The Revisioning Value 2011 conference (REVV) held in Portland, OR on March 7 and 8 provided yet another excellent opportunity for those interested in social entrepreneurship and social finance to come together. This is the second annual REVV conference; both have been hosted by Springboard Innovations, a non-profit in Portland developing a social entrepreneurial ecosystem in order to catalyze local social innovation. This year, the conference both continued and broadened last year’s focus on social finance.

Amy Pearl, director of Springboard, laid out three themes, or what she referred to as “three I’s,” for REVV 2011:

1. Integration from social innovation to enterprises that increase both social and economic wealth;
2. Intersection of cross disciplines such as entrepreneurship, finance, design thinking, and engineering for solving problems; and
3. Developing local and national ecosystems to nurture and promote innovators that pursue the previous two I’s.

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Anyone keeping up with the discussion around designing metrics for social/environmental impacts knows of attempts to standardize measurement of outcomes (for example, through IRIS) and evaluate or rate companies or even investment funds (such as GIIRS and B Corporation). These are important, cornerstone achievements of the impact investing movement. What one will generally not find, however, is mention of measuring and evaluating the risks of social/environmental impacts to blended returns. This is despite the fact that finance based on blended value will ultimately require appropriate risk measurement.
 
Consider a blended value investor looking for companies with lower carbon footprints to invest in, who finds that one company is consistently at 20% below its industry average, while another company is also at 20% below industry average but with significantly greater variability from year to year. Should these differences matter? How about if company A made a consistent social impact in its community, while company B made similar impacts on average that much more closely followed the ups and downs of the local, regional, or national economies?

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