Initiatives
IDinsight

IDinsight ... part of a larger ecosystem working towards improving the world.

Burgess COMMENTARY

Peter Burgess

ABOUT US

MISSION & VISION

Our mission is to partner with clients to generate and use rigorous evidence to improve social impact. Depending on client needs, we help diagnose social sector challenges, design and test potential solutions, and operationalize those solutions found to be most impactful. We believe that client-centered, rigorous, and responsive evaluation is essential to help managers maximize program impact.

Our vision is to improve millions of lives by transforming how the social sector innovates, learns, and improves.

VALUES

IDinsight’s team is driven by common values which guide our actions. These values are a statement of commitment to our teammates, clients, and partners.

Service We each put the interests of the poor, our clients, and our teammates before our own, and in every interaction seek to give more than we take. It is a privilege to serve a cause bigger than ourselves. We support others to achieve significant social impact, and we measure our success by the added social impact our clients have due to our services.

Humility We often operate in someone else’s home, community, office or country. We recognize the limits of our personal knowledge, especially compared to local experience, and are aware that having multiple perspectives is highly valuable. We seek to raise the profile of the communities and organizations with whom we work above and beyond our own.

Professionalism We are conscientious and respectful in what we say and do. We bring to bear the skill and effort needed to produce work of the absolute highest quality. We respect the differences of others. We consistently represent IDinsight values, in the office, the field and the countries where we work.

Honesty We are completely honest with each other and our clients. We always share our objective findings and honest opinions with the client – even if they are unpopular, and encourage productive disagreement within our organization. We readily share when IDinsight is not the appropriate service-provider for a given context.

Community of leaders We hire and develop the best. We are committed to enabling our colleagues to reach their full long-term professional potential. We insist that each employee constantly gains in skills and knowledge by purposefully creating opportunities and raising the bar.

System perspective We are part of a larger ecosystem working towards improving the world. We seek to creatively contribute to the entire social sector in a unique way by changing the perception of what kind of impact is possible and expected. We insist on pushing the frontier of evaluation practice beyond what is currently practiced or thought possible.

HISTORY

IDinsight was founded on the premise that rigorous field experiments can be a powerful tool to directly inform and improve decisions in the social sector, benefiting millions of lives and optimizing the impact of billions of dollars each year. The founding team united around their commitment to serve and a shared desire to make rigorous impact measurement methods useful and accessible for social sector leaders in developing countries.

Through our work with governments, NGOs, foundations and social enterprises, we have seen that client-centered and decision-oriented rigorous impact evaluations can be tremendously powerful in helping organizations make more socially impactful decisions. However, we have also seen that many organizations often need a number of other advisory services to better use evidence to increase their social impact. As a result, we added a range of related services – including program design consulting, monitoring and evaluation technical advice, and scale-up support – that align with our organizational strengths and further our mission of improving social impact through the proper use of rigorous evidence. Our current range of services aim to ensure that a good report does not simply make for interesting reading, but is translated into an improved social program by our client.

The most critical element of IDinsight’s growth has been our extraordinary team, made up of individuals who are exceptionally talented and passionate about improving the lives of those who have had a less lucky draw in the lottery of life.