Year in Review: Impact Investing

Since January, ImpactAlpha has brought you 222 daily editions of The Brief, with more than a thousand deals, signals, features, podcasts and guest contributions from leading lights of impact investing. This week, we’ve rounded up ImpactAlpha’s highlights in Women Rising, Impact Tech, Inclusive Economy and 2030 Finance. To cap off the year, we’re taking stock of impact investing itself. Like Santa, we know whether you’ve been naughty or nice.

#Featured: Returns on Investment Podcast

Revving up supply and demand as ‘impact investing’ turns 10 years old. A decade ago, no one had heard of AirBnB, Uber, Spotify, Instagram or Snap. Or “impact investing.” The term was coined, or at least adopted, at a 2007 gathering hosted by the Rockefeller Foundation at their Bellagio retreat center on Lake Como. (There was a follow-on Bellagio gathering in 2008 as well, so we’re straddling 2017 and 2018 for the 10-year anniversary.) But while those post-2007 startups have gone on to become proverbial “unicorns,” impact investing remains a marginal part of the worldwide financial markets, ever on the cusp of a tipping point.

Or does it? When we took up the question in our year-end Returns on Investment podcast, even our resident curmudgeon Imogen Rose-Smith acknowledged, “It has gained traction within the investment community.” Added Imogen, late of Institutional Investor magazine and now an investment fellow with the University of California, “To shift trillions of capital, it needs to be more than a niche, boutique-y conversation. It has achieved that.”

Read (and listen to) “Revving up supply and demand as ‘impact investing’ turns 10 years old” (podcast). Catch up with (and subscribe to) all of ImpactAlpha’s Returns on Investment podcasts.

Top stories of interest covered are; 

1. How much capital was pointed toward impact in 2017?
2. Who will move money in 2018?
3. What we know about financial performance. 
4. Measurement matters.
5. Practical solutions to impact management.
6. People to watch in 2018. 
7. And the winners are…
8. After the tax bill, all eyes on impact investors.
9. Engage communities. Don’t be extractive. Balance risk and return fairly.

You can read the full stories here. 

Article first published in Impact Alpha.