Research Buddy: Faster Evidence, Better Insights — Trained on Your Documents and Sector Sources

Evidence-based practice is a widely shared aspiration across public services, charities, and professional organisations. The reality is often rather different. Research exists — in published reports, internal evaluations, sector literature, and data your organisation has spent years accumulating — but accessing it quickly enough to actually inform decisions is another matter.

The barriers are familiar. The report you need is buried in a shared drive that nobody can navigate. The evaluation you’re looking for was written by someone who left two years ago.

The sector evidence exists but searching for it takes longer than you have before the meeting. The data is there but interpreting it requires specialist knowledge that isn’t always in the room.

Research Buddy removes these barriers. It makes your research base searchable, accessible, and useful — not just to the analysts and specialists who know where everything lives, but to every member of your team who needs evidence to do their job well.

Research Buddy is trained on the research base you define — your own internal reports and evaluations, sector publications, evidence reviews, national data sources, and any other materials your organisation relies on for evidence-informed practice.

Your team can then query that research base in plain English and receive accurate, cited summaries and syntheses in seconds.

Here’s what Research Buddy supports:

• Evidence retrieval — finding the most relevant research, data, and findings from across your knowledge base in response to a specific question, in seconds rather than hours
• Document summarisation — producing clear, accurate summaries of lengthy reports, evaluations, and research papers — pulling out the key findings, methodology, and implications without requiring the reader to work through the full document
• Evidence synthesis — bringing together findings from multiple sources to answer a specific question, identify patterns, or assess the state of evidence on a topic

• Bid writing and funding application support — helping bid writers find and cite the evidence base that strengthens grant applications, tender responses, and funding proposals
• Report and briefing support — giving policy, strategy, and communications teams fast access to the evidence they need to produce well-grounded reports, briefings, and recommendations
• Sector intelligence — keeping teams up to date with relevant research, publications, and evidence from their sector without requiring hours of literature monitoring
• New angles and gaps — surfacing connections between research sources that might not be immediately obvious, and flagging where the evidence base is thin or contested

Every response cites its source — document, author, date, and section — so your team can verify, reference, and build on the evidence with confidence.

For charities and third sector organisations, Research Buddy is a powerful tool for bid writing — helping teams quickly build the evidence base that funders expect to see, drawing from sector research, your own evaluation findings, and national data. It also supports impact reporting and the kind of evidence-based practice that builds credibility with commissioners and donors.

For housing associations and local authorities, Research Buddy gives policy, strategy, and service development teams rapid access to the evidence base they need — housing research, demographic data, service evaluation findings, and sector publications — without the hours of searching that currently slow down decision-making and report production.

For health and care organisations, Research Buddy supports clinical and service improvement teams in accessing and synthesising the research evidence that underpins safe, effective practice — making it easier to ground decisions in evidence and produce well-referenced reports for commissioners, boards, and regulators.

For think tanks, research organisations, and policy bodies — where research is the product — Research Buddy dramatically accelerates the synthesis and retrieval stages of the research process, allowing analysts and researchers to spend more time on interpretation, analysis, and communication rather than search and retrieval.

For professional services firms, Research Buddy gives consultants, advisers, and sector specialists rapid access to the evidence and intelligence that underpins their advice — ensuring recommendations are well-grounded, well-referenced, and current.