Making Better Business Decisions by Impact Measurement

By Screening For Good, Investors Can Plant Seeds for Future Wealth

Giving Compass' Take: • Writing for Be the Change, Oliver Russell's Russ Stoddard discusses how investors dedicated to social progress can bring return and stay true to their values. • How do these ideas fit into your own impact investing strategy? The message about focusing locally is one any socially-conscious entrepreneur can internalize. • More more advice, check out these four lessons from four decades of impact investing, via the MacArthur Foundation. As a Certified B Corporation and public benefit corporation, Oliver Russell makes impact investing a part of all we do, whether that means investing in our own company, fellow social enterprises, or NGOs in our community. Since Oliver Russell was founded in 1991, the company has donated more than $2 million to social enterprises and nonprofit causes in its community. Additionally, we partner with B1G1 to tie business outcomes to international social impact. For example, in 2017: Based on the number of e-newsletter signups, we fed a child in an Ethiopian nursery for 966 days. We landed five new clients this year, and in turn we provided five business loans to women in Africa. Book sales from “Rise Up  —  How to Build a Socially Conscious Business” meant we donated 234 children’s books to libraries in Cambodia. I don’t mention all of this to toot our horn but rather to show that impact investing means looking beyond traditional measures of financial success. Impact investors — whether corporate foundations or companies, family foundations, or individuals — make the world a better place by evaluating social and environmental returns as well as meeting or exceeding financial metrics. And you don’t have to be a big corporate behemoth to do it.