Organizational excellence

Achieving the goals in our three focus areas will require us to build upon our research and communications excellence, seek out opportunities to broadly engage our member companies and ensure we are being good stewards of our resources. Below we lay out strategies for those areas.

Strategy 1
Increase brand awareness of the Institutes.

Awareness of our brand is key to the effectiveness of our consumer ratings and our ability to spread safety information to policymakers, transportation professionals and the public at large. We will continue to assess recognition of the IIHS-HLDI brand and content and develop new metrics to measure our progress. We will also continue to expand and revise our website content to improve the accessibility of information for specific audiences such as researchers and policymakers. Finally, we will explore new ways of expanding our reach. These may include traditional advertising on radio and television; increased social media marketing and working with influencers; corporate partnerships with car-buying sites, lifestyle companies and health marketers; and outreach to driver education instructors, science teachers, car dealers, motor vehicle departments and apps relevant to parents of teens.

Strategy 2
Engage with IIHS-HLDI membership and the auto insurance industry at large in order to retain current members (our primary focus) and recruit new ones.

Our membership at the end of 2024 represents over 92% of private passenger auto premiums in the U.S. We have a robust program of member engagement and recruitment activities, which we plan to continue. This includes an ongoing webinar series offered to all member companies that is at the technological and creative forefront of the medium and an evolving catalog of prepared and ad hoc online presentations offered to individual member companies. We will continue to conduct in-person visits to member companies upon request and to promote the Vehicle Research Center as a destination for member company meetings and visits as well as for insurance industry events with key strategic partners. In addition, we will develop a new framework for sharing IIHS comments on proposed rulemaking with the full membership.

To boost awareness of our work within the insurance industry, we will continue to participate in targeted insurance industry conferences and to take advantage of social media platforms, particularly LinkedIn.

We will also expand and improve our current system for monitoring each member company’s engagement with our offerings to enable us to better tailor our retention efforts.

Strategy 3
Develop an internal structure responsible for pushing IIHS-HLDI research into action.

In order to achieve our 30x30 vision, we will need to ensure that effective solutions revealed by our research are implemented on a broad scale. We will continue to use our consumer safety ratings to influence the auto industry and will adapt that approach to address makers and purchasers of medium and heavy trucks. We will continue to work closely with our partners in advocacy organizations to guide policy directed at enhancing transportation safety. As outlined in several of our goals above, this will include developing analyses and communication tools that our partners find useful in their direct appeals to legislators and other government officials. Finally, we intend to identify and examine organizations that have successfully translated research into action, with an eye toward adopting the most effective and relevant tactics. Ultimately, this may result in reallocation of staff or resources to research implementation, but in any case, we will systematically incorporate this imperative into our work.

Strategy 4
Responsibly manage and safeguard our resources.

Taking care of our most valuable assets, including our intellectual property, our members’ confidential information and our human capital, has always been a priority for IIHS-HLDI and one of the keys to our success. We will strengthen this commitment with new cybersecurity and employee training efforts.

We intend to develop a comprehensive information security and compliance program based on the National Institute of Standards and Technology Cybersecurity Framework 2.0 to manage and reduce cybersecurity risks. We will also examine the feasibility of pursuing SOC 2 attestation to provide assurance to our member companies and other partners about our cybersecurity posture.

We will establish a structure for staff development that incorporates general workplace skills, tech literacy (including AI) and compliance and safety training for all IIHS-HLDI employees. In addition, we will provide training for new supervisors and recurring training for all supervisors to help them stay current on leadership skills, people management and employment law concepts.