Meet the Agents
Sam Knowles, Founder & MD, Insight Agents
Insight Agents was founded in the U.K. in 2013 by Sam Knowles, who’s the MD and Chief Data Storyteller. Sam combines long and varied consultancy experience with a planner’s facility for turning relevant data into narratives that resonate and campaigns that deliver. His purpose is to help organisations sound like people and to talk that rarest of corporate dialects: ‘Human’.
Through Insight Agents, Sam helps all sorts of organisations to identify and craft the most compelling, data-driven stories in their sector. He finds flow through coaching, mentoring, and solving data storytelling challenges.
Sam is the author of the ‘Using Data Better’ trilogy of books with Routledge. This comprises the critically-acclaimed Asking Smarter Questions (2023), the best-selling How To Be Insightful (2020), and the award-winning Narrative by Numbers (2018). His popular training courses based on the intellectual property in these books are delivered both in person and in the online training course, Using Data Smarter.
Sam holds a doctorate in psychology, one source of his understanding of human motivation and behaviour and his love of telling stories with data. He is a Fellow of the Market Research Society, the Royal Society of Arts, and the Professional Speaking Association. He chairs the Data Storytelling Council of I-COM, a global association focused on smart data marketing.
An experienced and sought-after keynote speaker, Sam is also a prolific podcaster, as both host and guest. He is the creator and host of Data Malarkey – the podcast about using data, smarter – as well as co-founder and co-host of the Small Data Forum podcast (2016-2024), a sideways look at the uses and abuses of data big and small in business, politics, and public life.
Connect with Sam
Saskia Gent, Director, Insights for Impact
Founded in 2017 by impact champion Saskia Gent, Insights for Impact has rich and deep experience of developing powerful impact in research projects, departments, and institutions.
Saskia started her impact journey working with a DFID funded project to enable migration to bring benefits to developing countries. After establishing the impact support function in the School of Global Studies at Sussex University, Saskia set up and ran the impact office at the University of Sussex and led the Sussex impact submission to REF 2014 across all schools and departments.
After creating Insights for Impact, Saskia has supported organisations and projects to set and achieve impact goals. In the years leading up to REF 2021, she worked with more than 30 institutions, coaching, facilitating, and training hundreds of researchers to deliver their best possible impact case study submissions. Her team is currently working towards REF 2029.
Saskia is inspired by research, has deep knowledge of impact and the impact agenda, and a well-honed ability to help researchers share their work with the world beyond academia. These skills and attributes – combined with her coach’s empathy to help people clearly see the options available to them – make her ideally placed to advise on all your impact needs. This is true at both and individual and an organisational level, from crafting the most persuasive impact case studies to developing institutional impact and knowledge exchange strategies.
