For Knology, 2019 was a year of transition.

Eight years after founding, our transdisciplinary model for pursuing practical social science to advance the public good has gained traction. We started our year with a reinvigorated spirit and a goal of positioning our work for greater success. We dedicated the first half of the year to taking stock of our successes and regrets, seeking feedback from our core partners, and revisiting how we could play a more useful role in creating a better world.

We heard from our partners that our value is the ability to situate our work at the broad systems level even when we're working on a single program. We’re solution-oriented, which means we pursue our research with a clear eye to how results will be applied. Partners also appreciate that we work as a connector of ideas, people and organizations. We focus equally on research and our commitment to writing accessible stories to ensure our research is in the hands of professionals who can effect change.

The process helped us learn that we need to expand our founding practice areas. We spent the year developing a strategy to integrate two new cross-cutting research programs into our framework: a focus on the individual mental processes that drive human behavior, and the policies and structures that constrain or permission interactions in our society. The result is our new model that we outline in the following pages.

In the fall of 2019, we completed an extensive process to use the feedback from our partners to redefine our brand and announce our new name: Knology. This was a rather massive investment in pro bono support by a variety of great legal minds and designprofessionals, as well as trademark and communications specialists. Thanks to their effort, we ended the year with filing our new name and rebranding as Knology. We believe our new name, logo, and design strategy captures the joyful inquisitive nature of our team, and clear-eyed practical social science. The following pages are organized according to our new strategic plan, with each section highlighting one of our research areas.

At the close of 2019, we were a financially secure non-profit ready to take on even bigger challenges.

-- Leonard Singh, Board Chair; Joanna Laursen Brucker, Chief Operating Officer; John Fraser, President & CEO

Photo: Adam Solomon on Unsplash