The Impact Investing Institute’s open-source Learning Hub, named by Forbes as a go-to resource for impact investing, provides individuals and organisations with knowledge and skills to invest for impact with confidence.
Resource
This Learning Hub is designed to help you learn more about impact investing either to meet your personal interest or to support your work.
The modules below will help you build your knowledge and skills so that you can do impact investing with confidence. They draw extensively on research and reports from leading organisations such as the Global Impact Investing Network, the Impact Management Platform, as well as on our own resources.
Knowledge
- Introduction to impact investing: Everyone’s first question about impact investment is ‘so what is impact investing?’ This module defines impact investing, tells you how impact investing has developed, how it fits in with the rest of the investment world, what some of the challenges it faces are and what the key terms mean.
- The purpose of impact investing: This is about the ‘why’ of impact investing. How do impact investors see the world and what are the frameworks that they work with to identify the impact of their investments? This module provides the answers and lists some of the challenges that impact investment sets out to address (as well as some of the constraints).
- The impact investing market: Impact investing is developing and growing fast. Here you will learn about the current research on the size and shape of the market, who the investors and investees are, and gain insight into some of the strategies that leading investors use.
- Asset classes and products: It is possible to invest with impact across all asset classes in some form. The traditional preference for venture capital and private equity is starting to break down as investors seek scale in public markets.
Skills
- Impact measurement, management, and reporting: Managing impact is one of the core characteristics of impact investment – and you cannot manage what you cannot measure. This module takes you into the nuts and bolts of impact investment and leads you gently and logically through the steps you need to take to get it right, including looking at standards, logic frameworks, and theories of change.
- Impact investment thesis, strategy, and portfolio management
- Impact investment sourcing and due diligence
Impact investing approaches
- Impact investing in the main endowment: As part of our endowments with impact programme, we have compiled a set of resources that trusts, foundations, and other endowed bodies may find helpful as they explore impact investing.
- Place-based impact investing: Private capital, including pension money, can address place-based inequalities across the UK and secure financial returns at the same time. This module explores how.
Impact investing in practice
- Advising on impact investment: Individual investors, family offices, endowments, and other institutions are moving beyond Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) integration and seeking measurable impact as well as a financial return. Those that serve them are having to build new skills.
- Building and managing impact investment products: The surging interest in impact investment is leading to a rush of new products coming to the market. It has always been important to ensure that impact investment products have a clear purpose and are managed well. Now, it is more important than ever.
- Investing in and managing impact assets: Institutional investors have long made investments that have impact, for example in assets such as infrastructure and social housing, just perhaps without the intentionality that characterises impact investment. Increasingly, investors are adopting and helping to develop impact investment practices.
Guest preview of selected publicly available resources