Our Impact Report 2015

Everyone wants transparency, but very few link transparency with impact and partnership. It is time to redefine transparency, turn it into a tool to promote effectiveness and to unite stakeholders around shared outcomes. Every one of our partners helped us achieve our impact. Executives, team members, consultants, investors and the 380,000 people who were asked to participate in decision making. They deserve to know what they have contributed to.

Insights is a private company. As such, it is not required to report anything. But, why should reporting be an obligation? Like a non-profit or a government agency, a company should define an outcome that matters, find what works but deliver it via a different financial model. This is what some "build to last" companies have done for years. One would expect every organization to define the value it creates to its community. The financial model can rely on donors (and salaries), investors (and profits) or tax-payers money. However, in an era of hybrid partnerships, finding what works is more important than the financial model one choses in order to deliver it.

This is why the concepts of impact, effectiveness, partnerships and transparency are relevant to us at Insights, as a mission-oriented company. Achieving our outcomes will generate profits, but profits are not an outcome in themselves. As in the public sector, our challenge is to find what works: how the way decisions are made can have a positive impact on their effectiveness and delivery. Transparency enables us both to find ways to achieve our own outcomes while building our community.

Over the last four years, Insights has helped 50 organizations to power 250 crowd-consulting projects that reached out to 380,000 people. When leaders take action after consulting their stakeholders, 60% of their decisions are fundamentally different. Here is the first report on our impact.