Sarah Gelfand: Measuring impact investment performance with BlueMark

Good Future

In today’s episode we’ve got Sarah Gelfand on the show, she’s Managing Director of BlueMark, an impact verification business that was spun-out of consulting firm Tideline. She works with the world’s leading impact investors, to verify their impact results across both their management practices and their impact performance. And most recently she authored a report called ‘Raising the Bar’, which attempts to improve the quality of impact reports, which is vital, as there’s more being published than ever. Sarah has her finger on the pulse of leading practice in impact measurement and management. Her clients are some of the world’s leading impact players, and as a consultant she gets to ‘look under the hood’ of all sorts of investors that are all at different stages of their impact journey. She offers lots of great insights in this conversation, helping us understand how various impact frameworks fit together, the importance of being guided by a central strategy, as well as her hopes for the emergence of more reliable impact data to help us move beyond rhetoric and to drive better impact performance. This was the second episode in my series of discussions exploring the current state of Impact Measurement and Management, and how the harmonisation of leading frameworks represents a powerful inflection point. I’ll pull all of the key insights together into a special report that will be released in due time. To be sure you don’t miss it, sign up to my newsletter on my website www.johntreadgold.com that's where you’ll find the show notes, as well as more details about me and my business. Enjoy the episode!