Every year the federal government spends more than $600 billion on grants to fund programs and services in education, social sectors, and health. When deliberating such commitments, policymakers weigh evidence from research, practice, and their own experience while also navigating political pressure, the demands of their constituents, and regulatory constraints. A central tenet of evidence-based policy is that society will be better off when research is used. Recent efforts to increase the use of evidence in policymaking have focused on improving the quality of evidence and on providing incentives to policymakers to allow evidence from research to guide their decisions. Although well intentioned, these efforts often fail to get evidence used in policymaking because they make unrealistic assumptions about how policy decisions are made and how policies are implemented. An emerging body of evidence featuring the social side of evidence use--infrastructure, capacity, relationships, and trust--points the way toward a more nuanced understanding of evidence use. In this essay, the author urges advocates for evidence-based policy to attend to the evidence on getting evidence used, and call on researchers to test new models that take into account the social side of evidence use.