Identifying, measuring and improving social impact is a significant challenge for corporate and private foundations, charities, NGOs and corporations. How best to balance possible social and environmental benefits (and costs) against one another? How does one bring clarity to multiple possibilities and opportunities? Based on years of work and new field studies from around the globe, the authors have written a book for managers that is grounded in the best academic and managerial research.It is a practical guide that describes the steps needed for identifying, measuring and improving social impact. This approach is useful in maximizing the impact of different types of investments, including grants and donations, impact investments, and commercial investments.With numerous examples of actual organizational approaches, research into more than fifty organizations, and extensive practical guidance and best practices, Measuring and Improving Social Impacts fills a critical gap.
Practical guidance to maximize financial results while driving positive social change The Mission-Driven Venture provides actionable guidance for leveraging the power of the marketplace to solve the world's most vexing social problems. Written by attorney and financial advisor Marc J. Lane, a renowned thought leader and expert on entrepreneurship, social enterprises, impact investing and entrepreneurial finance, this book reaches the full spectrum of interests represented at the intersection of business and social change. Whether a social entrepreneur, impact investor, socially conscious individual, or a nonprofit or foundation leader, any reader committed to social innovation can benefit from this practical roadmap to the rapidly developing arena of social enterprise. Through real-world accounts of the journeys and successes of mission-driven ventures, Lane effectively illustrates the transformative potential of social enterprise, inspiring the reader to be an agent of change. Among the many tools offered through The Mission-Driven Venture, readers will: Find functional guidance to move from idea to reality with a step-by-step guide to designing and implementing a successful mission-driven venture Assess the benefits and challenges of the business models and entity choices available to the social entrepreneur Examine the entrepreneurial linkages between nonprofits and for-profits Recognize governance issues that can arise when mission and profit objectives clash, and discover tools for managing them Explore evolving trends and developments in financing social enterprise Discover methods and tools for measuring and reporting social impact Develop an effective strategy for achieving both financial success and meaningful social impact
Your money can change the world The Impact Investor: Lessons in Leadership and Strategy for Collaborative Capitalism offers 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. The book 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. The book presents a simple thesis with clarity and conviction: "Impact investing can be done successfully. This is what success looks like, and this is what it requires." With much-needed lessons for practitioners, the authors view impact investing as a harbinger of a new, more "multilingual" (cross-sector), transparent, and accountable form of economic leadership. The Impact Investor: Lessons in Leadership and Strategy for Collaborative Capitalism serves as a resource for a variety of players in finance and business, including: Investors: It demonstrates not only the types of investments which can be profitable and impactful, but also details best practices that, with roots in impact investing, will increasingly play a role in undergirding the success of all investment strategies. Wealth advisors/financial services professionals: With unprecedented detail on the innovative structures and strategies of impact investing funds, the book provides guidance to financial institutions on how to incorporate these investments in client portfolios. Foundations: The book explores the many catalytic and innovative ways for for-profit and non-profit investors to partner, amplifying the potential social and environmental impacts of philanthropic spending and market-rate endowment investment. Business students: By including strategies for making sound impact investments based on detailed case studies, it provides concrete lessons and explores the skills required to enhance prospects for success as a finance and business professional. Policy makers: Reinforcing the urgency of creating a supportive and enabling environment for impact investing, the book demonstrates ways policy has already shaped the sector, and suggests new ways for policymakers to support it. Corporate leaders: The book includes essential advice on the way business is and must be responding to a new generation of Millennial clients and customers, with unique insights into a form of value creation that is inherently more collaborative and outcomes-driven.
This book provides readers with a basic understanding of sustainable finance and impact investing including history, definitions of impact, current trends and drivers, future challenges, and an overview of the key players in the global impact ecosystem. The term impact investing first appeared in 2008. Today the most commonly used definition is investing made with the intention to generate positive, measurable social and environmental impact alongside a financial return. A wide range of individual and institutional investors that have already entered the impact investment marketplace and continued growing enthusiasm can be expected given that feedback from investors indicated that portfolio performance has generally met or exceed their expectations for both social and environmental impact and financial return. Established companies have been compelled to respond to calls by institutional investors to incorporate responsible environmental, social, and governance initiatives into their business models as a condition to continued support in public capital markets. Other companies seeking to demonstrate to impact investors their commitment to environmental and social responsibility have opted for emerging forms of legal entities, so-called social enterprises, which explicitly incorporate sustainability and multi-stakeholder interests into their governance and reporting frameworks. This book provides readers with a basic understanding of sustainable finance and impact investing including history, definitions of impact, current trends and drivers, future challenges, and an overview of the key players in the global impact ecosystem. The book also describes impact investment structures and instruments, social enterprises, and impact measurement and reporting.
"A new wave of investors is using impact investing to address some of the greatest challenges of our time--from climate change and water scarcity to lack of access to health care, education, and affordable housing--with the intention of also generating a financial return. This couldn't happen at a more critical time. While philanthropy continues to be a transformative force for good, global philanthropic funds, even when combined with the development or aid budgets of many national governments, add up to mere billions of dollars ... Rockefeller Foundation president Judith Rodin and Margot Brandenburg, two of the foremost experts in the field, explain what impact investing is, how it compares to philanthropy and traditional investments, where opportunities are evolving around the world, and how to get started ..."--Publisher description
This book is the first publication to provide a comprehensive overview about the market, financial instruments and the associated impact assessment for interested practitioners and academics. Specifically, it will introduce the concept of impact investing within the broader field of social finance as well as the relevant actors, present current financing instruments and the various tools to assess the impact of the investing strategy. This useful reference tool will be of interest to academics and researchers in the field of impact investing. Impact investing is a dynamic field that has been recently been discussed as a supplemental funding source for addressing societal problems. The topic has generated significant interest and is presumed to achieve double-digit growth rates for the coming years.
In the absence of a widely accepted and common definition of social enterprise (SE), a large research project, the "International Comparative Social Enterprise Models" (ICSEM) Project, was carried out over a five-year period; it involved more than 200 researchers from 55 countries and relied on bottom-up approaches to capture the SE phenomenon. This strategy made it possible to take into account and give legitimacy to locally embedded approaches, thus resulting in an analysis encompassing a wide diversity of social enterprises, while simultaneously allowing for the identification of major SE models to delineate the field on common grounds at the international level. These SE models reveal or confirm an overall trend towards new ways of sharing the responsibility for the common good in today’s economies and societies. We tend to consider as good news the fact that social enterprises actually stem from all parts of the economy. Indeed, societies are facing many complex challenges at all levels, from the local to the global level. The diversity and internal variety of SE models are a sign of a broadly shared willingness to develop appropriate—although sometimes embryonic—responses to these challenges, on the basis of innovative economic/business models driven by a social mission. In spite of their weaknesses, social enterprises may be seen as advocates for and vehicles of the general interest across the whole economy. Of course, the debate about privatisation, deregulation and globalised market competition—all factors that may hinder efforts in the search for the common good–has to be addressed as well. The first of a series of four ICSEM books, Social Enterprise in Asia will serve as a key reference and resource for teachers, researchers, students, experts, policy makers, journalists and other categories of people who want to acquire a broad understanding of the phenomena of social enterprise and social entrepreneurship as they emerge and develop across the world.
A ground-breaking book on the transformative power of impact investing This is the first book to chart the catalytic path of this new industry, explaining how it is and can be a positive disruptive force. It shows how impact investing is a transformational vehicle for delivering "blended value" throughout the investment spectrum, giving a single name to a set of activities previously siloed in enclaves, revealing how they are linked within what is becoming a new field of investing. Written by two leaders in the growing field of impact investing, the book defines this emerging industry for participants on all sides of the funding equation (investors, funders and social entrepreneurs). Filled with illustrative examples of impact investing success stories Reveals how the field can expand in order to address the most critical social and environmental issues of our day Explores the wide-ranging applications of impact investing as well as entrepreneurial opportunities The authors do not take a normative approach to argue how investors should behave like an investment guide might but show how entrepreneurial people and institutions are already offering an integrated alternative.
Social enterprises represent a new kind of venture, dedicated to pursuing profits for owners and benefits for society. Social Enterprise Law provides tools that will allow them to raise the capital they need to flourish. Social Enterprise Law weaves innovation in contract and corporate governance into powerful protections against insiders sacrificing goals such as environmental sustainability in the pursuit of short-term profits. Creating a stable balance between financial returns and public benefits will allow social entrepreneurs to team up with impact investors that share their vision of a double bottom line. Brakman Reiser and Dean show how novel legal technologies can allow social enterprises to access capital markets, including unconventional sources such as crowdfunding. With its straightforward insights into complex areas of the law, the book shows how a social mission can even be shielded from the turbulence of an acquisition or bankruptcy. It also shows why, as the metrics available to measure the impact of social missions on individuals and communities become more sophisticated, such legal innovations will continue to become more robust. By providing a comprehensive survey of the U.S. laws and a bold vision for how legal institutions across the globe could be reformed, this book offers new insights and approaches to help social enterprises raise the capital they need to flourish. It offers a rich guide for students, entrepreneurs, investors, and practitioners.
‘Shaping Social Enterprise’ helps researchers, policymakers, practitioners, and international development actors better understand various institutional paths of social enterprise development and where institutional strengths and weaknesses may be located.
