March 16, 2013

Best Practices for Impact Investing Funds: Impact Investing 2.0

The Impact Investor Project

The Impact Investor aims to build data-driven and practitioner-guided knowledge for the rapidly growing field of impact investing.

The project is a multiyear partnership among CASE i3 at Duke University, InSight at Pacific Community  Ventures and ImpactAssets. The project is led by Cathy Clark, Ben Thornley and Jed Emerson of those organizations, respectively. The project is supported by the Omidyar NetworkRS GroupThe Annie E. Casey Foundation, the WK Kellogg FoundationThe FB Heron Foundation and Deutsche Bank.

Project updates:

October 13, 2014:

Cover mediumThe Impact Investor: Lessons in Leadership and Strategy for Collaborative Capitalism,   Precise details on what, exactly, impact investing entails, embodied in the experiences and best and proven practices of some of the world’s most successful impact investors, across asset classes, geographies and areas of impact. This book, co-authored by Cathy Clark, Jed Emerson and Ben Thornley and based in part on their work on the Impact Investing 2.0 project,  discusses the parameters of impact investing in unprecedented detail and clarity, providing both context and tools to those eager to engage in the generational shift in the way finance and business is being approached in the new era of Collaborative Capitalism. Visit The Impact Investor website to find out more and to order your copy of the book now.

November 7, 2013:

 Today marks the official launch of the new report, “Impact Investing 2.0: The Way Forward – Insight from 12 Outstanding Funds.” This report, created in partnership with InSight at Pacific Community Ventures and Impact Assets, identifies twelve high-performing funds that have seen both financial and social returns on their investments.

Of our initial list of 30 funds that had proven they were successful impact investors for at least five years, these 12 funds represent a diversity of objectives, geography, impact focus and background. They have pursued very different investment strategies and approaches to social impact, and their success across such a broad set of parameters offers many lessons for the impact investing field.

This report is designed to be a resource for the broad community interested in the future of impact investing, but especially for impact investing practitioners – those fund managers, investors, entrepreneurs, policymakers and advisors creating and managing new and existing funds and working hard to achieve successful social and financial performance.

  • And 10 of our 12 case studies on the funds are also available:

September 2013:

IMG_1781

Ben Thornley, Jed Emerson and Cathy Clark on SOCAP main stage

  • CASE i3, InSight at Pacific Community Ventures and ImpactAssets shared “Impact Investing 2.0” – a  preview of new research report we’ll be releasing in November on the best practices of 13 exceptional impact investing funds managing over $3 billion of assets with investments in over 80 countries.
  • Our Impact Investor team also convened expert panels at SOCAP13 on three themes from our upcoming report. Thanks to all our panelists, managers from Aavishkar, SEAF, Omidyar Network, Deutsche Bank, RSF Social Finance, Elevar Equity and Calvert Foundation, for an amazingly honest conversation about the tangible issues that impact investing funds face and surmount in achieving their goals.

SOCAP13MayaJenn1SOCAP13TedSOCAP13Ben

Maya Chorengel, Jennifer Pryce, Ted Levinson and Ben Thornley

SOCAP13JedSOCAP13MarkIMG_1798

Jed Emerson, Mark Narron, Mildred Callear and Ben Thornley

September 2012:

April 2012:

  • cover cropRead the initial report launched at the Skoll World Forum in 2012, The Need for Evidence and Engagement, which describes the team’s strategy of consolidating data and insights from dozens of successful impact investing funds and publishing a set of detailed case studies and evidence-based best practices

 

 

 

II launch2We have held 4 practitioner convenings over the past 2 years, at the Skoll World Forum in Oxford  in 2012 and 2013 and at SOCAP in San Francisco in 2012 and 2013. In addition to the latest news from SOCAP13 above, see:

  • Skoll 2013: We held our second Convening on Emerging Best Practices on April 10th, 2013 in Oxford. We convened 80 global practitioners and broke into 7 working groups on cutting edge topics.  Read our blogpost here: Best Practices in Impact Investing Emerge at Oxford

And, some press:

For more information, contact Cathy Clark of CASE i3 or Ben Thornley of PCV InSight.