IMPACT FUNDERS AND INVESTORS
Design a strategy that ensures value for money
Do you wonder how, in complex problem spaces and with almost infinite options available, your funding can be directed to the areas in which it can make the most difference?
Are you unsure of how to define, structure and measure the social—and potentially financial—value you are looking to get from your impact grants or investments?
Are you interested to explore how to build a portfolio of investments in social impact innovation and/or research and wondering how to approach risk and ensure that your funding is catalytic?
We can help you review and understand opportunities in a problem space, using tools such as gap analyses, root cause analysis, and systems mapping.
Using this, we can assess with you how to focus your funding in alignment with your values and priorities, building a robust and flexible strategy for how you will achieve maximum impact through your grants or investments.
Investing in research and innovation can be an effective tool to leverage your available funding. It is well documented that innovative companies are more profitable, and for organisations seeking social outcomes rather than profit, innovation similarly tends to significantly improve performance. We can work with you to define the impact you are interested in, where you might affect the greatest change in the ecosystem of social innovators, and how you can build a portfolio approach to investing in research and innovation.
Find the right partners
Are you unsure how to find and select the right partners to deliver the impact you aim to have?
Are you interested to test different funding mechanisms, for example innovation challenges, prizes or accelerators?
Drawing on over a decade of experience supporting and managing funds for a range of social impact and innovation funders, we can help you design and implement the most appropriate approaches to find and select the best ideas and programmes.
We can also help you review the landscape of solvers within a given problem space, broker partnerships, and carry out due diligence of potential partners’ organisational health, strategy, results and evidence.
Manage and support your portfolio
Do you have a social impact portfolio but little capacity to manage it and document its impact?
Have you invested in a range of promising programmes or innovative ideas but are missing a framework for evaluating and learning what social value has been created and where your investments should stop or pivot?
Do you want to offer tailored mentoring or coaching to your portfolio partners, ensuring they can access knowledge and tools to effectively and responsibly manage innovation processes?
We can help you manage your grant or social investment portfolio, tracking and reporting on its impact and advising you on what we are learning through the impact partnerships.
We can also advise you on how to monitor the progress and outcomes of your portfolio, designing flexible evaluation and learning frameworks that work for both you and your impact partners. We understand the importance of nuanced and adaptive monitoring and evaluation for research and innovation projects and can help you prioritise only the data that is truly valuable to your learning.
We also love working directly with social impact organisations and startups, and can support the impact of your funding through providing non-financial support in the form of mentoring, coaching and training for your impact partners.
Funding innovation
Investing in social impact research and innovation—through grants or other financial instruments—requires a deliberate and strategic approach. To manage risk and maximise chances of solving a certain set of problems, successful funders often take a ‘portfolio approach.’ Through this, they balance investments across different types of innovation—ranging from incremental improvements to transformative systems change—by assessing social return on investment across the entire portfolio.
Innovation funders have at their disposal a wide range of mechanisms they can use to find and support the best ideas. Some use Innovation Challenges or Prizes (see examples here and here), while others convene mission-based partnerships between solvers (example here) or simply directly approach exciting teams and ask them to pitch.
We can help you assess which mechanisms are right for your objectives, as well as explore which types of financing—for example grants, loans, equity investments or social impact bonds—may best support the outcomes you are looking for.
Experimental grant-making
A growing movement of funders are experimenting with more democratic and equitable ways of managing their resources, for example through participatory grantmaking (see examples here and here) or community-led programming in which the funder steps back from any direct influence over what or whom gets funded (see a recent toolkit for community-led innovation programming here).
Others focus on reducing the many human biases present in grant application reviews are trying more controversial mechanisms to promote better diversity in fund recipients by using randomisation—essentially, some degree of a lottery—in selecting winning proposals.
We can help you explore how your values and objectives align with various funding mechanisms, working closely with you to design and test tailored approaches that match your risk appetite and the outcomes you want to create.
