Social Impact Investing

SOCIAL IMPACT INVESTMENT: BUILDING THE EVIDENCE BASE
Figure 6.1. Social enterprise in UK surveys
Note: DTI stands for Department for Trade and Industry. In 2002 DTI defined social enterprise as “a business with primarily social
objectives, whose surpluses are principally reinvested for that purpose in the business or in the community, rather than being driven
by the need to maximise profit for shareholders and owners” (DTI, 2002). ASBS stands for the Annual Small Business Surveys where
questions were added by DTI in order to assess the percentage of social enterprises in mainstream businesses. NSTSO is the
National Survey of Third Sector Organisations. Please also refer to ECOTEC (2003) and ITF (2005).
Source: Teasdale et al. (2013). © 2013 The Author(s). Published by Taylor & Francis is licensed under
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/.
6.21 Third, most of the information available on the demand side provides general demographic
information on organisations that may require SII funding, but information on actual financing needs is
scarce. Social enterprises do not necessarily disclose the relevant financial information needed to
understand whether pressing financing needs exist. Therefore, information available is usually limited to a
sample of firms for which financial information is available (e.g. Unicredit Foundation, 2012) or based on
surveys that specifically ask for financing needs. In order to derive effective SII demand, it is necessary to
look at how much financing delivery organisations need. Further efforts to collect data on financing
constraints of social enterprises or information that allows for the estimation of the underlying financing
needs (e.g. detailed financial information on social enterprises) are still needed.
6.3.2. Supply-side data
6.22 While not much data is available on effective supply of SII financing, except that obtained from
surveys, investor platforms and transaction data sources, different data sources exist that provide
information on potential pools of capital that could be deployed — Section 6.2 discusses the distinction
between data on potential and effective SII activity. Also, SII supply forecasting exercises are increasingly
common, but require strong assumptions such as the percentage of assets that may be committed to SII. As
mentioned before, sources of data that allow measuring effective supply are likely to be different from
those used for potential supply and forecasting.
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