Designing Supports For and With Research Teams

At Stanford Impact Labs (SIL), we listen carefully to feedback as we design and enhance the services we provide to research teams in our portfolio of investments. 

Rather than claiming to have all the answers, we take care to surface and elevate patterns across disciplines that serve as opportunities for impact-focused scholars and their collaborators to learn from each other. We are fiercely committed to continually building, testing, and iterating on our services as we support the relationship-building and skill development necessary for funded teams to realize long-lasting and scalable impact. 

One way SIL supports funded teams is through a series of interactive workshops intended to foster learning in peer networks, from practitioner experts, and through skill-building training. The research teams directly shape these workshop topics by telling us what they need in  surveys and ongoing conversations. Because we often field questions about building partnerships, navigating decisions about scale, and pursuing change within entrenched systems, we designed and delivered workshops around each of these topics. 

Our team has spent the past year testing the hypothesis that led us to create the workshop series: bringing different perspectives together around shared challenges will lead to targeted skill-building opportunities, more connections and idea exchange across different teams that wouldn’t otherwise cross paths, and active participation in other forms of SIL support.

After hearing from funded teams at these workshops and in our regular check-ins, we’ve come to understand the varying landscapes of their research areas, and how SIL is best positioned to help them meet their needs. 

Here are three things we’ve learned from offering workshops and gathering feedback along the way:

1. Teams are eager to turn research insights into action 

Across social science disciplines and issue areas from public health to education and sociology to economic policy, teams face common challenges when it comes to communicating about and implementing research insights. Even well-funded and robust research studies can stall along their pathway to impact if they lack stories that resonate with stakeholder audiences and if they fail to design for the practical constraints faced by external partners. For instance, two obstacles we often hear about from labs: competing demands on practitioners’ time, and limited political will and public opinion slowing progress. 

In one of our most popular workshops, Designing for Impact at Scale, we share frameworks, resources, and tools for testing scaling strategies. The goal is to support researchers to engage with, and better understand, the spectrum of external partners and potential users of their research insights—recognizing that different stakeholders might have competing priorities. 

In addition to sharing resources, we focus on peer-to-peer learning and exchange where faculty and staff can ask each other questions like how to gauge which new partnership opportunities to pursue, or how to balance the role of objective researcher with being an advocate for change. 

We’ve found that this model helps attendees assess their strengths and weaknesses, reorient to challenges, and take time to attend to the complex dynamics inherent in impact-focused research. 

We often have multiple potential outcomes in mind for projects, and this will help us to be able to think clearly about how to integrate overlapping goals. – Workshop attendee

2. You might be surprised to discover who shares common experiences

A recurring theme we've heard is that at universities, impact-driven research can often go unseen, contributing to a sense of isolation among academics. Scholars who have attended our workshops say that they deeply value the connections they’ve made, which allow them to share insights across disciplines, investigate shared roadblocks, and explore strategies for addressing the complexity and uncertainty that is central to social change. 

This feedback has taught us to prioritize showcasing lessons learned by previously funded teams so that newer projects can build on their experiences.

The highest value I always get from these sessions is in connecting with others navigating similar spaces. Day to day, the work isolates us from other labs, but these sessions remind me that folks are doing parallel work with parallel challenges. I appreciate the opportunity to connect around these things. – Workshop attendee

3. Group workshops are a gateway to individual team coaching 

We design our workshops in different formats—from in-person roundtables to virtual sessions—depending on the topic and what we’re trying to achieve. The workshops are just one way of supporting research teams. Often, they’re a starting point: a place to introduce useful ideas and approaches. From there, we invite teams to follow up with us one-on-one for more tailored support based on their unique goals and partnerships. By offering both group learning and individual coaching, we've discovered we’re able to spot patterns and share insights across fields.

At SIL, we take a testing and learning approach to much of what we do. Sharing what we’re learning is one way we continually reflect and improve upon how we support research teams.