Global Integrity is committed to innovation, not only in our research and reporting but also in the way we manage our operations.

• Global Integrity is a leader in deploying technology in the developing world. Our teams of field experts share data and reporting from the field in real-time through a custom-built Web-based content management system. Using secure databases designed by Potomac Digitek, our staff can remotely contribute to or access each other's work through any computer with Web access. Some Internet-based organizations have difficulty carrying out work simultaneously in Colombia, Tanzania, Papua New Guinea and Bangladesh. We don't and have proven that large scale virtual organizations can work in the developing world.

• We are lean and nimble by design. From the outset, we have avoided large support staffs, big offices, or spending our supporters' money on non-essential junkets and conferences. We'd rather hire more field experts, report on more countries, and launch new and innovative projects that others are too slow or bureaucratic to tackle. We use private sector contractors extensively for non-research roles, reducing our risk and increasing our agility. This outsourcing also keeps our core staff focused on one thing: the quality of our information.

• We are a learning organization. By that, we mean that we're constantly learning from our own mistakes, systematically tracking glitches and problems in real-time and assimilating those lessons-learned into future work. It also means we don't lay claim to the title of smartest experts on corruption and governance, but draw on many friends, colleagues, and our own field teams for advice and ideas. Our approach to running our organization is the same one we apply to analyzing governance reforms: with enough trusted data, the smart decisions become increasingly obvious.

• We are environmentally sustainable. Despite working with hundreds of people in more than 90 countries, our environmental footprint is small. Using Internet technology, our staff works virtually, avoiding the need for extensive travel, remote offices, and the negative environmental impact those habits create. We typically produce the annual Global Integrity Report — comprising more than 10,000 data points, 15,000 peer review comments, and roughly a million words of text — using just a single box of printer paper during the course of eight months. We're pretty sure that sets some sort of record.

• We take care of our team. We pay every reporter, researcher, and peer reviewer that works on our projects. While volunteer efforts are effective in some settings, our requirements are clear: we need the best people and we need their full attention. Our pay scales are based on the work performed, not geography — pay rates in the developing world are exactly the same as what we pay in developed countries.