Impact investing market on Twitter: influential users and communities

Abstract

The 2008 financial crisis unveiled the intrinsic failures of the financial system as we know it. As a consequence, impact investing started to receive increasing attention, as evidenced by the high market growth rates. The goal of impact investment is to generate social and environmental impact alongside a financial return. In this paper we identify the main players in the sector and how they interact and communicate with each other. We use Twitter as a proxy of the impact investing market, and analyze relevant tweets posted over a period of ten months. We apply network, contents and sentiment analysis on the acquired dataset.Our study shows that Twitter users exhibit favourable leaning (predominantly neutral or positive) towards impact investing. Retweet communities are decentralised and include users from a variety of sectors. Despite some basic common vocabulary used by all retweet communities identified, the vocabulary and the topics discussed by each community vary largely. We note that an additional effort should be made in raising awareness about the sector, especially by policymakers and media outlets. The role of investors and the academia is also discussed, as well as the emergence of hybrid business models within the sector and its connections to the tech industry. This paper extends our previous study, one of the first analyses of Twitter activities in the impact investing market.

Understanding drivers when investing for impact: an experimental study

“…Yet, the experiment reveals that showing the video had a positive impact in prompting socially oriented decisions, whereby signalling a wider scope for promoting and raising awareness about impact investing. This is confirmed by our logistic regressions and represents one of the most important findings of our research in line with recent studies on the same topic (Novak et al, 2018). Public administration bodies and civil society organisations have already started to put efforts in raising awareness about impact investment.…”

“…Our findings show that older people have a higher tendency to choose impact investment options than younger people. This is somewhat surprising given the current momentum of narratives such as "Millennials Will Bring Impact Investing Mainstream" (Emerson and Norcott, 2016), whereby young generations are expected to shift large capitals towards social causes, as well as prioritising socially meaningful careers and thus focus on social entrepreneurship (Novak et al, 2018;Stecker, 2014). Nevertheless, some studies have also shown that senior citizens are more prone to contribute to the common good (Molina et al, 2019), due to their willingness to leave a positive legacy behind.…”

“…This kind of initiatives, however, generated mixed results; more needs to be done not only by coordinating efforts between governments and international institutions but also by encouraging inter-sectorial collaborations between researchers, the private sector and practitioners from the social economy and the social enterprise world, who could work together to gather stronger evidence on the added value of impact investment and better communicate their main results through institutional channels. In this regard, media outlets are currently missing an opportunity, especially in light of the positive general attitude towards the topic in public narratives (Novak et al, 2018). Furthermore, impact investing is not currently part of the curriculum of finance degrees and is not part of the formal training of a financier or corporate investor.…”

“…The experiment also brought about the lingering scepticism about impact investing. Indeed, impact investing is still perceived by some as a suspicious hybrid where money-driven actors, philanthropists and practitioners (i.e., social entrepreneurs) are culturally polarised and still struggle to speak the same language (Novak et al, 2018). By way of example, one of the participantsand more specifically a participant from the expert poolreported feeling "almost angry" at the built-in reward mechanism of the game.…”

Impact investing and sustainable market transformations: The role of venture capital funds

“…One possible source to fill this financial gap is emerging in the investment spectrum between traditional investments and philanthropy, namely “impact investing” (Agrawal & Hockerts, 2019; Novak et al., 2018). The Global Impact Investing Network (GIIN, 2018) define impact investing as “investments made into companies, organizations, and funds with the intention to generate social and environmental impact alongside a financial return” (p. 1).…”