The Final Touches on a Great Experience

As our project progressed, we became focused on securing interviews with investors to better answer our central question of how investors consider ESG factors in their investment decisions. Additionally, we continued our desk research by analyzing more academic literature on ESG investing and looking at sustainability reports from many funds to identify trends in their ESG considerations. The biggest challenge we faced was securing investors for interviews. While we were able to speak to many professors who gave us their theoretical take on answering our questions we were concerned that we would not be able to speak with enough investors to start pulling out major trends to present to client.

We began to understand that the biggest constraint in our project was going to be time. While we reached out to dozens of investors of various categories as soon as we were able to, many offices took a long time to respond or did not respond at all. Furthermore, coordinating with their busy schedules left us little time to evaluate their answers after the interviews we had. Something our team did well was organizing our questions before we even started interviews. This ensured that any one team member can conduct an interview and it would be addressing consistent topics with each investor and allowed for more scheduling flexibility on our end. Ultimately, we were able to conduct about 20 interviews and provide what I believe are strong recommendation for our client’s work. If I were to do this process over again however I would have been clearer with our client about their expectations and needs for our interviews. While we presented and got approval for our interview plan prior to their start, overtime it became clear that our client was more interested in certain investor segments than others. If we had known that from the beginning we would have focused more on outreach to those segments and hopefully secured more interviews of interest to our client.

Once we completed a good number of interviews we began the process of looking over our research to pull out any trends and creating recommendation based off of them. An important part of this step was to really understand what our client’s business model was and what their future goals are. We tried to emphasize our client’s value add over their competitors and align that to the answers we got to how investors consider ESG factors. Ultimately, I believe we came up with a strong set of recommendations that will help our client grow their business. If we had more time to continue working on this project I would have liked to test our recommendations with some of the investors we spoke to. Specifically, I would have liked to re-interview some of them with an outline of how our client may now start going about pitching their services to see how they react. This would have allowed us to further refine our recommendations to meet the needs of investors.

Overall, I very much enjoyed the process of conducting a sustainable investing consulting project. I have learned things and gained skills, specifically on ESG reporting and ESG frameworks, that I have already used during job interviews and in my other classes. Working with a client also kept me more engaged in the research my team was doing than I would have been if I was doing that same research as part of a more theoretical class. As my team prepares for our final report to our client, I am excited to hear their feedback and close out this process with new knowledge gained and new friends made.