A social research company
At Decodis, we believe that actively giving people the space to express themselves as they wish – in their own language, in their own dialect, in their own voice – elevates our understanding of their lived experiences and opinions. We realize this principle by offering impact investors, private corporations, donors, thinktanks, NGOs and governments nuanced insight into the perspectives of the populations they serve. We use methods that are high-powered, scalable and low-cost; and have proven to be effective in helping organizations understand and better serve their target populations.
Our Story
by Dr. Daryl Collins, CEO and Founder
I've been doing research on vulnerable populations for over twenty years, but something has been increasingly troubling me. I get the feeling that people have just been telling us what they think we want to hear.
The stories I was hearing were far too simple. Only if I spent a longer period of time interviewing them, such as with the Financial Diaries research method I co-innovated as the basis of Portfolios of the Poor, did I achieve a real understanding of their experiences and opinions, which were messy and complicated. But lengthy fieldwork is frustratingly expensive, onerous to execute and not scalable. I heard similar experiences from peers in different parts of the globe who struggled to make quality social research with increasing constraints.
I founded Decodis to solve that problem. Using proven technologies in innovative ways, our team at Decodis is creating tools to access even deeper understandings than I could with Diaries, but in a more agile, cheap and scalable way.
Join us in reimagining social research.