Gallup, Inc.

Who owns Gallup?
Gallup is employee-owned through an employee stock ownership structure. There are no public shareholders and no private equity owner. Strategic leadership has run through the Clifton family, with Jon Clifton as CEO since 2022.

Is Gallup publicly traded?
No. Gallup is privately held and has never listed shares. Its employee-ownership structure makes a public listing unlikely.

How does Gallup make money?
Primarily through workplace advisory services: engagement surveys, consulting, CliftonStrengths assessments, coaching certification, analytics software, and publishing. Public polling is a small share of revenue but a large share of its public profile.

When was Gallup founded?
George Gallup founded the firm in 1935 in Princeton, New Jersey, as the American Institute of Public Opinion. It later became the Gallup Organization and is now Gallup, Inc., headquartered in Washington, DC.

Is Gallup a reliable pollster?
Gallup pioneered scientific sampling and remains one of the most cited research organizations, though it stopped forecasting presidential elections after a 2012 miss. Its approval ratings, World Poll, and workplace research are widely used as authoritative references.

How many employees does Gallup have?
Approximately 2,000 employees work across offices in more than 30 countries, with major operations in Washington, DC, and Omaha, Nebraska. LinkedIn and third-party data put the count between 2,000 and 2,400.

What is CliftonStrengths?
CliftonStrengths is Gallup's behavioral assessment that identifies a person's dominant talent themes. More than 30 million people have completed it, and it anchors Gallup's development, coaching, and enterprise advisory products.

George Gallup founded the American Institute of Public Opinion in Princeton, New Jersey, in 1935. A former journalism professor and advertising research director, he believed that small, scientifically drawn samples could measure public opinion more accurately than the mass straw polls newspapers relied on.

The 1936 presidential election proved the point. The Literary Digest surveyed more than two million people and predicted Alf Landon would defeat Franklin Roosevelt. Gallup surveyed a few thousand, predicted Roosevelt's landslide correctly, and became the most famous pollster in America almost overnight. The Gallup Poll soon covered politics, consumer confidence, and social attitudes, syndicated through newspapers nationwide.

The organization expanded into market research and advertising measurement through the mid-twentieth century, then increasingly into management science. After George Gallup's death in 1984, his sons George Jr. and Alec carried on the polling work. Jim Clifton joined in 1988 and became CEO, redirecting the company toward workplace analytics as the polling industry commoditized.

The pivotal product was the strengths assessment. Clifton had acquired the StrengthsFinder business in 1999, and the tool, renamed CliftonStrengths after Donald Clifton, the psychologist who developed it, became the foundation of a development and coaching franchise. The Q12 survey, distilled from decades of employee research, became the standard engagement instrument used by thousands of organizations.

The company weathered polling's upheavals, including a widely noted miss in 2012 election tracking that led Gallup to stop predicting presidential votes. It consolidated headquarters at 901 F Street NW in Washington, DC, and continued expanding consulting and software delivery through its Gallup Access platform. Jon Clifton succeeded his father as CEO in 2022, making leadership a third-generation Clifton affair while ownership remains broadly held by employees.

As an employee-owned private firm, Gallup has no exchange-mandated ESG disclosures, but it publishes workplace and wellbeing research that functions as its public accountability record. The company's internal practices receive scrutiny through employee review platforms, which generally rate it as an above-average employer in the consulting category.

Its most substantive ethical position is methodological independence: as a pollster, its credibility depends on visible freedom from sponsor influence, which the employee-ownership structure is designed to protect.

Gallup's institutional recognition is substantial. George Gallup's role in establishing probability sampling is honored across the research profession, and the company regularly appears on employer rankings in its category. Its State of the Global Workplace report is one of the most cited sources in management journalism, and Gallup Press titles are perennial business bestsellers.