Our impact on enterprises and people

We collect the data points below on our investments, to track and communicate our impact on the enterprises taking on social investment and the people benefiting. While we don't collect “number of people reached” consistently across our entire portfolio, we know from fund managers’ impact reports that our investments help create important outcome changes for large numbers of people:

We code our investments based on their alignment to the SDGs on a primary, secondary, and tertiary basis. This provides insight into the top three SDGs each investment is supporting; however, many investments will be targeting more than three SDGs and therefore will not always capture the full range. The visualisation below focuses on the primary SDG alignment. The primary SDGs that feature most dominantly by commitment value across our portfolio are:

Outcome areas

What outcome areas are social investment targeting?

Our investments are deployed across a range of social issues, or outcome areas. We tag our portfolio by outcome areas to understand the social issues and outcomes our investments are aiming to support and achieve. A large proportion of the portfolio will be delivering across multiple outcome areas. For this report and insight purposes, we have focused only on the primary outcome area as per the Outcomes Matrix.

Housing and local facilities has been the top primary outcome area over time, reflecting the ability to find alignment between the scale of need, amount of capital required and investor goals around social property through social investment. These investments cover a wide range of business models within social property, including supported housing addressing both short- and long- term need, affordable housing, community housing and residential services providing nursing home and children’s homes care.

By number of investments, 21% are delivering social impact within the education and work sector. These investments span social lending, impact venture and social outcomes contracts, and cover a wide range of business models including social enterprise recruitment agencies, EdTech initiatives, youth services and early years support.

User groups

Who is benefiting from social investment?

We tag our portfolio with user groups to understand the range of end-users that social investment is supporting, and to enable analysis of the wider context of the users an organisation is working with.

22% of enterprises that have received investment to date have targeted the “general population”. This category is selected when the primary user group is not a specific vulnerable and/or underserved group, however it will not capture individual underserved and/or vulnerable people or geographical areas that are underserved. The primary user groups of investment to date include people living in poverty and/or financial exclusion, people experiencing homelessness and older people. These user groups are supported across a wide range of business models, including affordable and accessible personal lending, short- and long-term transitional housing, and residential nursing and domiciliary care.

Business models

What business models are social investment supporting?

Our business model groups provide insight into how capital is allocated to drive financial returns and impact. The categories provide insight into the flow of investment into different business models. Our aim is to build out our business model insights to help influence investors and fund managers to design and deliver propositions that direct greater capital at scale to high-impact business models and develop a shared understanding of the relationship between financial and impact performance.

The most invested business model our investment has targeted is supported housing – short-term and transitional need. This is investment used to support the integrated provision of housing and support for those with short-term and transitional needs, such as people who are experiencing homelessness, people who are fleeing domestic violence, people with mental health conditions, those recovering from drug and alcohol addiction, and ex-offenders. This is based on the amount committed (£) and reflects the significant investments made within the social and affordable housing market system.

In 2024 we will be continuing to build out our business model analysis to further refine the models that we have identified and map our portfolio to share relevant insights with investors and fund managers. The aim of our business model analysis is to achieve an improved understanding of how business models drive impact and value. It will allow investors, fund managers and others to develop the appropriate investments products to effectively support social enterprises, charities and social purpose organisations, while delivering on the risk, return and impact preferences of different investor groups.

The case study below is an example of community-owned renewables, which describes investment used for community-owned utilities, including energy generation assets, that can provide affordable energy and/or other services (eg broadband) to the community, and a long-term income stream to be spent on community benefit initiatives

Geographical reach

Where does the investment go?

We have invested in over 3,500 enterprises to date, and the map below shows a selection that have received investment through the fund managers we work with and have shared their postcode data with us.

We map these investments by local authority, and use the index of multiple deprivation (IMD) to assess the relative deprivation of places where the organisations that have taken on social investment are based. This data can be reviewed by the number of investments or by the total value of those investments, which both show a similar pattern of distribution across IMD Quintile 1-5.

Although we don’t specifically set targets on the geographical reach of our investments apart from in our lending portfolio we use the IMD as one measure to help us determine whether social investment is reaching those most at need, and ensure our investment is wide-reaching across all regions of the UK. Looking ahead, we want to overlay alternative geographical data sets such as Census household deprivation indicators, to complement our IMD analysis and further understand where more localised deprivation hotspots may be overlooked.