Impact Value is a specialist consultancy firm, established in 2012.

We help impact investors identify how they can best use their capital to create positive social or environmental change.

We help all investors to consider how the management of social and environmental risk and impact can add and protect long-term value: an organisation that can articulate its strategy in terms of its impact will make more resilient decisions, and protect and enhance financial returns. We help businesses and social enterprises to clarify and enhance their impact.

We know that it is far from easy to do this well. Our approach and our recommendations are based on more than 25 years' experience of evaluating the impact of business and investment, learning what works through listening to people in organisations across the world, and putting practical solutions in place.

Helping businesses create impact

We help businesses develop strategies that deliver value for the business itself and also for wider society.

Impact Value helps social enterprises and commercial organisations to develop strategies to meet social and environmental challenges through their core business activities.

1) Create value through better understanding of impact
There is evidence to show that a company that manages and reports its wider impacts simply performs better across its operations because it has a better understanding of the issues affecting its customers, suppliers, employees and wider environment.

2) Identify opportunities for innovation and growth
For example, increasing pressure on resources creates market opportunities for products or processes that use resources more efficiently (detergents that require less water or houses that use less energy to run; or leasing models that ensure that resources are re-used).

3) Attract employees and customers
The most talented young people increasingly seek employment in organisations that have a clear strategy for creating a positive impact for society, so companies require this to attract the best employees. Customers may also prefer brands that can demonstrate this clear strategy for impact.

4) Be a part of the solution
Several of the enterprises that approach Impact Value have simply decided to take the lead in developing new approaches. They may not even know exactly how this will evolve, but they know that the private sector must take action.

Impact Value is currently working with several companies to explore how a more strategic approach to impact can generate value for themselves and for wider society.

Helping investors create impact

We work with investors on identifying how they can identify and select investments that combine their target financial returns with attractive social or environmental outcomes.

Investors create impacts on society and the environment at a number of different levels.

1) Impact through deciding which economic activities receive capital
This is determined by investors' strategies - in particular, the choice of sectors, regions or countries, and the choice of whether to invest in early-stage riskier ventures or later-stage ones.

2) Positive or negative impacts through policies and practices adopted in investments
This is determined by what investors do to manage social and environmental risks arising in the chosen sectors and geographies.

3) Impact on the long-term stability of the financial system as a whole
This depends on whether the investors are seeking a sustainable level of financial returns and making decisions with the long-term health of people, the environment and the economy in mind.

Impact Value works with investors and NGOs at all of these levels. For example, we -

a) work with impact investment funds - including development finance institutions and charitable foundations - to help them design their investment strategies so that they can maximise their impact, and to help them monitor and evaluate that impact to enable feedback for learning and improvement

b) work with investment managers to review the resilience of their portfolio in the light of social and environmental trends

c) work with private equity investors to help them put in place policies and processes to manage environmental, social and governance (ESG) issues and to articulate, measure and report on their impact

d) work with think-tanks and NGOs on addressing some of the wider systemic barriers to sustainability in the financial market

Designing frameworks for assessing impact

We help investors and businesses articulate, measure and monitor the impact they make through their activities. This may be to demonstrate the value they bring to the communities in which they operate and / or to inform their strategy and identify areas where they could achieve more.

Impact Value helps businesses and investors articulate, manage, measure, maximise and report on their impact.

Impact Value works with businesses, investors and NGOs to design frameworks for monitoring and evaluation, or for tracking and reporting on results. Through this, we help an organisation to describe the impact it wants to achieve and to define what resources and activities it will use to achieve the goals. We then help it to highlight the outputs and outcomes that will be important milestones on the journey. And we help to develop indicators that will demonstrate progress towards the goals and / or will enable feedback to ensure that the goals will be met as effectively as possible.

You can download a simple guidance document here.

Evaluating impact

We help organisations develop a programme for evaluating their activities so that they can test whether they are delivering the impacts they expect, can report robustly to stakeholders, and can learn what works and what doesn't.

Impact Value helps impact investment funds and development finance institutions to design evaluation plans which will gather evidence on their impact. These enable the organisations to understand better what works and what doesn't, and to report credibly to their stakeholders on their achievements and their lessons learned.

The nature of the evaluation plan depends on a number of factors, including the types of activity being undertaken, the way in which the organisation expects to create impact, the budget available for undertaking detailed evaluations of the organisation's activities and the evidence available from other sources. Impact Value's focus is on providing an evaluation plan which can generate sufficiently robust evidence in a practical way and at a proportionate cost.

Impact Value can also identify and provide suitably qualified staff to undertake evaluations.