Lucky #7: Ways IssueLab Gets Exposure for Your Work

I consider myself a thrifty nonprofit communicator. And in my book, nothing beats free – especially when the return value is as cool as an entire organization working to get more eyes on your research.

Luckily, IssueLab is much more than an archive. We work tirelessly to generate awareness about your research. Here are seven ways we do it, and seven reasons for your nonprofit to participate!

1. www.issuelab.org: Our publishing forum is a go-to place on the web to learn about social issues, and to locate and access research produced by the third sector. Your organization and research titles become a part of IssueLab as soon as you add them and they are approved for publication.
   
2. Social Media-Ready: It's easy for IssueLab's audience to interact with your research using Web 2.0 tools. Our users can review, tag and rate your research, save it to personal libraries, and easily share it with their own social networks using bookmarks, facebook, Twitter and so much more.
3. Content Partners: Our content partners carry news about IssueLab's research holdings as part of their own content offerings. If your listing falls under a partner's content criteria (and you give us permission to share it), it's automatically available for syndication on other sites.
4. RSS Notifications: Our comprehensive and 35 issue-specific RSS feeds let subscribers everywhere know that your newly added and categorized listing is available on IssueLab.
5. Data Harvesting: Since IssueLab is an Open Archives Initiative-compliant data provider, 'harvesters' from around the world can receive raw data about our research holdings. Any group or person interested in our research (that includes data about your listings!) can easily grab it.
6. IssueLab's CloseUp: We delve into a variety of topics all year long by creating special research collections about a spotlighted issue. If your listing pertains to the current CloseUp feature, it's included in the collection and gets all the attention we can garner for two months.
7. One-On-One Dissemination: We actively promote the research we archive. Our daily activities include pushing your research out to bloggers, online communities of practice, social networking groups, and other places where your audience is already gathering online.

Sound enticing? If you're a 501(c)(3) and have research (evaluations, case studies, data sets, policy briefs etc.) you'd like to share, get started with a free contributor account! We even include access statistics to show how often your research is viewed, downloaded, and interacted with by our user community.

Speaking of free: IssueLab is offering a Webinar to share its ideas and lessons learned about online dissemination of research. If you're a nonprofit communicator and want to join the discussion (at no cost to you), here's more information.