Social Impact Investing

SOCIAL IMPACT INVESTMENT: BUILDING THE EVIDENCE BASE
6.49 Survey response rates are often lower than initially expected. It is important to understand why
there are non-respondents. Designing the appropriate incentives for reporting good quality data is essential.
Moral hazard issues in previous data collection efforts were identified during the OECD SII Expert
Meeting in Paris. Incentives should ensure that, for example, portfolio losses are reported in a rigorous
way. In addition, it is important to note that incentives should be tailored to the type of SII player being
surveyed. For example, showing respondents part of the survey outcomes could provide a good incentive
to some types of respondents such as fund managers.
6.50 Third, data control and verification mechanisms are crucial to ensure high data quality standards.
In some surveys carried thus far, data was checked through registration documents (e.g. Saltuk et al., 2011,
2013, 2014). Finally, building upon the sample collected while ensuring its representativeness, it is
possible to draw broader conclusions about SII activity (inference making).
6.51 The CASE initiative on impact investing (CASE i3) provides good examples of surveys aimed at
building the SII evidence base. Launched in 2010 it partners with different market players (social
entrepreneurs, investors, academics and policymakers) in order to provide build the SII evidence base
(Box 6.5). An interesting feature of this initiative is the simultaneous focus on the demand and supply sides
of SII.
Box 6.5. CASEi3 work on building the evidence base
Case is a recent initiative launched in 2010 by the Center for the Advancement of Social Entrepreneurship
(CASE), based at Duke University's Fuqua School of Business, US.
Within CASE i3, a number of surveys have been carried out, either focusing on social entrepreneurs or on
investors. The surveys are done in partnership with B Lab (focusing on social entrepreneurship) and with GIIRS (aimed
at impact investment funds). Two separate datasets on companies and impact funds are maintained by CASEi3. As of
March 2013, the company dataset covered over 8000 for-profit impact entrepreneurs. In terms of the funds database, it
covers a total of over $4.5Bn in AUM.
CASE i3 also runs a MBA on Impact Investing. This is an interesting approach that accrues benefits in terms of
increased research capacity, since students are involved in consultancy and research work, while engaging with
academics and practitioners in the field of Impact Investing.
Case i3 also has the capacity to commission research to outside academics and consultants which further
enriches the contribution of the initiative to advancing the knowledge about the SII empirical base. In particular, it
commissioned research in 2012 to work with the data collected on social entrepreneurs with the objectives of i) making
comparative analysis of the effects of being a B-corporation and ii) improving the data collection mechanism (including
streamlining the survey). A new call for research proposals is expected for September 2014 and will focus on analyzing
the supply side data. A sample of the survey can be found online.
The data on funds has been used for a report (Clark et al., 2013), where 12 out of 12 major funds selected
between 30 very successful Impact funds (out of initial list of 350 potential impact funds). These accounted for $1.3bn
total assets.
Data collected includes proprietary information so it is only disclosed to the greater public at aggregated levels
through a series of reports and working papers. Nevertheless B-corp profile information is made available and includes
company general information and
Source : CASE i3 website at http://sites.duke.edu/casei3/
6.52 Since the beginning, CASE i3 has been collecting data via surveys on social entrepreneurs and
impact funds, in collaboration with B-Corporation and GIIRS, respectively. The survey of demand side
organisations is used to label companies as a B-corp (Box 6.6). Therefore, there is a high incentive for
companies to report the data because they can benefit from the label. The survey has been being improved
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