Our Work
Our Projects
At Gadfly, we find out why people do what they do.
We have applied this question to everything from market research to program evaluation to political campaigns. Hover over some of the icons below to learn more about some of our favorite projects.
We helped the Center for Active Design and the Knight Foundation conduct an original large-scale national survey and a series of field experiments exploring how the design of public space can inspire people to engage in their communities and be stewards of the environment. The results will be published in the forthcoming Design Guidelines for Robust Engagement.
Knight Foundation and Center for Active Design
Increasing Civic Engagement Through Design of Public Spaces
Working with the Athena Center for Leadership Studies at Barnard, we co-created a diagnostic survey to assess women’s leadership readiness for large companies and to identify strengths and challenges to growth. While lots of programs address women in the workplace, we helped the Athena Center develop a data-driven, targeted solution.
Athena Center for Leadership Studies, Barnard College
Assessing Women's Leadership in Organizations
Working with the Analytics Department inside Obama for America’s Campaign Headquarters, we helped implement and innovate new ways of applying data, experiments, and analytics to understanding voter sentiment, targeting, and underlying societal mechanisms.
Obama for America
Optimizing Persuasion, Getting Out the Vote, and Donations in the 2012 Presidential Race
We helped the Search Inside Yourself Leadership Institute, an organization born at Google, optimize their program evaluation in order to measure the effect of their mindfulness and emotional intelligence programs. The project entailed precise recommendations for best practices regarding survey wording and measurement, coding, increasing response rate, analysis, and presentation.
Search Inside Yourself Leadership Institute
Measuring the Impact of Mindfulness Education
Working with a newly funded start-up, we took them through a series of product learning and messaging tests. At the end of the iterative process, we had homed in on a brand name, a product name, a refined product concept and positioning, who the prime prospects were, and which version of the product to go to market with first.
Biometric Startup
Testing a New Product and Bringing It To Market
We partnered with Enroll America on a large-scale field experiment to see whether stressing certain aspects of health insurance were more effective for some people and less effective for others. We turned our findings into a forthcoming academic journal article so organizations can enroll more people in health insurance more effectively in the future.
Enroll America
Exploring Mechanisms for Health Insurance Enrollment