Webinar recording: What is social investment now and what does the landscape look like?

In our first social investment roundtable, brought to you by Mark Salway, Moore Kingston Smith Fundraising & Management and Jim Clifford OBE, CEO and Founder of Sonnet CIC, and guest panelists Alexander Hoare, Golden Bottle Trust and Holly Piper, Fair4All Finance, discuss what social investment is like now and how the landscape is changing.

Some things we learned:

• Wealth managers and fund managers wanting to go on the social investment journey should try! They need to become an enabler of that rather than standing in the way, and the forward-thinking ones are shining out already.
• We need to keep people and social purpose organisations at the heart of things.
• An earlier assumption amongst some that investment yields are automatically lower in social investment than in general markets no longer holds good (if it ever did). Social and environmental investments have a sustainability and interest that gives them an important place in a ‘normal’ balanced portfolio.
• Relationship between funder and funded is key; good communication and alignment if interest and values go with and underpin this.
• The pandemic has meant that investors will need to ride this storm out before they can see the real lay of the land; they need to continue to be patient and supportive investors; they also need to be ready to reappraise the nature and range of their support as investees emerge into a different new world.
• Timescales and horizons are changing, with the traditional five-to-seven-year investment terms still existing, but a demand on the part of both investors and investees for longer-term investment.
• Social investment is being used to help charities survive and re-imagine themselves.

Next roundtable

The next roundtable in the series ‘The case for change: business models that fit social finance and social investment’, is on 20 July, 6pm-7pm. You can register here.

Further details of the roundtable series can be found at Social Investment Roundtable Discussion Series | LinkedIn.

As we work through the roundtable series, we aim to cover all chapters of our book: Demystifying Social Finance and Social Investment | Taylor & Francis Group (taylorfrancis.com).

To discuss anything about social investment or this series, please contact Mark directly.