charitable Statistics, the Foundation Center, GuideStar. It's often also found in nonprofit websites, in the sort of related links and resources sections in nonprofit websites, or even in the grantee profile on Foundation websites. It's also in the sort of, you know, often mentions of research or mentions of toolkits and lessons learned are inside of the grants themselves that certainly can be found through resources like Foundation Center. And then finally, it's also often shared, you know, through social media channels like Facebook or Twitter, LinkedIn, RSS feeds. And then finally, you know, it's also found and shared through good old human contacts. So we're starting a program, and what do we do? We call people we know who did similar sorts of programming, or we call people we know and ask them who they know. So it's a pretty labor-intensive and pretty highly distributed knowledge sharing system. But the question is sort of what if we want things to be a little less scattershot and a little less labor-intensive? You know, what if we don't just want to find the mushrooms, but we actually want them to be easily identifiable, and we want them to be well-organized so that our work doesn't go so much into sorting it as it goes into really reading and understanding and applying the knowledge that we're finding there. So this is exactly the problem that prompted us to start IssueLab. And, you know, we designed IssueLab really simply to make the hunt a little bit easier. We recognize that knowledge will always and believe actually that it always should be shared in many places by many people, but it doesn't need to be as hard as it's been. Research can make a difference to how we do our work, and we want to make sure that it can be found, used, and shared as easily as possible. So I'm going to turn the reins over to Lisa Brooks to give you a little more information about how IssueLab can actually help you find and share your research. But I think Kyla wanted us to take a couple of minutes just for some questions at this point before we move on to the next part of the presentation. Sure. Thank you, Gabby. That was great. We do have a couple of questions that have already come in. One is from Farley. He asks, do you have plans to include publications, et cetera, from environmental organizations? We do. And we actually have a lot of – the energy in the environment is one of the topic areas that we do cover right now in IssueLab. We are always eager to get more work into the collection. And so that's something that Lisa is going to go over actually in the next part of the presentation about how you can add research yourself to this sort of collective pool, this public and openly available collective pool of research from the sector. And environmental concerns are definitely one of those topics that people are coming to the site to learn more about. Yeah. Okay, great. And the other question that has come in, I think you kind of just spoke to that. And I know Lisa will be as well, but I wanted to mention it. It's Kevin. I was wondering, can you recommend new resources for IssueLab? Yes, absolutely. If it's resources from an organization that you have no affiliation with, you can just shoot us an email and make the suggestion for us to include it, and we'll do that work. Or if it's an organization that you've worked for, or volunteered for, or been on the board for, you can actually set up a free account and add it yourself. And that's something that Lisa is going to show a little bit about, and I'll talk a little bit about as well. But yeah, we absolutely are relying on people to tell us what's useful to them so that we can make sure it's useful to other people as well. Okay, great. And we did just have one other question come in from Lisa. She's wondering, how do you suggest one can use research to solidify a project that is not a nonprofit organization yet? Yeah. Well, I think that hits on a couple of things. I think it hits on the sort of about-the-sector research and then the about-the-issues research. So I think that research is incredibly useful in describing what you're identifying as the problem to begin with, and in understanding whether there's a real need for another organization or a project to be formed to address that problem. So I think we are often in a position of sort of recreating work that others are doing in the field. And sometimes that's really necessary because we're filling a real need. Sometimes we just don't know what else is happening. And so I think that research can help us make that case. And so we can say, look, there is a real need out here, and this is how I know that, and it's based on this research. But the second piece gets to sort of, you know, the question of establishing a nonprofit to begin with. And that's something that I would point you actually to GrantSpace and to some of the Foundation Center's work on that topic that is, you know, what sort of funding models are out there? What organizational models are out there? How do I decide whether to pursue a project as an independent 501c3? Those are all questions that a lot of people have produced super helpful materials on and toolkits on. Some of that's an issue lab. Some of that's another Foundation Center properties. But I think that question hits on exactly the sort of breadth of the research that's out there. Right. And I'll make sure to include the links to GrantSpace and those kind of resources as well in the follow-up messaging so people can have easy access to find out more about those services. And I wanted to go ahead and handle one more question before we hand it over to Lisa and then anything else we'll handle at the end of the webinar. Jeffrey was wondering if you will be including research that will pertain to intersections between social sector information and the arts or economic development through the arts? Yeah. You know, Lisa again is going to hit on this a little bit, but one of the other main motivators for starting an issue lab is that a lot of the knowledge that is in the sector is very siloed currently in sort of one issue area or another. And one of the things that we do on issue lab is really we do cover 41 different issue areas and cross-reference work within those. So you can find work that is existing both in economic and community development as well as the arts. That's why we actually index everything that comes into the collection. But Lisa is going to get into a little bit more detail about that. Okay Fabulous. Thank you Gaby. I really appreciate it. And I think with that we'll hand it over to Lisa. Okay. Hi everybody. I am going to walk us through a bit about issue lab website as well as how we're sharing things and thinking about distributing and sharing. But first I wanted to recap issue lab's mission which Gaby touched on a little bit earlier. So what we're doing is we're working to more effectively gather, index and share the collective intelligence of the social sector. We provide free access to all of the resources that we collect. And we're also committed to increasing access to this knowledge by making it broadly available through the issue lab website, Foundation Center websites, Distributed Knowledge Centers, and also content sharing partnerships we have with libraries, archives, and online communities. So to give you a better sense of what we're up to I'm going to give you a quick tour of the site and also in a minute I'll be kind of giving you our view of our approach to sharing. So this is the issue lab homepage or I should say it's a representation of our homepage. We've collected more than 12,500 white papers, research reports, case studies, evaluations, toolkits, surveys, issue and policy briefs, annual reports, and actually even more document types in issue lab to date. The collection grows in numbers every day. The homepage updates whenever a new resource is added and approved for inclusion. So what you'll get whenever you visit the homepage is a snapshot of recent additions to issue lab. Now I'm going to move us into a listing page. So this would be describing any resource that is added to the collection. We, meaning our community of users and issue lab staff, attach metadata to each record that we collect. So the metadata we collect includes metadata on authors, funders, publishing organizations, copyright, state published, keywords, geographic locations, document types, and of course an abstract. We make all files that we collect available to download for free so you can always get access to the full document, not just an abstract. And the download link you'll find on these listing pages. And when technically possible, meaning we've received a file that can be converted into other formats, we create scrollable dynamic documents that let visitors access a resource before downloading. And that's what you see here on this screen as one of these kind of scrollable docs. I want to move us into kind of how you can explore issue lab. We have a variety of ways that you can enter the collection and start to learn about what we have. And one way is through an issue index. Right now I'm showing you our issue area called arts and culture. Issue labs taxonomy covers 41 issue areas and they're geared toward the social sector. So big thorny issues that you expect when you think about social change like community and economic development, education and literacy, energy and the environment, housing and homelessness, hunger, immigration, poverty, prison and judicial reform, welfare and public assistance. We've got all that in issue labs. We also cover issues like arts and culture, athletics and sports, consumer protection, journalism and media, parenting, transportation. So we have a really good mix of the kinds of issues, problems, opportunities that are available and how the social sector kind of attacks these and kind of benefits or takes advantage of these particular issues. Resources can be indexed under up to three issue areas. So this gets back to I think it was Farley's point about kind of cross-referencing. And we did design our system to allow for that cross-referencing in ways that highlight the interdisciplinarity of social service and social change efforts. So I hope that helps to answer that question a little bit more. The next way I want to talk about kind of exploring the collection is through our organization index. We have over 2,200 publishing organizations that are sharing resources through the issue lab right now. Every organization gets an organizational profile page. That's what you see here. It includes contact information, website or a web address, mission statement, and it also lists out all the authors affiliated with an organization, issue areas that the organization covers, and of course provide access to the actual resources that that organization has published. So every single one of our organizations has one of these profile pages. The next index is our author index. Now when we launched this latest version of the issue lab, which was last fall, we exposed the new data point that we felt warranted its own section. And this new author index includes over 9,000 individual writers and researchers who are really to be considered social issue experts. It's an unrepresented group of research professionals. Their work is not indexed in academic journals for the most part or captures centrally anywhere else that we know of. So this is a pretty unique index online. Every author gets a profile page and that includes not only the resources authored by that individual, but also lists out their co-authors, the organizations that this individual is affiliated with, and the issue areas and topics that the individual covers. So it's a really unique data set and it begins to outline who knows what in the sector as well as what we know. The last index I'm going to bring your attention to is our geographic index. So we currently have over 700 geographic areas in use. And when we apply geographic metadata to resources, it's when the resources pertains to a particular location. So an example would be, let's say we get in a case study that focuses on a charter school in San Francisco. Then we would apply San Francisco as the geographic metadata for that resource. And our goal in collecting this geodata is to enable our visitors to find resources based on what the social sector is doing and what the sector is finding in specific regions around the world. So you can come log into our visit issue lab, click into our geographic index area and get started searching geographically right now. The last part of my little tour here is going to focus on special collections. We create special collections in a couple of ways. One is by mining the data that we have. So an example of this is our special collection on annual reports which we're showing you right now. This currently holds over 700 reports from a variety of foundations and nonprofit organizations. Any resource that's added to issue lab and indexed as an annual report automatically will become a part of this special collection. But we also curate special collections. So for example, this is our gun violence special collection. We launched this in December and we created it in response to the shootings in Newtown, Connecticut. So the collection includes 30 hand-picked reports published by 23 organizations. We went out and found these reports online just in various places all over the place. We're going to continue to add to this collection as we discover new applicable resources. And this is another place where maybe you might know of a report, a case study, some type of publication that should be in that collection you think. Please shoot us an email and let us know about it and we'll definitely check it out. And if it's applicable, we'll add it to this particular special collection. So that's what's on offer at issue lab. And now what I want to kind of talk about is how we share everything we collect much more broadly than just through our website. And first I'm going to make a quick assertion which is that we create knowledge in order to share it. In some circles maybe knowledge is shared with a small group or it's shared secretly but in the circle that we work in which is the social sector, knowledge is generated in order to be shared. And to my mind that's why the sector has categories of information such as best practices or lessons learned, toolkits, evaluations. It's about trying things, we succeed, we fail, we analyze, we learn, and then we share what we've learned. So in this piece of the talk I'm not going to really get into the communication side of sharing. For instance like through social media or the blogosphere website. What I'm going to focus on is how you can share through issue lab and offer you some reasons to hopefully consider sharing your work through issue lab. So what we're trying to do is simplify and augment the sharing process. And we come at that work in a couple of ways. One is through centralized indexing. So people come to issue lab, they add their resource to the collection, they describe it with metadata, and then the resource becomes the part of the larger data share that we provide visitors who use the website to find and access knowledge. And most visitors are practitioners, they're direct service providers, they're advocates and researchers, grant makers, policy professionals. But in addition to centralized indexing and providing a destination to learn about and access the knowledge, we're actively pursuing a decentralized distribution approach. And so when you add your work to issue lab, your knowledge gets shared automatically through a network of distributors. And those include websites owned by groups that are using issue lab knowledge center service which lets any group host an issue lab driven library on their own website. We also share through OCLC's WorldCat service. We have an Open Archives Initiative compliant data provider service. It's a mouseable, it's a real thing. And it's regularly harvested by WorldCat. And that means that it actually gets shared through thousands of library systems around the world. That's a pretty big data share just encapsulated in WorldCat. We also have data partner sites. So for example, we provide online communities like WiserEarth.org which works in environmental issues and has an online community of close to 75,000 members. We provide them with a data feed of resource titles that they share with their members directly from within their website pages. We also share all of our resources with a number of Foundation Center online properties including the Foundation Center's Gay Knowledge section, Grant Space, the Foundation Directory online which Gaby talked about a little bit ago. Each of these properties has its own audience type as well. So I'm going to show a slide here that gives you a sense of how many folks we're reaching. This kind of gives you a sense of page views on the various Foundation Center websites including IssueLab, also our social media outreach that we do through Twitter, Facebook, e-news alerts. All to say we're working really hard to mainstream the knowledge we're collecting. Now I want to just briefly walk you through how you can get started with sharing your work which I'm hoping you'll find is pretty simple. First of all, anyone can create a free user account at IssueLab. It takes just a minute or two. And once you've got your account and you log in, you affiliate yourself with the organizations you'll be adding resources for. And then it's just a matter of filling out a couple of forms to describe your resource with metadata which we discussed. You can upload your files. Our system automatically generates cover graphics and the scrollable documents that I talked about earlier and other collateral. We also have an approval process to ensure that what people have added is appropriate for distribution to all of these various audiences. So once the approval process is complete, your resource becomes available on IssueLab and also through all of the sharing channels that I just talked about. So it's a pretty good deal. You drop it in one place and it kind of shoots out in a lot of places around the web. The last thing I wanted to talk about is open licensing. It's one option that we've built into the AdEdit process. It's the ability to apply an open license to any resource. To do this, we have a Creative Commons license chooser available for you. We really urge everyone to use Creative Commons licensing to really let people know what they can do with your resource. If you don't know about Creative Commons, if you have questions about this, you can always get in touch with us. And we also have a link to a really great video by Creative Commons that explains open licensing from soup to nuts. So you can check that out once you log into the site, or go to creativecommons.org and find out about the good work they're doing. Okay, this is Gaby again. And thanks, Lisa. That was the down and dirty super fast tour. So that should give you a sense not only of the breadth and the value of what's out there as concerned social sector research, but also how you can use it to maybe better inform your own strategies and practices, as well as to educate your supporters, whether those are individuals or grant makers you like working with and collaborating with. We do hope that the short tour of issue lab will at least encourage you to check out the system, use it in your own research efforts, and to think about how you're sharing what you're learning with the rest of the sector. So that question is sort of how do we know, right? That there's things that you all know about the work that you're doing. And issue lab can be a real important resource in terms of sharing that out with a broader audience and helping the sector as a whole to improve. So that sort of concludes our formal presentation. I'll hand it back to Kyla to take some additional questions. And that's about it. Yeah. Kyla Thank you with Gabby and Lisa. This is a really, really informative presentation. And before we really got to the questions, I wanted to go ahead and share a comment that we got that I think points to how great this is. Bridget was saying that this is really great information. How did I not know that this existed? And I kind of felt the same way when I was talking to you both when you were preparing for this webinar because this is a really, really great resource that hopefully we can get the word out to more people to both contribute and to use. So looking at some of the questions that are coming in, Leslie was asking, what is the actual website for the open sourcing? Do you want to take a stab at that? Or do you want me to get more clarification for that? Yeah, I think we need just a little more clarification. Yeah. So Leslie, if you want to type in, do you mean the actual issue lab website? Or did you mean something more specific? While we're waiting for that, we have somebody asking, I think she's referring to Creative Commons. Oh, the open licensing, right. So that, I mean, if you were to Google Creative Commons it will come right up. I believe that the website address for Creative Commons is creativecommonsalloneword.org. Yeah. I mean I have really good resources on just sort of understanding why open licensing matters. But also I think if you do enter the issue lab system and you start to actually add research, there's also a link to a video. And we can send that out as a follow-up too. That explains the importance of open licensing that I'm hoping is something that as a sector we can begin to be a little bit more educated about as a real option for sharing. Definitely. And Becky from TechSoup shared out that link to everybody. And I will include that link to Creative Commons and both to the video in the follow-up message so everybody will have that information. I was wondering actually how, if you knew kind of a rough percentage of sharing organizations on your site who actually do use that Creative Commons licensing. Oh, you know it's actually, it's a very small percentage of organizations that are using Creative Commons licenses that we know of through issuelab.org. We did just kind of a side note but it's relevant. We recently archived the work of two organizations that went out of business. They no longer exist. One was Public Private Ventures. They went out of business in this past summer. And then another was Public Education Network which went out of business just on the 31st of December. And the reason I bring them up is that as part of the kind of taking on their collections of works which in the end will number somewhere around 600 documents between them we worked out a scenario where they agreed to use the Creative Commons license across the board on everything that they had published. And the reason that that was, we're learning today is really kind of a great thing is that we've had people get in touch and say, how can I use this stuff? And we're able to say, well it's License and the Creative Commons and you just, you know, here's the license information and essentially what they can do is everything that you would hope you could do. You can cite it. You can make it, you know, replicate it and hand it out and whatnot. And it's very clear, you know, the Creative Commons license is very clear which is why we really love it and really promote it. But I would say in terms of groups using Creative Commons in issue half I wouldn't even think it's maybe 5%. It's just not very many out of the 2,200 groups that we've collected from. But I do want to say that I do think that number is growing. I think that people are beginning to understand the options that come through Creative Commons. Some exciting things that have happened also as we became part of the Foundation Center. Actually all of the metadata that's in Issue Lab is licensed under Creative Commons license. And so we, you know, we organizations that add their research to Issue Lab maintain their rights and their licensing over their own work obviously. But the content that we create independently on Issue Lab is under Creative Commons license. We also had a wonderful opportunity when we incorporated all the Foundation Center's reports that come out of their research department. We actually licensed all those under Creative Commons license as well. And we're beginning to see some larger organizations like BridgeSpan, like Mott, begin to use Creative Commons licensing, you know, and Foundation Center too, really beginning to adopt it in ways that make sharing that much more possible. Yeah, and Becky was mentioning in the chat, which is true that all of TechSoup's resources, including webinars of this webinar archive, they're all issued under Creative Commons as well. So we definitely agree with you with your use of it. And let me take a look at the other questions. There was another caveat and I believe was wanting me to pass along a kudos to your mushroom analogy. She really liked that. That's good to know. You're not going to be the only one. Laura Ann was saying, this is both a comment and a question. She was saying this is wonderful. I'm really excited to share this with our staff and thank you for putting this together. We are thinking a lot lately about how to show the impact of our work in our community and sharing the impact after we figure out how to do it is an important part which brings me to my question. Does Issue Lab collect information on evaluation and data collection in the nonprofit sector? Yeah, that's a great question. Also a multi-tiered one. I think the first thing I do want to say about showing the impact of our work in the sector generally, and I think especially showing the impact of the research that we produce and the knowledge products that we produce, one of the things that we do provide people when they add research to Issue Lab is that you do actually get statistics on how many times it's been downloaded or viewed. So at this point in time, that's sort of the measure that I think at the communications level we're often working with, how many people have used this. Obviously that doesn't measure the full or real impact of what research does at the ground level, but it's a sort of proxy measure at this point. But I think you're asking a little bit of a different question as well which is do we collect research about evaluation and do we also collect evaluations? And the answer on both of those fronts is yes. We do collect and we collect research about how to do evaluation better. So there are some that actually also just worth mentioning there's a service out of the Foundation Center called TRACY, T-R-A-S-I, which is actually all about measuring social impact. And it's also a really interesting sort of collective pool of knowledge about social impact measurements. But if you do, one of the things that we do is any time a piece of research is added to the Issue Lab collection, we do note whether it's an evaluation. So you can in the Advanced Search on Issue Lab actually search on just evaluations. And so that should get you part of the way. You could also do just evaluations that are also within the issue area of nonprofits and philanthropy. And you would end up with research that is both evaluation in type but also the topic of nonprofits and philanthropy rather than a specific issue like education or the environment. All right, got it. And we also had a question come in from Sonya who is saying, first she says, I can't believe the Issue Lab exists. I'm a disability advocate and cultural anthropologist and this could have cut my research hours in half. And then she was wondering would you have information from libraries like the Newberry and Chicago? You know, that's a good question. We don't actually have, I know that we don't have research from the Newberry. We would have research from research centers or nonprofit organizations that are maybe collecting, producing like from a museum for instance that's producing knowledge about what their collections entail. But we don't actually have, I don't think we have, I don't think we have libraries who have produced research in Issue Lab at the current moment. We do have a disability issue area though. If you're looking to kind of find out who else is out there that's putting research, publishing research, different organizations, academic research centers, you could probably just do a quick search in our advanced search and just check off disabilities as an issue area and see who comes up. But if you know that my issue is Newberry, I'm not sure exactly where that question is heading Sonya, but if you do for instance know that the Newberry is producing knowledge about the work that they do, please shoot us an email and I'd love to follow up on it with them. Yeah. Okay, great. One thing that I was wondering with the, and somebody said she's on it so she's definitely going to shoot that email today. Oh, and also somebody just said that she was about to ask for the name of Tracy and I had put the Tracy website in the chat box so everybody can do that website that way. But it is T-R-A-S-I. But one thing I was wondering about was that when people actually submit their work to be shared through Issue Lab, do they have any kind of say in how their work is indexed? Or how does that kind of process work or is that done entirely internally? No, actually they do. They get to describe it the way they want to describe it. And that all of those data points that I just kind of walk through, right? So they're going to fill out everything from the title to the author to the organization. Two, which issue area it would fall under up to three, and what kind of a document it is and whatnot. Our approval process first of all just make sure that it's actually the kind of content that we're sharing and it's not like somebody's PhD dissertation or an editorial or something like that. And then we will kind of check over it for typos or anything like that. And we do cast an eye to things like what issue areas they placed it under. I'll categorize the resource under just because everybody does have a kind of a different take if you've ever done cataloging. It's an art. There's an art form happening right in front of your eyes. And so I think that we do sometimes, mostly we approve as is, sometimes we will tweak things knowing what our audience is, how they're going to be searching for stuff. But you do get to describe the item the way that you want. And you can always get in touch with us if we describe it in a way that you don't like later. And we can figure it out. Okay, great. We also had a question come in wondering if issue lab collects conference proceedings as well as everything else that you collect. We do. We used to actually, when we first started, we used to try and we tried a service that was just literally archiving an entire conference. We found that that wasn't particularly useful or attractive to people. And so what we do get in though, much more often now is sort of the reports that are commissioned often to summarize what happened at a conference. So rather than like here are the 20 papers that were in the conference, often organizations that are hosting a conference will hire someone and say can you sort of summarize the key learnings from that conference? Or can you sort of summarize what the dialogue was there? And we do include those and then tag them as conference proceedings. I had to say to a small percentage of what's in there. That's not going to be a big focus. Got it. One thing, another thing that I was wondering was that in the search, in your search engine on issue lab, I noticed that there were search filters and I didn't know if those correlated with the index subjects or if those were something separate. Like if you could search and kind of filter it by geographic location as opposed to just looking at the index in that way. Yes. Right now it's really simple. You're talking about the advanced search I think. So it's keyword document type, issue area, and the publication date. This is one of those things where we're kind of working through. We launched a site in late October. And so now we're kind of working through that next phase of enhancing, tweaking, fixing. I have to admit different things. This is one of those areas that we're constantly in conversation about what to include in advanced search. Is it easier for people to navigate the geographic data point for instance through an index where they can kind of click and filter down versus a search limited to. That's something that we're investigating. How do we best help people search for information without overwhelming them from the start? So yeah, that's the data point that we could include in advanced search. We are very open to hearing opinions about why or why not to include it. Okay. And Alisa just put in I think using the issue areas search options would help narrow down better if one is looking for more specific info. That's at least one person's opinion on that. And I'm going to go ahead and kind of start wrapping up a little bit because we're about four minutes out. But certainly if anybody has any more questions, still keep typing them in and we'll either try to get to them before the top of the hour, or we will follow up later. But I did want to thank both Lisa and Gabby for this just fabulous webinar. I think this is really, really helpful information for the entire sector. And I know that at least Laura Ann who is one of our participants just put in great webinar, one of the best I've ever seen heard by far. And I think that's really a testament to both Gabby and Laura's presentation and just the product itself. So thank you both for participating today. And thank everybody for attending. I know it is the day before a three-day weekend for many of you. And so I really want to thank you for taking the time out of your day to attend. If you do have any follow-up questions that you can think of, after the webinar ends you can put those into our community forum and the link is up there. I'll put that bit late into the chat right now as well. And we will be checking that later. But I think I'm going to go ahead and wrap this up. So again, thank you everybody. We are TechSoup. We are part of TechSoup Global which is working towards a day when every nonprofit library and social benefit organization, so that's all of you, on the planet has everything they need, so the technology, knowledge, and resources that they do need to operate at their full potential and fulfill all of your missions. And we are a 501c3 nonprofit organization just like so many of you out there. And I do want to go ahead and take a moment to thank our webinar sponsor ReadyTalk for providing this five-day webinar tool that we are using today. So again, thank you all for joining us today. I hope you have a wonderful three-day weekend. If you do, get that three-day weekend. And again, thank you to Gaby, Lisa, and the UPEC on my end. I hope everybody has a great day. You too.