Growing a culture of social impact investing in the UK

Background and Objective

This paper forms part of the Social Impact Investing Taskforce’s response to the third key recommendation of the report of the Advisory Group on Social Impact Investing to“develop better reporting of non-financial outcomes”, which has been subsequently refined by the Taskforce as “better reporting of social and environmental impact”

The insights are drawn from a call for evidence that received responses from 92 representatives and experts from across the investment and reporting domains. 

Key findings

The current impact reporting landscape reflects the rapid growth in society’s expectations of business and the associated proliferation of reporting requirements in the last decade

In the absence of a common currency for impact applicable across issues and sectors, reporting practitioners and investment chain stakeholders have developed a wide range of different definitions and approaches for capturing ‘impact’ in a way that makes sense to them

To help cut through the noise, a definitional classification (see Figure 1) has been introduced in this paper to bring some clarity to the umbrella term ‘reporting approaches’ and to demonstrate the variance and similarities between the 16 most prevalent 2 reporting approaches. The classification also aims to lay the ground work for clear discussions in phase 2.