April 2026
To ensure fairness and clarity for ICG members, we have slightly revised our membership criteria as of 1st April 2026: please have a read through to make sure you are still eligible.
Size
- New members can have a maximum of 3 employees, including the member themselves. This is based on an absolute number of employees, regardless of the number of hours they work per week.
- After joining, businesses can grow to 5 employees, again including the member and, again, regardless of the number of hours worked.
- By employees, we mean payrolled employees, or people who could reasonably be seen as employees, eg by HMRC – it doesn’t apply to ad hoc supplier relationships or individuals collaborating on a project basis.
Set-up
- ICG members’ businesses must be independent of any other business – in other words, they must not be benefitting by being part of something else. For example, if you are supported by a larger company’s finance / HR / marketing department, and not managing all of that yourself, you have benefits that micro businesses normally wouldn’t have and would therefore be ineligible for ICG membership.
Part time / combined roles
- We know that some of our members have part time roles with other companies, outside of their independent insight work.
- If you work part time independently and part time in a research or insight role for a larger company, the majority of your income should come from your own, independent insight work. If the larger part of your income comes from the larger insight company, you are not eligible to be a member of the ICG.
- If you work part time for a larger company in a role that is not connected to research or insight, this rule does not apply – it only applies if you’re supporting them with research or insight expertise.
- If you work part time for your own micro business and part time for a larger company, the benefits of the ICG should be ringfenced for the micro business. For example, it would be fine to access the ICG hive mind through the egroup for your own business projects, but not to benefit the larger company.
We take care to check business size and set-up before accepting new members and do ad hoc checks on existing members, taking a range of information sources into consideration. However, it’s not always clear to see how members’ businesses are growing or changing after they have joined, particularly if different platforms show conflicting information.
If your business has outgrown the ICG, please let us know. Even though you’re no longer eligible to be a member, we’d be very happy to discuss how you can still be a friend of the ICG, and be in contact with our members, via sponsorship or advertising, and by staying on our ezine mailing list. If in doubt please get in touch – we can always talk through on a case-by-case basis.
We hope you appreciate the importance of us having, and monitoring, these limits, so that we can honour the purpose of the ICG and remain a fair place for all members. If needed, we reserve the right to withdraw membership if we believe a member falls outside of these membership criteria.
Anne Rodger – ICG Membership
membership@theicg.co.uk