The Social Capital Markets Conference 3.0

I just registered for this year’s Social Capital Markets Conference held in San Francisco in October. It is my favorite conference in the social innovation space for a number of reasons, and I think this year’s conference (the third) may just be even better.

The Social Capital Markets Conference brings together social entrepreneurs (both for-profit and nonprofit, although the latter have gotten less airtime in past years) and those who invest, or would like to, in them.  Last year it really felt as if the conference and the incredibly talented and visionary people attending it were at the beginning of something pretty amazing, new ways of providing sufficient capital to social solutions.

This year promises to go much broader and deeper exploring the financial tools and vehicles that social entrepreneurs need and how we create them. For starters, Sean Stannard-Stockton of Tactical Philanthropy is addressing the conference’s tendency in past years to downplay nonprofits and philanthropy at the conference by leading a new “Tactical Philanthropy Track” that will, as Sean has said:

Bring more donors and nonprofits to the “social capital markets table.” To that end, we’re building a series of panel sessions that examine the way in which philanthropy is an integrated part of the social capital markets, not a separate activity. Our sessions will give donors, nonprofits, investors and for-profits the opportunity to examine together the role that philanthropy plays in social capital markets.

Secondly, representatives from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation will be at the conference to discuss their decision to put $400 million behind their new Program Related Investments program, which I’ve discussed before as a watershed for the social capital market. The SoCap conference website explains what the Gates session will do:

Gates foundation will discuss the foundation’s PRI initiative including the rationale for charitable investment, the value of investment partners to leverage expertise and capital, and the foundation’s hopes for philanthropy in the social capital market. Remarks will be followed by a deep dive into their experience putting this PRI approach to work with Root Capital.

The Gates Foundation decision to put 1% of their capital into a fund to provide risk capital to social entrepreneurs has the potential to encourage other foundations to similarly experiment with new tools for investing in social entrepreneurs, which ultimately means more dollars in the social capital market.

It’s exciting to see what started three years ago as a small conference of less than 600 (a number achieved only at the last minute by a deluge of laid off investment bankers from the financial collapse) becoming arguably the most important conference in the social innovation space. I hope to see you there!

Tags: nonprofit, Philanthropy, Social Capital Markets conference, social entrepreneur, Social Investing, Tactical Philanthropy

Can Slow Money Launch an Austin Social Capital Market?

As I have written before, despite being the 3rd largest venture capital city in the country, Austin is slow to climb on the emerging social capital market bandwagon. Tremendous wealth and entrepreneurial expertise exist here, but there isn’t a lot of energy around creating a continuum of capital for social entrepreneurs. Perhaps that is about to change.

Slow Money is a national movement aimed at increasing the availability of risk capital to sustainable food-related social entrepreneurs. Austin recently established an affiliate of the movement here, Slow Money Austin, and their kick-off event is next month. Scott Collier, who has written on this blog before about mission-related investing and has been active in Austin’s venture capital community for years, is helping to lead this effort. I interviewed him about Slow Money Austin and what they hope to accomplish. Even if you don’t live in Austin, I think it is interesting to watch how one of America’s top 50 cities is responding to the increasing demand for a capital market for social entrepreneurs.

Nell: What is Slow Money Austin?

Scott: Slow Money Austin is a Central Texas affiliate of the national Slow Money Alliance focused on increasing the availability of risk capital to support the growth of sustainable food enterprises.

Nell: Why do you think Slow Money is a fit for Austin at this particular point in time?

Scott: Austin is one of several locations around the country where there is significant and growing interest in local food sources, organic farming that is better for people and planet, and sustainable food businesses that can provide much needed jobs and natural food alternatives. Slow Money is important to these businesses as they cannot grow to serve the increasing demand unless they have access to capital, especially patient risk capital that invests in partnership with food system entrepreneurs.

Nell: As part of a national movement, how will Slow Money Austin differ from other Slow Money organizations around the country?

Scott: Oh, I imagine we will find ways to make our Slow Money activities weirder than others. But seriously, Austin has such a national reputation for a healthy, entrepreneurial and well-educated population that I think it is obvious we should be national leaders in this process. Maybe it is because we are home to Whole Foods, the best entrepreneurial success story in the health food industry, or maybe it is because Austinites value community, health and a connection to nature like few other places in the country, but whatever the reason, this could be the start of a major new investment and entrepreneurship sector for Austin.

Nell: Your kick-off is in April, what do you hope to get out of this event?

Scott: The main objective is to get the Austin investment and entrepreneurial communities talking about the local and sustainable food sector in a serious way. The food industry, at over $600 billion, is a big part of the U.S. economy and it has a huge impact on hot-button issues like healthcare costs, carbon footprint and environmental health. With Slow Money, we want to awaken entrepreneurs and their funding sources to the great opportunity we have to use the power of free enterprise to tackle these major issues of our time.

Nell: What happens after the event? Where does Slow Money Austin go from there?

Scott: Great question. We are hoping to awaken some regional leaders to the opportunity with this event and after the event we would like to see ongoing events and investment activities proliferate that continue to build sustainable food enterprises. I like to draw a parallel to the efforts 20 years ago to bring attention to the opportunities for Austin entrepreneurs and investors to build technology businesses. As Texas struggled to come out of a dismal recession, thought leaders in this region launched the Austin Technology Incubator, The Capital Network, the Austin Technology Council and held events and venture conferences, all of which allowed Austin to claim a solid portion of the growth in the then-emerging tech sector. Cities all over the U.S. are still coming to Austin asking how we managed to pull that off. Well, hopefully this event will trigger some similar thinking as regional leaders see opportunity to create sustainable economic welfare in a large and growing sector: the sustainable foods market where margins and growth rates are high, but market penetration, at only about 3 percent, leaves tremendous room for further growth.

Nell: I’m fascinated by the funding piece of this. Is one of your goals to create a fund for sustainable food-related entrepreneurs in Austin? And if so, how does that fund work, how big is it, how are investments made, what do the investments look like?

Scott: I would again point to the example of 20 years ago and say it is not about creating a single fund to answer the opportunity. Instead, it is about creating a continuum of angel and fund investors and a support network of legal and other services that can support ventures ranging from dozens of small farms that want to bootstrap healthy lifestyle businesses all the way to scalable production, processing or distribution companies that can produce strong returns and substantial social benefits. What the funding for these business should look like varies from simple equity or unsecured debt investments of tens of thousands of dollars to larger amounts coming from investment firms managing tens of millions. Considering the scale of the opportunity across the country, it is not hard to see dozens of funds emerge managing amount of $10 million to hundreds of millions. This is pretty much what has happened in the Cleantech sector, which 10 years ago was hardly a sector at all and now accounts for about a fourth of the $20 billion in venture capital that is invested in a year’s time. Of course I think there is room in Austin for a couple of funds especially focused on Texas, and I would hope that some of the existing venture and private equity firms would allocate some attention to the sector.

Nell: How do you think such a fund or funds will fit into Austin’s current “emerging” social capital market?

Scott: That raises a very important distinction that will be made in Slow Money activities. The book that Woody Tasch wrote, called Inquiries into the Nature of Slow Money, addresses this in a more comprehensive way, but in a nutshell, Slow Money investors will mostly be investors that are seeking a financial return as well as a social impact. This raises the potential for the sustainable food sector to be a major target for philanthropists and private foundations as they launch Program Related or Mission Related Investment practices deploying funds to generate not only a financial return but also a positive impact to human health, environmental and animal well-being, and employment opportunities. A dramatic example of such fresh investment thinking is the Gates Foundation’s recent move to deploy $400 million into such impact investments. While this represents just 1% of Gates Foundation corpus, imagine the impact that could result if the other $500 billion or so of foundation capital in America invested with similar expectations. We would see the deployment of $5 billion of investment capital seeking positive social impact and a financial return of capital, thus creating a sustainable, perpetual virtuous cycle.

Nell: Besides you, who is behind bringing Slow Money to Austin?

Scott: We have great underwriting sponsors in Whole Foods Market, a global leader in the healthy and sustainable food sector, and Barr Mansion, one of the country’s first USDA Certified Organic events facilities, where we will be holding an investor-focused local food dinner April 22nd. And of course we have great partners in the Sustainable Food Center and the City of Austin, who will host the Showcase event on the 21st in our own LEED Gold-certified City Hall. We have great support from Austin Ventures, The RGK Center for Philanthropy and Community Service, Greenling, Dai Due Austin, and too many others to name here. And of course we will have Woody Tasch representing the national Slow Money Alliance in attendance to kick things off. It should be an interesting discussion, and an amazing dinner! Sign up at www.slowmoneyaustin.org.

Tags: Austin, Austin Technology Council, Austin Technology Incubator, Austin Ventures, Dai Due Austin, Gates Foundation, Greenling, RGK Center for Philanthropy, Slow Money, social capital market, Texas, The Capital Network, Whole Foods, Woody Tasch

A Watershed for the Social Capital Market?

One of the sessions of the RISE Social Entrepreneurship track was a panel of investors who fund social entrepreneurs (both nonprofit and for-profit).  One of the panelists was Scott Collier, Managing Director of Triton Ventures.  Scott has been a venture capital investor since 1991, serves on the board of the Entrepreneurs Foundation of Central Texas, and is working to engage Austin’s funding community in social innovation.  In the RISE panel Scott was on, a conversation began around mission-related investing, the missed opportunity currently facing foundations, and how a new move by the Gates Foundation may be opening up a whole new pool of funds to social entrepreneurs.  I asked him to write a post on this. It follows here.

I was recently fortunate to be on a RISE panel with a great mix of entrepreneurs and venture investors turned philanthropists, private foundation founders and social investors, all talking about investment in social enterprises.  The discussion emphasized the grant-making functions of the foundations represented on the panel and the exciting ventures that these grants were supporting. However, as often happens, there was no discussion about the potential for social impact investing by the investment functions of these organizations if they were to allocate a portion of their investment capital to activities that could produce both a financial return and a social impact.

I mentioned that this seemed to be a missed opportunity since the investment function of U.S. foundations manages about $550 billion whereas the grant-making function manages a much smaller amount: about $45 billion a year.  This would seem to imply that small program-related or mission-related investment allocations out of the $550 billion under management could represent much greater impact investing potential than would similar allocations of grant funds.  I also mentioned a cautionary tale as revealed in an LA Times article in 2007, where it was pointed out that the Gates Foundation, the world’s largest private foundation, was investing for a financial return in companies whose business practices were causing harm to individuals that were at the same time receiving benefits from NGOs supported by Gates Foundation grant funding.  Given that investment dollars comprise such a much larger sum, such returns-only investment practices could be undermining the value of grants, resulting in questionable net positive impact if viewed holistically.

What I failed to add to this conundrum is that the Gates Foundation has now recognized the opportunity to be a thought leader in making social enterprise investments out of their investment capital.  Below is an excerpt from the Gates Foundation website explaining features of their pilot $400 million PRI initiative.

Q. What is the [Gates] foundation’s new approach to Program-Related Investments?
A. We are working with a range of partners to use Program-Related Investments (PRIs) to deepen the impact of our work. We believe that investments are the right instruments to use in situations in which our program strategies are best served by partnering with revenue-generating enterprises, such as NGOs, financial institutions or companies. These entities may not be able to access investment capital from the private markets because the markets or entities that serve the poor may be perceived as too risky or costly to serve, or investors don’t have good information to assess the opportunities. By providing investment capital directly or by reducing risk to investors, we can help our partners access the capital they need to grow and demonstrate to the market that financially viable opportunities exist that serve the needs of poor or otherwise disadvantaged persons.  We know we can’t solve all problems with these types of investments – grant-making remains critical for those sectors that can never generate revenues or be addressed by market forces.

We have established a pilot program with an envelope of $400 million to invest in a range of investment opportunities. The capital for PRI investments or guarantees will be provided by this special $400M pool which will be managed by the CFO’s office of the foundation. Out of this pool, we will invest in PRIs that directly and meaningfully contribute to the achievement of the foundation’s charitable purposes.

Q. What types of investments will the foundation do?
A. We will evaluate a full range of investment opportunities that could include:

• Debt investments such as loans to NGOs, financial institutions or companies;
• Equity investments such as investments in venture capital funds or (less commonly) purchases of shares in companies;
• Guaranty investments such as bond back-stops, credit guarantees, or insurance.
• Any PRI opportunity must closely align with our program strategies, from increasing financing for agricultural smallholders in Africa, to supporting charter school facilities expansion, to increasing investment in global health technologies.

I spoke with a colleague who is close to Gates Foundation CFO Alex Friedman, who launched this PRI program, and he told me that a key part of the pilot launch was to organize a new group whose financial returns would not impact the performance objectives of the office of the CIO.  This was intended to free the new PRI group to focus more on social return than on financial return.

It is certainly exciting news that this $400 million, representing roughly 1% of the Gates Foundation’s capital under management, is now available for both financial and social return when invested in partnership with social entrepreneurs.  However, what may be even more exciting is that the intention of the move is to encourage other private foundations to do likewise and for Gates to thus be a catalyst for multiples of the $400 million to show up in the market as risk capital for social enterprises.  Could this be the beginning of large pools of capital available for direct impact investing, social venture funds and private equity funds, and the creation of a true continuum of capital availability in what is today a very nascent social capital market?

Tags: Entrepreneurs Foundation of Central Texas, Gates Foundation, Mission-Related Investing, PRIs, RISE, Scott Collier, social entrepreneurs, Triton Ventures

Can PRIs Support Fundraising and Capacity Building?

Lucy Bernholz is hosting a great conversation on her Blueprint Research and Design website called “What Capital When?” As part of their work with the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation in their Digital Media & Learning initiative, Blueprint is hosting this online conversation around the theories and strategies of program-related and mission investing to advance knowledge and research in the field. They asked that I do a guest post on using PRIs (program related investments) to improve the fundraising effectiveness of nonprofit organizations. Below is that post. You can also read the post on their What Capital When site here, and you can read the whole series here.

I think there is a tremendous opportunity that most foundations and nonprofits are missing.  PRIs (program-related investments) are an under-used tool that could provide much needed capital for nonprofits to transform how they finance social impact.

PRIs are loans that foundations make to nonprofits at low, or no interest.  At the end of the loan period (typically 3-7 years) the loan is repaid, or forgiven.  PRIs are usually used for capital projects or land purchases in the nonprofit world.  But they could also be used to increase the fundraising capacity of a nonprofit organization, through increased fundraising knowledge, planning, tools and staffing.  The current economic climate seems like the perfect opportunity for this new use of PRIs when foundations are trying to hold on to their dwindling corpus while maintaining their past level of community support.

A nonprofit could use a PRI to improve their fundraising infrastructure in several ways:

• Create a strategic development plan. Many nonprofits don’t have the expertise or time to put together a strategy for how they will bring money in the door.  With funding to hire an outside consultant to put together such a plan, the nonprofit would have a much better chance of increasing their fundraising revenue.
• Get fundraising training for their staff and board. If a nonprofit staff and board have the tools and expertise for successfully raising money, they will be more likely to do so.
• Hire a seasoned Development Director. Many nonprofit organizations can only afford to pay the bare minimum for a Development Director, which means that they are often forced to hire someone with little experience who must learn on the job.  If instead they had enough funding to pay a market rate salary for a seasoned fundraiser, they could hit the ground running, increasing the likelihood of fundraising success.
• Purchase a new donor database. A key element to success in individual donor fundraising is an organization’s ability to capture and use data about donors and prospects.  A good donor database makes this effort easier and more successful.
• Upgrade their website, email marketing, social media efforts. As direct mail appeals (a nonprofit fundraiser’s traditional standby) continues to become less and less effective, nonprofits need to move effectively into the online world.  Funds for technology upgrades and staff could help them do this.
• Launch a major gifts campaign. The vast majority of private funding in the nonprofit sector comes from individuals (80+%), so to stay competitive nonprofits need to move into the world of major gift solicitation.  But that takes expertise, staff, collateral and other infrastructure elements.

These are just a few examples of how nonprofits could make investments to strengthen their fundraising efforts. But currently it is difficult to find funding to support things like this.

But a PRI could provide an initial investment that sets the nonprofit on a path toward more diversified, more sustainable fundraising for the social impact they are working to create.

There are tremendous benefits to a PRI program like this.  First, for the foundation:

• Increases their ability to meet past levels of giving, despite any losses they might have found in the market, because the loaned money will eventually come back to them.
• Encourages their nonprofit grantees to be proactive in creating fundraising streams that will make them more sustainable.  Thus, increasing the likelihood that their nonprofit grantees a) won’t have to come back to them year after year for ongoing support and b) will become more sustainable and thus achieve greater social impact.
• Stretches their capacity-building dollars further. Because PRI money eventually comes back to the foundation, they can increase their level of impact by helping more nonprofits improve their capacity than they could with grants alone.
• Increases the level of accountability among nonprofit recipients because of the expectation of repayment.

And second, for the nonprofit:

• More diversified and sustainable fundraising streams.
• Increased fundraising knowledge and experience.
• Increased ability to work towards social impact.

Although PRIs used in this new way seems, at least to me, to be an obvious win-win, very few foundations are doing it.  PRIs in general are used (according to the Foundation Center) by only a few hundred of the thousands of grantmaking foundations in the country.  And I know of only one example of a foundation using a PRI to upgrade the fundraisng capacity of a nonprofit (the KDK Harman Foundation in Austin just launched a program like this last Fall, but does not yet have any participants).

So what is holding foundations back from launching a PRI program like this?  A number of things:

1. Nonprofits lack the expertise to put a plan together and pitch it to foundations. This is where Social Velocity comes in to help nonprofits create a plan to upgrade their revenue function and pitch that plan to foundations and other funders.
2. Most foundations  have an aversion to capacity building funding and prefer that their money go to direct program service.  However, as more nonprofits can demonstrate to funders that capacity building actually results in even more impact, this aversion can be alleviated.
3. Foundations lack awareness of or experience with PRIs.  However, this is changing, especially in the last year when the poor economy has made foundations increasingly interested in finding alternative ways to maintain community investment levels.
4. Foundations that are experienced with PRIs are not aware of using them to improve a nonprofit’s fundraising function.

So there is a disconnect.  But I am optimistic that as nonprofits learn to put a plan together to upgrade their fundraising function and articulate to funders how PRI’s could finance it, more examples of this new use of PRIs will surface.

Tags: Blueprint Research and Design, Development, Foundation Center, Fundraising, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, KDK Harman Foundation, Lucy Bernholz, nonprofit, PRIs, program-related investments, What Capital When