Impact is firmly embedded along our entire investment cycle, from setting investments strategies, making and managing investments, to existing and learning from them. In doing so, our various investment and impact management frameworks and tools are building upon the impact norms, developed by the Impact Management Project.
For all our investments we consider their impact on people, as well as their impact on the respective system they seek to influence. This might be the respective investment ecosystem, or a particular social issue system that underpins and drives the pressing social issues we want to address.
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Impact on people
We consider the change we want to see in people’s lives for each of our investments. To do so we have adopted the Impact Management Project’s 5 dimensions of impact: What outcomes occur, who experiences them, and how much? What is the enterprise’s contribution beyond what would have happened anyway? What are the risks that impact doesn’t occur as expected?
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Impact on the broader system
We consider the impact on the broader “system” – the people and organisations, as well as the connections between them - for all our investments. By system we either refer to the investment ecosystem which we seek to build, or a particular social issues system which we seek to influence.
Key impact management pillars during portfolio management:
- Regular fund-specific impact reporting, based upon our Impact Canvas tool, which captures the specific impact thesis, measurement plan and KPIs for each investment.
- Annual Impact Conversations with our fund manager to discuss and influence impact performance (including impact risks) against thesis of our investments, state of underlying impact practice, and ESG performance.
- Annual Performance Committee to internally review performance and learnings of all our investments against their impact and system change thesis.
- Regular external impact reporting through our annual Schroder BSC Social Impact Trust Impact Report [insert link to SBSI Impact Report] and BSC’s external impact report (from 2023 onwards annually).
- Annual Market Systems Workshops to review progress and learnings against our broader Market System change goals.
Operating Principles for Impact Management
We are a signatory to the Operating Principles for Impact Management, and our latest Disclosure Statement from March 2024 provides a comprehensive summary description of our impact management approach and its alignment with the Impact Principles. Our latest independent Impact Verification reports high or advanced alignment against eight out of nine Principles. Previous disclosure statements can be found on our key documents page.
Disclosure statement 2024 Verification statement