Mission: To advance ongoing learning and research in the social sector.

Background: To address the gap created by the fact that too many of the evaluations, case studies, and reports produced by the social sector were never made available publicly or only reached a limited audience, Gabriela Fitz and Lisa Brooks launched IssueLab in 2006 as a searchable, browseable website where this knowledge could be collected and shared. IssueLab became a service of Foundation Center in 2012, and since then its mission has grown beyond the "simple" collection and distribution of knowledge products to include the support of social sector organizations in adopting the practical steps necessary to openly publish what they fund and produce.

Today, a newly revamped IssueLab hosts almost 20,000 resources in 38 different issue areas from 7,000+ organizations around the world. The result of a year-long design and technology reboot, the new site has been updated to make it easier for nonprofits and foundations to upload, discover, and freely share their research.

Outstanding Web Features: Through a new set of tools, nonprofits, foundations, and university-based research centers can share their reports, case studies, evaluations, and other knowledge products. New features of the IssueLab platform include an improved interface for uploading research and sharing items via a website, blog, or on social media; filtered search, the ability to curate user libraries, and "what to read next" suggestions for related research; the ability to issue Digital Object Identifiers, or DOIs, for qualifying resources, ensuring their long-term discoverability and accessibility across the Internet and on archival sites such as WorldCat; and metadata functionality for keyword, publication date, geographic focus, and language. IssueLab also has expanded its custom services for institutional clients to include synthesis reports, special collections, and Knowledge Centers like freshwater.issuelab.org, which was created in partnership with the Pacific Institute and Rockefeller Foundation to highlight incentive-based approaches to freshwater management.