Funders Tailor Approaches to Ensure Research Meets Real-World Needs

Research funders organized by the Impact Funders Forum, formerly the Transforming Evidence Funders Network, are fine-tuning the way they select priorities, develop funding criteria, assess proposals, and examine other practices to better align their investments with the needs of the groups intended to use or benefit from the research. These efforts increase the likelihood that the work they fund will help address pressing societal issues, such as climate change, educational inequity, and persistent health disparities.

Every year, billions of dollars are spent on research to help address the planet’s most prominent challenges. However, the full value of these investments too often goes unrealized. That’s because efforts to ensure research findings are useful to and used by the groups closest to the problems on the ground—policymakers, practitioners, and community leaders—are undervalued or not undertaken. One approach, sometimes called “engaged research,” brings together partners with diverse roles, knowledge, and perspectives to shape research and address the needs of the groups closest to the issue.

The Impact Funders Forum, facilitated by The Pew Charitable Trusts, convenes philanthropic and public funding organizations from around the world to collaborate on efforts that ensure research can deliver impactful solutions. Late last year, nine funding organizations coordinated by the forum compiled promising, field-tested practices in an article published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The article describes how funders support engaged research. Although there is still much to learn about what works best, the authors of this analysis, who are also the lead authors of the article, suggest these examples can serve as a starting point for experimentation, assessment, and impact evaluation. Below are examples of several of these funding practices, each drawn from a different grantmaking stage.

Identify funding priorities with input from intended research users

The AIR Opportunity Fund at the American Institute for Research supports work globally that combines local expertise with research-driven insights to improve education, workforce development, public safety, and health. In 2022, the fund used a call for essays to solicit ideas from youth, community organizations, researchers, legal and policy professionals, and educators to help shape its funding priorities. This is an example of how some funders create processes to ensure that, from the start, the focus or themes of their investments target the needs of policymakers, practitioners, or the community groups closest to the challenges the work is meant to address.

Set expectations through funding criteria

The Lenfest Ocean Program, which funds actionable research focused on the world’s oceans, posts the framework it uses to assess applications on its website to help potential grantees meet the initiative’s standards for high-quality proposals. The framework encourages applicants to plan how researchers will co-develop questions with partners in policy or practice settings. In a similar vein, Health Research BC, the health research funding agency of British Columbia, Canada, sets clear expectations for team composition and expected research budgets. This guidance helps ensure that projects are led by both a researcher and research user and that the initiatives dedicate resources to building capabilities within the partner organizations.

Assess proposals with insights from groups close to the issues being studied

The Patient Centered Outcomes Research Institute, a leading funder of patient-centered comparative clinical effectiveness research in the United States, includes patients, health system administrators, and clinicians as proposal reviewers. These reviewers help assess applications for patient-centeredness, engagement, and the projects’ potential to improve care. Integrating people from policy, practice, and community groups into the review panels can help funders ensure that proposals align with the priorities and needs of those that are intended to use or benefit from the funded research.

Support implementation

Funders also provide direct support—through training, dedicated time from funding staff, or additional targeted investment—to help with implementation of funded initiatives. For example, the National Estuarine Research Reserve System Science Collaborative, a funder focused on supporting science for estuarine and coastal decision-makers across the U.S., provides dedicated staff time to help grantees manage partnership dynamics, convene key actors, and provide capacity for other engagement activities.

In another approach, Canada’s International Development Research Centre has funded supportive networks—including think tanks, research organizations, and government organizations—to cultivate the relationships and connections that are critical to building alignment among research and policy, practice, and community groups.

Evaluate process and impact

Funders are also developing tools and frameworks to help recipients assess the progress of their efforts as they unfold and the impact of their work over the long term. For example, the William T. Grant Foundation, which focuses on improving the lives of young people in the U.S. through investments in research on reducing inequality and improving the use of research in decision-making, supported the development of a tool kit for partnerships between researchers and educators or other practitioner groups. The tool kit produced by the National Network of Education Research-Practice Partnerships includes a series of questions to help partners examine the health of their collaborations—for example, are partners meeting regularly, navigating conflict effectively, and balancing the interests of both sides?

To build knowledge about how engaged research efforts and related funding strategies contribute to long-term outcomes, funders are investing in studies on the conditions that enable research to support decision-making in policy, practice, and community settings. Knowledge from these studies can help funding organizations understand how to maximize the chances that research will have a positive impact—for example, whether they can successfully integrate team members who are poised to help those on the ground make sense of evidence.

For more information about the Impact Funders Forum, reach out to Ben Miyamoto at [email protected].

Ben Miyamoto is a manager for The Pew Charitable Trusts’ evidence project, and Angela Bednarek directs Pew’s scientific advancement efforts.