Never let the dust settle on breakthrough research.

At Redstone, we help our clients think through how to fund, pursue, and use research as a practical tool that informs both policy and practice. We help develop comprehensive research-based strategies, prioritize among different research opportunities based on potential impact, cost and feasibility, and design ways to monitor and evaluate progress.

For research institutions and their funders, strategy is a necessity, not a luxury. Research-focused organizations pride themselves on the quality of their work – its rigor, accuracy, and speed. We help these organizations use strategy to make the most of those virtues. One environmental conservation nonprofit with research expertise believed the quality of their day-to-day work made formal strategic planning unnecessary. After they showed the strategy we helped them design to a longtime donor, the donor volunteered to increase its funding well beyond historical levels. The strategy demonstrated that the organization had a long-term plan and was careful to put donors’ investments to the best possible uses. You can read more about our work with think tanks here.

Research products inform and influence. At times, analysis we produce to guide strategy can also serve as a research product that informs good policy. Our work on fisheries and catch shares provides an example. We worked closely with the Environmental Defense Fund, building on analysis we produced to inform philanthropic strategy, to publish papers in peer reviewed journals on catch shares’ impacts on the environment and the federal budget. The National Catch Shares Program has since become a rare instance of bipartisan policy agreement.