We improved our data on impact funds. Then we tracked the flow of capital.

When I was an LP, one of my many responsibilities was implementing an impact investment portfolio through various funds.

But with a very specific mandate, it was tough to find partners who were able to advance our mission.

I learned a few things from that assignment, one of them being that impact investing is not homogenous—every investor has a different idea of what they want to impact.

When I got to PitchBook in 2020, taking on a research role in part having to do with ESG and impact investing, I realized that while it was great that we were tagging funds for “seeking impact,” a person searching our platform would get a long list of funds needing to be whittled down.

If the user had a very specific impact mission, the vast majority of the list would be of no interest.

We needed to have a second tier of tagging, something that would allow users to filter down to the funds most likely to be in line with a particular investor’s chosen cause.

I was a little afraid that I’d need to come up with the categories we would use for tags—the world really doesn’t need another sustainable investing framework—but thankfully I stumbled across the GIIN’s IRIS+ framework, which had been built for investors to segment the landscape by categories of impact.

With this framework in hand, we were able to tag impact funds with the types of impact investments they were seeking to make. Through a lot of keyword searches and a lot of manual effort, we ended up with a unique data set: over 2,500 funds labeled as seeking impact, most of which have at least one IRIS+ category tag.

Once we had the data, we could start to work with it.

Pulling all of the funds and their impact category tags, plus their strategy (PE, VC, real assets, etc.) and geography, we were able to analyze where and when funds have been flowing to various types of impact.

While I’ve sliced and diced the data a number of different ways in the piece, clients of PitchBook are now able to do their own searches on our platform to try to identify investors that align with their personal definitions and goals for impact investing.

I have known LPs with impact assets to put to work, but they have labored to find funds that matched their mission. I also have known GPs with interesting impact strategies who have struggled to find the LPs who were looking for what they had to offer.

I hope that this new data set is able to help smooth the flow of capital between these investors.

For more data on our impact funds, download the research: Impact Investing Update