Solutions Insights Lab
The Solutions Insights Lab is a targeted research and analysis service focused on identifying and interrogating what’s working and what’s not in a particular sector or field. It employs interviewing techniques drawn from the solutions journalism approach, but is not a work of journalism and is appropriately separated with a firewall from SJN’s core journalism work.
We mind the gaps.
To understand a system, you have to bring the whole system into the room. That’s what Solutions Insights Lab does. An initiative of Solutions Journalism Network, it combines the investigative power of journalism with the research discipline of social science to map systemic challenges, identifying critical gaps and surfacing valuable insights about emerging responses that have the potential to bridge those gaps. It collects knowledge from across your network that can speed the spread of effective innovations.
What we do isn’t journalism. It’s client-focused research. But it’s anchored in the principles and mechanics of solutions reporting, a proven way to interrogate responses to problems. We conduct targeted interviews with people around the world who are working on a particular challenge—from distributing reading glasses to the 800 million people who need them to ending violence against children—with a constant focus on what’s working and what’s not.
Then we mine these rich conversations for key insights and analyze them for significant patterns and contradictions. Our precise questions identify gaps, surface hidden gems, and encourage a culture of shared knowledge. We uncover how change efforts are functioning in the work that matters most to you, and what can be learned to explain success or failure.
Solutions Insights Lab identifies practical, actionable solutions faster and more cost-effectively than other approaches. Our product is a database of wisdom custom-built for your needs. It helps implementers learn best practices from each other, leaders what to prioritize, and funders where to get the most effective return on their investment. It can also help interested journalists identify your unique story, and help you tell it more precisely and compellingly.
We work quickly and nimbly, responding to your organization’s needs and to the urgency of the challenges you’re taking on. That effort is guided by an independent perspective: What we find will surprise and challenge you. And we design engagement strategies geared to speed the resulting insights into the world in accessible ways, getting knowledge to the actors who most need it, helping to catalyze communities of practice, and informing stakeholders who can support the change you seek.
The Solutions Insights Lab integrates the elements of the solutions framework into research on social change. These elements include:
Recent Projects
Leading social change organizations have enlisted the Lab to support the work of social entrepreneurs, funders, investors, policymakers, NGOs and more. Here are a few examples of what that looks like in practice.
‘What’s Working: Solving the World’s Most Pressing Problems’
The Lab partnered with the Skoll Foundation to create “What’s Working,” a searchable portal that combines solutions journalism and curated interviews across sectors, regions and key topics to uncover insights from global efforts to solve social problems.
The Future of Wellbeing
The Rockefeller Foundation is supporting a partnership between the Lab and the Wellbeing Economy Alliance to help find and connect people working to envision the future of the “wellbeing economy.” The idea of such an economy is one that prioritizes quality of life over the quality of the economy, offering a very different vision of progress.
Eyeglass Initiatives
The Livelihood Impact Fund engaged the Lab to study pilot initiatives working with community health care workers and pharmacies to deliver reading glasses to those in need. Our analysis has already uncovered insights that can help scale these efforts, with the eventual goal of enabling access to over 800 million people globally.
Solutions for Ending Childhood Sexual Violence
To Zero, funded by Oak Foundation, Indigo Trust and Phillips Foundation, and the Lab partnered gather insights about how to support the movement building and research necessary to end child sexual violence. By speaking with practitioners, researchers, and experts – working both directly on the issue of childhood sexual and in adjacent sectors – we are distilling insights about what it takes to increase awareness, change social norms, and increase political and institutional support in order to make ending childhood sexual violence a priority now.
Insights on Supporting Social Ventures
The Lab is working with Rippleworks, which supports vital social ventures across many sectors and regions, to conduct in-depth interviews with the leaders of the projects they serve. The insights we’ve found will help illuminate the future of funding for social change, with a focus on centering the needs and voices of those closest to the problem.
Meet the Team
From distilling insights across dozens of interviews to creating graphics and websites, here are some of the people behind the Solutions Insights Lab.
