Do you come from the financial sector? Do you have a genuine interest in impact? Did your firm put you in charge of a small fund and ask you to explore impact investing, hoping you would learn and figure things out along the way? If you feel confident in your ability to make good financial decisions – but wish you had had a chance to develop an instinct for impact honed by years of interaction with impact organizations – you’re not alone.

In 2017, we at the Center for Social Innovation examined the hiring preferences of impact funds and found that many fund managers believe that accumulating investing experience takes years but that people can learn about social impact quickly and easily. The result is that only 45% of the impact investors we studied had experience in social impact before starting to invest for impact.

As you figured out already, qualifying social investments requires a complete reframing of your traditional selection criteria and processes. Incorporating multidimensional impact considerations on top of the tradeoff between risk and return makes it difficult to engage with impact in a way that is rigorous and unbiased. You need ways to understand which of your investment options will generate the most impact and whether a well-intentioned social program can also have a negative impact on society.

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