It was meaningful to participate in this year’s #GIINForum2024 in my new(-ish) role as Head of Secretariat for the Impact Principles. In addition to our Signatory Luncheon and DFI discussion, I had the privilege to moderate the IMM ("Impact Measurement and Management") Success Stories session with several Signatories leading the way on impact management best practices.
Bringing together impact practice, performance, and data, our panelists laid out how they integrate impact across their entire investment lifecycles, leveraging global standards and tools like the Impact Principles, IRIS+, and the GIIN’s Impact Performance Benchmarks. We also facilitated an interactive exercise, focusing on the state of IMM practice and the specific steps the industry must, should, could, and should not take to promote the scaling of the market and achievement of impact outcomes.
What is success in IMM? Beyond being impressed by the growing appetite for and expertise in IMM, I had a few takeaways from our panelists and audience participants:
🔄 Impact management and measurement needs to be an end-to-end system starting with a clear evidence-based strategy/Theory of Change, supported by standardized ex-ante and ex-post frameworks to bring consistency in screening, target-setting, measuring and monitoring impact across the portfolio, and managed for learning and improvement of results. The Impact Principles can provide a roadmap!
⭐ IMM practice alone is insufficient if it does not drive impact performance and ultimate real world outcomes, and we still have work to do in this direction. Market alignment around global standards and common frameworks and metrics lay the necessary foundation for the field to compare impact practice and performances and generate more specific and deeper insights into what practices drive impact outcomes.
🙌 Collaboration and sharing of both impact data and best practices are key as the impact investing mainstreams, both to promote the advancement of the practice with collective field knowledge and capacity, and to help new entrants develop and improve their impact approaches.
💡 While we should celebrate our successes, it is important to maintain a sense of humility around impact attribution (be conservative rather than overclaim!), center beneficiaries as key stakeholders and contributors, and cultivate an environment of self-review and deep learning to continue driving this field and impact forward. Impact data tells you “what” but not “how”.
Thank you to Signatory panelists Shade Duffy, Maria Teresa Zappia, and Milena Bertram, all the Facilitator volunteers, and the GIIN’s very own JuliaPaige Joseph for all their work to make this session a success story in its own right. And thank you to all the IMM professionals out there for helping make sure that the accelerating impact investing capital will result in equally impressive real-world outcomes, especially where it is needed the most.
#IMM, #ImpactPrinciples
