This is the 6th bi-annual release of the Social Investment Deal Level Data and now captures over 3,200 commitments to invest into charities & social enterprises totalling £1.7bn.
The growth in the data set since the last release is mainly due to 2018 (H1) commitments to invest of £256m across 234 frontlines, with the remainder being Unity Trust Bank’s contribution of data for the last 5 years.
The majority of the 2018 investment activity by size is due to a handful of Charity Bonds (£157m) and bank lending (£70m) by Charity Bank, Unity Trust Bank & Triodos Bank. The remaining £30m of 2018 activity is spread across 169 frontlines with a median size of £50k, this includes £4m of loans through Access.
A core aim of this data set is that all charities and social enterprises are classified as having a primary outcome area and beneficiary group as per the Outcome Matrix as this will enable us to see where social investment is proving most appropriate.
Across the entire data set the top three outcome areas by count are employment, training & education; citizenship & community and arts, heritage sports & faith and by £sum the top three are housing & local facilities, conservation of the natural environment & employment, training & education. Obviously these differ depending on the contributor. On the ‘Who?’ tab you can hover over each of the contributors to see where their investments are focussed. In future iterations of this visualisation we hope to do trend analysis to see how the data set is changing through time.
Use the tableau below to explore the data set. Who has contributed to the deal level data? What outcome areas are they focussed on? See the ‘Who?’ tab. Which charities & social enterprises have received investment? What legal forms are they? See the ‘charities & social enterprises’ tab. Which areas of the UK have received investment? See the ‘Where?’ tab. What new deals are there? See the ‘When?’ tab.
It is worth nothing that there are still plenty of ‘nulls’ in this data set where data has not been provided. Reducing these nulls and providing unique identifiers (company numbers and/or charity numbers) will increase the usefulness of this dataset dramatically, for example, by enabling us to tap into charity commission data to establish what difference taking on investment has made to an organisations’ financial sustainability.
We hope you continue to find the Deal Level Data a useful resource whether you are a social investor or a social enterprise raising investment. The next release of the deal level data will be for the end of 2018, and will be published in the spring of 2019. The data set itself can be found here.
If you have any other ideas of how this dataset can be leveraged for greater use we’d love to hear them – please email Nick Benton at: NBenton@bigsocietycapital.com