The ESG Initiative at the Wharton School

News

Impact Underperformance

Outlet: Impact Entrepreneur
Michael Brown on what impact underperformance looks like and why it matters

Tackling global social and environmental problems is hard. Yet, seven years of survey data collected by the Global Impact Investing Network (GIIN) show that impact investors report overwhelming success in their results. Since the first round of data collection in 2014, the proportion of impact investors reporting falling short of their impact expectations has hovered between only 1% and 3%. Given the known difficulty of measuring impact rigorously, how do we make sense of such confidence?