Our impact on the wider financial system

We know that organisations do not exist in a vacuum and that significant change takes time and resource. While many of our partners have worked individually and collaboratively to improve how social investment works – many lack the time and resources to make change happen at pace. 

Our role has been to accelerate change by bringing people together to strengthen existing approaches and share new ones. 

Our partnership with Barrow Cadbury Trust, the Connect Fund, looked to strengthen the social investment market to better meet the needs of charities and social enterprises in England. This £6 million initiative has created valuable time and space for partners to co-create new networks, products and support. Its legacy is a multitude of approaches and projects that have improved how the social investment sector approaches language and terminology, data, and equity and diversity. 

Good Finance is a collaborative project to help improve access to information on social investment for charities and social enterprises. As a comprehensive resource hub, the site facilitates these organisations to learn more about social investment and test whether it is right for them. 

Access as a convener 

Sitting at the intersection between social investment, impact investing, and philanthropy Access plays a unique role in convening networks that bring together stakeholders from the private, public and philanthropic sectors. 

While this work is rarely conducted alone, we have supported: 

• The development of the Community Enterprise Growth Plan – a detailed plan to utilise dormant assets and ensure charities and social enterprises can access the appropriate forms of finance they need to thrive. The plan has support from a broad coalition including key players in the voluntary sector such as NCVO, ACEVO, ACF, CFG and NAVCA, funders such as Esmée Fairbairn, the Barrow Cadbury Trust and the Plunkett Foundation as well as business groups such as the British Chambers of Commerce, the Institute of Directors, and the Federation of Small Businesses.

   

• With Better Society Capital, the establishment of the Blended Finance Collective – a community run by and for blended finance practitioners working across developed and emerging markets. The Collective serves as a comprehensive resource hub for practitioners, aiming to foster collaboration, share learning, and facilitate coordinated efforts to grow interest and investment in the blended finance ecosystem. Since its inception, the Collective has hosted two annual conferences and three quarterly learning events, reaching 50-100 practitioners from across the UK domestic social investment and global development finance markets at each event. The Collective currently has 152 individual members from 129 organisations, across 18 countries, spanning Europe, North America, Africa, Asia, and Australia. Convening the Collective allows us to mobilise more capital by increasing understanding of blended finance structures and making it easier for other concessional and non-concessional investors to participate.

   

• With the School for Social Entrepreneurs and the Association of Charitable Foundations, the creation of the Enterprise Grants Taskforce - building the movement of enterprise grant-making, while highlighting the vital role enterprise has to play in developing resilience.

   

• Work to encourage other asset owners to align their investing with their impact and mission. This has included convening several organisations to increase coordination and information sharing, support for vital forums and training such as those organised by the Association of Charitable Foundations, the Eiris Foundation and the Impact Investing Institute. We've also supported the development of the Charity Investment Governance Principles.  

Mobilising

KPI 5: More public, private and philanthropic organisations are engaging with and funding charities and social enterprises through blended finance, enterprise grant making and responsible investment.

Our final KPI looks at whether we are successfully influencing others’ to engage with and fund similar work to our own, so that charities and social enterprises have more access to appropriate finance for blended finance and enterprise development, and so that more organisations’ invest their endowments for good. This matters because we cannot achieve our vision of an investment ecosystem that works for all charities and social enterprises by ourselves, we need others to champion and fund this work. 

This KPI has three metrics, with one being about engagement and attendance in the three working groups Access convenes or helps to convene (The Blended Finance Collective, Enterprise Grants Taskforce, and the Responsible Investment Network) which is currently scoring green. The second is how useful the attendees of these networks have found their participation, for which we are still to establish a baseline, but have awarded an interim RAG score of amber. 

The final metric is around how much funding is going into blended finance and enterprise development, and how much of their endowments foundations are investing responsibly, and will be measured every 3-4 years, as we would not expect major changes to funding annually. This currently has an interim rating of amber. 

Lydia Levy Director of Impact and Evaluation

Practical support

Singlify 

Singlify enables social investors to manage their entire investment portfolio, covering applications, assessments, loan scheduling and social impact reporting with a single software application. This allows them to focus on what they do best – making investments in charities and social enterprises and helping solve some of society’s biggest problems, rather than building the systems to support this invaluable work. They received £139,000  investmentvia the Connect Fund to develop, market and scale this software, which is now used widely across the social investment market. 

Good Finance

Good Finance is the go-to source of information on all things ‘social investment’. The Good Finance website has so far had more than 592,000 unique users, engaging with a range of interactive tools (such as the “Is it right for us?” diagnostic tool, cost of capital calculator and the outcome matrix), educational content and resources. One in three of these users goes on to visit investor websites through the directory, which has seen more than 189,000 unique users. Good Finance also hosts in-person and online thematic and geographic events, which have supported more than 3,500 people to demystify social investment. More than 200 participants have completed the e-learning programmes. Good Finance is jointly funded by Access - The Foundation for Social Investment, Better Society Capital and DCMS, with additional in-kind support provided by members of the steering group.

Knowledge and data 

Social Enterprise UK Knowledge Centre

The SEUK Knowledge Centre is a world-class source of evidence and insight on social enterprise. It brings together evidence compiled by Social Enterprise UK with wider sources of data, to make the UK’s most comprehensive source of information about social enterprise. It houses qualitative and quantitative information and will produce evidence for a range of audiences exploring key thematic areas of interest for social enterprises and their support ecosystem.

Diversity

Diversity Forum

The Diversity Forum was established to drive inclusive social investment in the UK, through the convening of sector-wide groups, commissioning research, and knowledge sharing. With support from the Connect Fund, the Diversity Fund has three sector-wide initiatives to improve diversity in social investment: the Diversity Working Group, the Diversity Champions Network, and the Diversity Training Group.