By the second half of the semester, our team had built a relationship with our client and had done research on their deal making process, their impact measurement framework, the portfolio company, and an impact measurement tech company. Through our interviews and team reflections, we identified challenges faced by the client that ultimately led them to request the deliverables we were tasked to work on. We found that there was a clear disconnect between the investor’s priorities and the portfolio company’s vision when it came to impact measurement. There seemed to have been some communication challenges, which could have prevented the client from delivering on its promise to help create an impact measurement and evaluation process for the portfolio company.
In my opinion, identifying this disconnect helped our team find our purpose – to make recommendations that would helps strengthen the investor/investee relationship to ultimately measure and create long-term impact. Besides the required deliverables, our team decided to provide a toolkit that would help both parties better measure and evaluate impact via the existing framework. We also found ourselves making additional recommendations both on how the portfolio company would need to manage impact measurement collection and how our client, the investor, would need to help facilitate.
After spending a semester learning about impact measurement challenges of an impact fund and its portfolio company, one of the major takeaways I’ve learned about sustainable investing is that it really requires dedicated and empathetic people. It is difficult to balance the responsibilities of one’s position along with the need to measure and deliver on impact, whether it’s a partner in an impact fund or the founder of a startup. There are different pressures that arise (i.e. delivering on financial goals or actually keeping the startup alive) that compete with the need to measure impact. Maintaining balance and being understanding and open are key. Remaining dedicated to the vision, learning and evolving are also necessary.
Over the last several months, I’ve grown by picking up knowledge on sustainable business practices, regulations, markets, etc. I’ve practiced my project management, research, problem solving, relationship building, teamwork, and communication skills. I’ve learned how to be a consultant by diving into a brand new topic and working with a team to solve a problem in a matter of months. Most importantly, this project deepened my appreciation of impact investors and startup founders, as they’re not only facing the challenges of building new companies but they also have the added layer of building them sustainably.