The ImpactAssets Handbook for Investors Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Contributors
- Preface
- Introduction
- 1 Construction of an Impact Portfolio: Total Portfolio Management for Multiple Returns
- 2 Total Portfolio Management: One Practitioner's Approach
- Case Study 1
- Case Study 2
- Case Study 3
- 8 The Measurement Challenge
- 9 Communicating Impact: Frameworks for Messaging
- 10 A Journey to Impact: Initial Steps toward Impact Investing
- Case Study 4
- Appendix: Impact Investing Resources
- Notes on Contributors
- Index
9 - Communicating Impact: Frameworks for Messaging
from 8 - The Measurement Challenge
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 October 2019
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Contributors
- Preface
- Introduction
- 1 Construction of an Impact Portfolio: Total Portfolio Management for Multiple Returns
- 2 Total Portfolio Management: One Practitioner's Approach
- Case Study 1
- Case Study 2
- Case Study 3
- 8 The Measurement Challenge
- 9 Communicating Impact: Frameworks for Messaging
- 10 A Journey to Impact: Initial Steps toward Impact Investing
- Case Study 4
- Appendix: Impact Investing Resources
- Notes on Contributors
- Index
Summary
The field of impact investing represents a new frontier of language and understanding about simple and yet very complex issues. This can be inspiring, provocative, hopeful and disorienting, all at once. This chapter is for people investing in impact and those receiving impact investments. If you're investing for impact, it's important to understand key challenges of communicating impact. And if you're creating impact, you want to understand how to demonstrate and communicate the good work you've done.
The following pages offer some guiding questions and tested messaging, intended to assist you as you navigate the communications you receive and create. What follows is hardly comprehensive of the inspiring amount of activity in this space, past and present; and there are many new voices, as people seek greater impact and broader reach.
This chapter doesn't offer quick communications fixes to every challenge (especially ones tied to business model, leadership or culture). It does offer the reader:
• Data to better understand a field with limited research;
• Questions to reflect upon, as you consider where to invest, give and why; and
• Tactical insights and themes that have resonated with others on the impact investing journey.
Some grounding reflections, to consider and challenge:
• Impact investing is emergent, and yet part of a long tradition. While it's been called different names over the years—program related investments, mission-related investments, socially responsible investing, and so on—impact investing is largely new in the retail marketplace and to many in the mainstream. This chapter offers ways to hack or adapt existing ideas and language to create shared meaning for the various practices represented by the term “impact investing.”
• The first step in communicating about impact investing is knowing the impact you seek; then, identifying ways to achieve it; and then, evaluating and reporting the impact you have.
• Not all aspects of impact investing are positive or will create the future you want. There's no single approach to measure impact and people have a range of priorities and audiences. What does impact investing mean to you? Is it generative, or—perhaps—destructive? What do you want to create, build, scale? Who are your partners? Communicating impact takes many forms.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The ImpactAssets Handbook for InvestorsGenerating Social and Environmental Value through Capital Investing, pp. 217 - 264Publisher: Anthem PressPrint publication year: 2017