Social Change Lab seeks to maximise the impact of social movements by conducting research on the best ways to accelerate positive social change.
Social movements have historically been crucial drivers of social change, yet little research and funding goes into understanding which strategies and tactics are most effective. Social Change Lab is dedicated to studying the impact of social movements on public opinion, public discourse, and policy.
Social Change Lab’s work revolves around three key themes:
Social Change Lab produces research reports and runs workshops and trainings that provide actionable insights to help movements and funders be more effective.
It seeks to inform advocates, decision-makers, and philanthropists on the best ways to accelerate positive social change across a range of cause areas, including animal advocacy efforts, climate change, and building the effective altruism movement.
It is also exploring whether lessons from social movement research could be applied to reducing existential risks.
We don't currently have further information about the cost-effectiveness of Social Change Lab beyond it doing work in a high-impact cause area and taking a reasonably promising approach.
We have varying degrees of information about the cost-effectiveness of our supported programs. We have more information about programs that impact-focused evaluators (some of which our research team expects to investigate soon as part of their evaluator investigations) have looked into, as well as programs that we’ve previously included on our list of recommended charities. We think it’s important to share the information we have with donors as we expect it will be useful in their donation decisions, but don’t want donors to mistakenly overweight the extent to which we share information about some charities and not others. Therefore, we want to clarify two things: