In pursuit of deep impact and market-rate returns

Impact investing is a growing market. By some estimates, over $10 trillion of global assets were using sustainable strategies in 2016. These days major institutions from Barclays to BlackRock are involved in impact investing.

Yet there’s very little good practice out there on reporting the social impact of impact investing.

We have been working for the past ten months with Charly & Lisa Kleissner, and their wealth advisors Sonen Capital, to analyse the social impact of their KL Felicitas Foundation (KLF)  foundation’s 100% impact investment portfolio.

This report displays both the financial and social returns—something too rarely seen in the impact investing space.

We highlight the tools and approaches we used to understand the portfolio’s impact, using NPC’s own Impact Risk Classification framework, the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and the Impact Management Project’s 5 dimensions of impact. We hope it will prove useful for others looking to grapple with the ‘impact’ in ‘impact investing’.

Our work has shed light on two fundamental lessons

1. It is possible to measure the outcomes of a wide spectrum of investments across different asset classes and impact categories.
2. Impact (of varying degrees) can be achieved while gaining a financial return (of varying levels).

Read more about our findings in this blog by one of the authors Plum Lomax >

Let us know your thoughts on the work via @NPCthinks and #investingforimpact.