Success Stories
Success Stories
Reducing poverty. Adapting to a changing climate. Creating educational opportunities. Promoting health. Preventing disease. Increasing voter engagement. Practitioners, policymakers, and social scientists share these goals—but we often find ourselves in siloes, without easy opportunities to connect with others who bring diverse forms of expertise relevant to the challenges we care most about.
Research4impact bridges the gap. Since 2018, we’ve initiated 350+ new collaborative relationships with our matchmaking services.


Jourdan Davis
Assistant Professor of Political Science & Public Administration
I love talking to practitioners about the problems that they face outside of a research context. Research4impact allows me to chat with practitioners that face real problems…


Arlene Birt
Founder and Visual Storyteller
Every field speaks in its own lingo – this seems particularly true in academic research. As a practitioner, the difference in language made it challenging for me to understand academic publications and connect to research in adjacent fields…


Tatiana Bustos
Indep Researcher & Social Research Scientist in WA State Dept of Health
I appreciate the opportunities research4Impact offers to connect with other researchers and practitioners across the country…

Sharon Delcambre
Impact and Improvement Evaluator for Climate
I have greatly appreciated the willingness of the researchers to have informal conversations with me as our team works to design a brand new program from the ground up…


Heather O’Connor
Managing Director of Research
Meeting with practitioners from a nonprofit organization allowed me to better see the nuance in the organizational context…


Kimberly Ratcliff
Monitoring, Evaluation, and Learning Specialist at IRI
We were looking to find academic partners to bolster our research expertise to conduct quasi-experimental research on political party support…


Derek Wakefield
Research4impact helped crystallize my research topic and provided useful tips for how to approach practitioners and political campaigns…


Jesse Clark
PhD Student, Political Science
My research focuses on the causes and consequences of election reform in the United States, particularly around its impact on the ability of voters to make their voices heard…


Maria D. Perez
Ph.D. Student, Political Science and International Relations
Through research4impact I connected with two people at nonprofits who engage in lobbying in their everyday jobs to hear about the challenges they face on the ground…


Heather Marquette
Professor at U of Birmingham & Senior Research Fellow at UK’s Dept of Int’l Development
We were very happy to have Adam come to speak to us. The group was an eclectic mix of experienced research leaders, mid-career researchers looking to take their impact work to the next level…


Piyush Tantia
Chief Innovation Officer
‘How to be Helpful’ delivered highly valuable and practical tips for how we can manage our own teams better at ideas42, and also provided useful insights for our external work on designing and implementing innovations at large organizations…


Scott Lewis
Doctoral Researcher, School of Politics and International Relations
It was very refreshing to hear practical suggestions for how to engage with organisations to increase the impact of our research…


Jeremy Garson
Legal Counsel and Operations Coordinator
Adam was incredibly easy to work with as we prepared for the presentation, and he was personable and engaging throughout the presentation itself…


Jaclyn Piatak
Associate Professor of Political Science & Public Administration
Through R4i I found the perfect organization to work with that had overlapping interests, existing surveys to share, and mechanisms to share out my own survey…


Emily Steinberg
Director of External Affairs, America’s Service Commissions
Thank you for a great presentation on “How to be Helpful”. You did a great job of making an important, yet complex topic, fun, relatable, and practical…


Alero Akporiaye
Political Scientist at Rhode Island School of Design
I am most impressed with r4i’s desire to try even when it seems impossible and how they coach clients to maximize opportunities and requests…

Jeff Pelich
Vice President of Elementary Teachers Federation of Ontario in Waterloo
This workshop reaffirmed to our members the value of developing deep relationships to better engage and motivate their colleagues into action…


Erica Frazier
Research Manager, FairVote
We had a great collaboration with researchers at MIT, using ballot data to analyze the impact of ranked choice voting. It’s already been presented as part of an engaging conference panel…


Jean Ritok
Volunteer chapter leader, Citizens Climate Education in Raleigh-Durham, NC
The practices really worked well. Once we understood the reasoning behind their design, they were easy to adopt and felt natural, even the first time I used them….


Abiola Oyebanjo
Founder, Empower Local People (Based in Nigeria)
Having to gain insights that combines value-based principles, professional field experiences and personal drive was awesome and we are making steps to reboot our process…


Miguel Pereira
Political Scientist at Washington Univ in St. Louis
I first heard about Research4Impact at an annual meeting of the American Political Science Association. Adam was describing the goals of the organization and his excitement and passion about the project were contagious…


Olivia Chow
Institute for Change Leaders Founder & Former Member of Parliament in Canada
Adam provided excellent insight on how to build relationships for social impact. We know that building stronger organizations requires reaching out and having conversations with new people…


Anna Ebers
ORISE Science and Technology Policy Fellow (Based in Washington DC)
Adam puts his heart and mind into building bridges — in my case, between the public sector and academia…


Sutton Eaves
Generation Squeeze (Based in Canada)
R4I matched us up with a researcher who offered some great ideas on how to structure member and Google surveys, and ways to compare the views of existing supporters with the general population…


Claudia Quintanilla
Director Capacity Development, Rare
We’re excited to apply our new skills in workshops, site visits, meetings, remote and in-person mentoring and many more interactions across our diverse stakeholder networks…


Carina Barnett-Loro
Senior Program Manager, Climate Advocacy Lab
I appreciated that the workshop distilled a number of the social science insights we often talk about as critical to powerful volunteer programs into a single framework…


Joe Mitchell
Coordinator, Democracy Club (based in the UK)
We got a dose of years’ worth of research expertise in a 45 minute phone call.


Danny Hutley
Impact and Learning Advisor, The Change.org Foundation (based in Australia)
A key question for us was how to measure saliency. In two short calls I got an overview of the research on this and was able to come up with several great ideas…


Kathy Chiron
President, League of Women Voters of the District of Columbia
Collaborating with reasearch4impact is amazing! What started with one simple application on-line has developed into a very exciting project to help the League of Women Voters of DC develop a GOTV campaign…
