Issue Lab: The enduring value of lessons learned

Across the social sector, there’s one thing we can all agree on: data and knowledge are crucial to our collective success. With that in mind, Candid recently updated and refreshed our knowledge management platform, Issue Lab,  doubling down on our commitment to connect people who want to change the world with the resources they need to do it. 

If you’re new to Issue Lab or haven’t hung out on the platform in a while, here’s what’s on offer.  

Issue Lab is where Candid collects, preserves, and shares research reports, whitepapers, evaluations, case studies, issue briefs, and more, published and/or funded by social sector organizations. Anyone can freely search the collection and access full-text documents.  

Organizations with qualifying content can create a free account and add their published works anytime. Candid shares the content in Issue Lab on our website, in topical special collections (trending collections: democracy, racial equity, and race and policing), and through our distribution network which persistently shares this content globally.  

The content in Issue Lab is designed to help social sector professionals with common, daily tasks. Every published work in the collection is tagged to at least one of 35 issue areas. If you’re getting started with research on an issue, we’ve got a filter for that. Looking to create a new funding strategy or program area? Filtering on an issue combined with document types such as “evaluation”, “literature review”, or “case study” will likely yield on-target results. If your interests are location-specific, add a geo-location filter into the mix. 

If you’re looking for funding, an issue-area and/or geography driven search will generate dozens of recently published works. Clicking into content details reveals the organizations that provided funding for that specific work. If you’re interested in learning about a particular funder’s grantmaking activities, our search tool includes a filter for that as well. 

Essentially, Issue Lab content supports you with everything from conducting a literature review in prep to write original research, to learning about experts and organizations working on the issues you care about, to finding funders to support your work. 

The Issue Lab knowledge management platform also offers services to help your organization curate, preserve, and share the knowledge assets that are important to your mission and audience. For example organizations like WKKF and the Barr Foundation use the knowledge center service to highlight and promote insights and analysis from grantees and partners.  

Beyond that, foundations that are spending down, social sector organizations that are ending operations, and organizations that want to capture knowledge from programs and initiatives that are being phased out will find the legacy collections service useful. Through this service we aim to support continued learning in the field by supplying a publicly accessible full-text collection long after spend/phase down. 

Lessons learned in the field have greater and more enduring value when others can build on them. Through Issue Lab, Candid meets knowledge seekers where they are, making discovery of and access to lessons learned effective and efficient for changemakers everywhere.