Learning Hub

Learning Hub

A Learning Hub for professional organisations and individuals

This Learning Hub is designed to help you learn more about impact investing either to meet your personal interest or to support your work with clients if you are a professional organisation looking to make impact part of your training courses and materials.

Institutional and retail clients are increasingly looking for impact to be integrated into their portfolios. These pages will help you build your knowledge and skills so that you can work with impact with confidence. They draw extensively on research and reports from leading organisations such as the Global Impact Investing Network, the Impact Management Project and the International Finance Corporation (IFC) as well as on our own resources.

Our Lead Expert and board member Will Goodhart explains more about our Learning Hub and why you should use it.

We are looking for your feedback

We welcome feedback about the resources listed here and about the overall structure of the Hub. We will update the resources list regularly and would be grateful for any suggestions for additional resources that we could include. If you have comments or suggestions, please send them to learning@impactinvest.org.uk so that they can be reviewed by the pro bono learning panel that has helped us to build these pages.

Read more about the framework our Learning Hub is based on Download

Modules

Introduction to impact investing

Everyone’s first question about impact investment is ‘so what is impact investing?’ This module defines impact investing, tells you how impact investing has developed, how it fits in with the rest of the investment world, what some of the challenges it faces are and what the key terms mean. Start here.

The purpose of impact investing

This is about the ‘why’ of impact investing. How do impact investors see the world and what are the frameworks that they work with to identify the impact of their investments? This module provides the answers, lists some of the challenges that impact investment sets out to address (as well as some of the constraints) and provides an important reminder to maintain a keen focus on the people benefiting from impact investing.

The impact investing market

Impact investing is developing and growing fast. Here you will learn about the current research on the size and shape of the market, who the investors and investees are and gain insight into some of the strategies that leading investors use.

Impact measurement, management and reporting

Managing impact is one of the core characteristics of impact investment – and you cannot manage what you cannot measure. This module takes you into the nuts and bolts of impact investment and leads you gently and logically through the steps you need to take to get it right. Standards, logic frameworks, theories of change? Easy peasy, lemon squeezy.

Impact investment thesis, strategy and portfolio management

The section on the purpose of impact addressed the importance of impact investing and the range of opportunities available to impact investment….

Impact investment sourcing and due diligence

Impact investing is different from traditional investment. It has dual objectives of both financial and impact returns. The types of investment that…