Our 2020 Impact Report

The results, ideas, and impact management and measurement practice from our team in 2020.

Published: October 15, 2020

We’ve designed this year’s impact report (pdf) to be useful for investors, our investees, our team, our partners, and the broader impact ecosystem.

We ran a webinar on the 18th of November. You can listen to the audio of our presentation here.
Or view the presentation slides. (pdf)

Impact Highlights

Sustainable Cities & Resilient Communities





The Ideas, Lessons and Tips.

Beyond the results, this years impact report delves into some ideas we’ve been thinking about through the year.

  • What’s The Threshold for Impact?
    An impact management theme that keeps coming up when we talk to investors, sector partners and peers, is how we think about thresholds for making decisions around impact.How do we know there is ‘enough’ impact? This can apply at the time of making an investment, making a divestment, considering net impact, and interpreting performance or results.A lot of what gives us the meaningful information to assess whether there was ‘enough’ impact or whether the impact was positive or negative depends upon the benchmarks or thresholds we select. There’s more in the report (P27), including how investors can consider Impact Over Time, Relative to Peers, Targets, Net Impact, Tradeoffs, Impact Risks and Perspective.
  • Developing an Investment Policy for A Specialist Impact Manager.
    Through the last year, Erin stepped through the process of actually developing an investment policy. Plenty of ESG investors have developed negative screens, but you need to do something different as an impact investor. It’s a crucial foundation that allows impact investors to be more strategic and less reactive. Possibly of interest to family offices and endowment managers who are moving into impact.
  • Taking Temperatures: The Conversation Has Moved on from “Why This Matters”
    In 2020, we have found that the narrative and willingness to use finance for good has grown to the point where we are not having ‘why this matters’ conversations anymore. Now, more than ever, people seem to understand the clear links between finance, our economy, our society, and our environment. Most of the people we come across seem to understand there are relationships and interdependencies between these systems that underpin our wellbeing, resilience and survival.
  • The Impact Reporting Demonstration Effect.
    We have an additional, crucial kind of meta-goal for this years impact report: Impact management and reporting remains a rapidly evolving field. We have learned from peers in Australia and overseas. New people are getting into the field, so there’s a lot of value in “showing your work” and demonstrating the practice. We hope that this year’s IIG Impact Report makes a valuable contribution to the field.

 

Download the full report

 

We’re running a presentation

18 November
12pm AEDT
Zoom webinar (of course)
Register Here
By Dr Erin Kuo – IIG Chief Impact Officer

Erin Kuo