The culture of SJF Ventures empowers members of our team to identify new compelling investment themes and work on problems that matter to them. 

This led our firm to invest in new and sometimes unexpected sectors like supply chain, health, and GovTech. 

This team-driven approach has led SJF to impactful opportunities, sometimes in overlooked places — from Iron Sheepdog, a logistics platform reducing wasted miles in short-haul trucking, to Authorium, a platform for managing government procurement processes. 

This investment strategy has complicated the issue of impact reporting: how do you track and communicate the impact of portfolio companies with such varied missions and solutions?

As SJF approached its 25-year anniversary, we decided to reimagine our approach to our public impact reporting, culminating in the recent launch of our new Impact website. 

The first, $17 million Sustainable Jobs Fund was launched in 1999 to invest in growing companies with a focus on sustainability and quality employment. We rebranded to SJF Ventures in 2001, but continued and diversified our focus on delivering on ‘high growth, positive impact’ companies. We are now invested with 10X the capital, or $175 million, and looking to deepen our impacts.

Here’s what we changed, how we did it, and how we aim to continue improving our processes and transparency. 

Impact objectives

As a multi-theme fund, it can be difficult to quantify, compare and communicate impact across our portfolio. SJF invests in many different types of companies, both by sector and growth stage. In each of our six investment areas, our managing directors and teams develop their own theses as to why each sector is impactful, and what kinds of companies in each sector can deliver venture returns.

Because of this team-driven approach — rather than one established top-down by the fund’s founders — it can be difficult to report our impact as a firm. As we reflected on our upcoming 25-year anniversary, we conducted an exercise to define the “impact objectives” of each of our sectors: communicating the theory of change for each sector and the impact objectives our sector experts look for when they consider prospective investments.

Before defining our impact objectives, we might say that SJF Ventures invested in Health and Wellness, and that portfolio companies achieved results like “107,619 Patients enrolled in at-home monitoring programs.” This left out a crucial middle layer: how SJF helped the company to achieve those results, and what those results meant for our goals as a fund. The new impact objectives allow us to communicate the intended outcomes of our investment strategy, with portfolio data supporting progress towards these objectives.

Now, the impact indicators that our portfolio companies report on speak directly to how we are achieving our sector objectives. For example, we have invested in energy and climate mitigation strategies since our founding. To better articulate how SJF intends to make an impact in this sector, we defined the impact objectives for our Energy, Carbon, and Climate Resilience sector as “Accelerate the Transition to Clean Energy,” “Catalyze Emerging Solutions to Climate Change,” and “Improve Public Outcomes in a Changing Climate.” 

Our impact objectives give us a common language when discussing impact together in investment committee meetings, when collaborating with companies on their metrics for reporting, and when presenting impact to our Limited Partners and peers. While SJF collects standardized data around job quality and governance across our companies, impact is measured and communicated on a company-by-company basis with bespoke metrics. We have always felt impact data should be tailored, not standardized, because that is what is most significant and actionable to the companies themselves.

We work together with individual companies in each sector to map metrics back to these objectives and track progress over time. For example, our investment in PosiGen supports our objectives to accelerate the transition to clean energy and improve public outcomes in a changing climate. PosiGen collects and reports on data describing the number of solar installations and efficiency upgrades each year, and the communities benefiting from these projects. This data helps SJF understand the impact of our dollars on these objectives.

Impact dashboard

Our UpMetrics dashboards provide transparent and thorough data to our limited partners on all portfolio companies across our five funds But these dashboards are data-heavy and contain too much company information not appropriate for a public report. 

Public reports should have storytelling to accompany the data through case studies, company highlights, and qualitative data from stakeholders. These are important documents. A strong public report can drive thought leadership and inspire new ideas among peers.

But in recent years, impact reports have become long, glossy, resource-heavy exercises. 

Annual reports are also just that, annual — only demonstrating your impact at that single point in time. With our new Impact website, we envisioned a better way — a “living” report that we could update throughout the year as we have new impact data, insights, case studies, and exciting news to share. 

It is our hope that this is both a more engaging format, and one that allows us to better use our time and resources towards work with our portfolio companies.

Bending the curve

The next step SJF is working on to drive deeper impact is ‘bending the curve.’ The typical impact investment thesis posits that business and impact success are collinear and part of the DNA of a company, but can we drive deeper impact to “bend the curve?” 

This year, we focused our impact acceleration efforts on conducting a series of studies with impact measurement firm 60 Decibels. The goal of this work is to help our portfolio companies collect outcomes data, which can be a complicated and expensive exercise. The 60 Decibels data establishes a baseline, allowing companies to benchmark and augment impact over time.

In one of our studies with our portfolio company, Posigen, we sought to uncover how customers were using the money saved from switching to their solar product. It’s one thing to know and report on cost savings, but the real difference to customers is the impact of those savings. For Posigen, this data revealed a significant number of customers surveyed were using those savings to purchase basic needs like fuel and groceries.

The 60 Decibels surveys also enable SJF to proactively identify areas where portfolio companies may benefit from added support. You can read more about this work here and continue to follow our Impact website for updated case studies as we finalize this work.

We look forward to continuing to help build an impact venture capital industry that produces consistent venture returns and authentic, ever-increasing societal and environmental benefits.

David Kirkpatrick is the Managing Director and co-founder of SJF Ventures. Kelsey Jarret is SJF’s Director of Impact.