At the intersection of private enterprise and social service delivery, a new generation of social entrepreneurs are launching viable ventures to address our most pressing social challenges across an array of geographies and sectors. A new investment class is rising to meet their needs, and there is a groundswell of interest across the globe to invest capital for both social and environmental impact in addition to a financial return.
As these worlds intertwine, relying on common bonds of urgency and purpose, this nascent relationship between social enterprise, impact investors and communities worldwide will require a communications strategy that captures and reports the entire spectrum of meaning and metrics to inform investment decisions, attract capital, satisfy stakeholders and influence policy.
At the end of 2010, I started to design a visual communications strategy that would capture and convey the real wealth and higher purpose of the impact investing sector: the creation of an enabling environment for people to enjoy long, healthy and creative lives. I explored the role of social sector capacity-building, strategic communications and documentary photography in the creation, growth and sustainability of social capital markets (estimated at around US$400 billion to US$1 trillion.) With the explosion of digital and social media, I wondered whether the transformative power of visual journalism could be a new business strategy for this emerging social movement and new asset class. Would I create new visibility and legitimacy for social enterprise and impact investing, drive awareness of issues and adoption of innovations, through a mobile, photojournalistic platform? If so, it would need to achieve the following:
- Inspire collective action and coordinated innovation, encourage alliances, build industry infrastructure
- Support the identification, capacity-building and scaling of market-ready and worthy social enterprises, and help to direct significant new capital flows to these enterprises
- Complement and reinforce emerging and established industry standards, systems and integrative reporting practices
- Capable of spanning boundaries and communicating across sectors, while appealing to a wide spectrum of key stakeholders with diverse financial expectations and social interests
- Translate social processes, complex connections, issues and technical topics to make them intelligible and compelling for non-specialized audiences
- Catalyze critical conversations about the nature of social change
Early in 2011 I founded REEF Reports (Realizing the Ecosystem Effects of Finance)
to document, communicate and publicize impact investing opportunities and successes worldwide by using two of the most powerful communication tools that humankind has devised: storytelling and photography. Paired together, these art forms have proven capable of facilitating and translating highly complex social processes, while expanding our consciousness, reflecting our times and testing our courage.
Living With Regard 
Crystal clear ideas, beautifully eloquent, yet profound, new and exciting. Reads like the opening of a required textbook for people dedicated to transforming communications, marketing and finance (in sum, the consumer part of business) for social change. It leaves one thinking whether – or if ever – this could in fact be the future of all consumer marketing and financial investing one day; that instead of selling/buying a brand detached from the producer and consuming something detached from consequences, instead of investing in a commodity without knowledge of how this money is making an impact on people’s lives and the environment, we could in fact be informed through stories instead of seduced or manipulated by messaging, to take actions everyday simply from our buying, selling, sharing, and investing in ideas and products whose entire value chain is committed to making a positive social impact on people’s lives and a zero impact on the Earth. I am so glad there are artists and businesswomen like you out there who are interested, and talented enough, to succeed in telling photographic media-savvy stories universal enough and yet individual enough to convince even the most detached, unconscious consumer or investor that they have a stake in creating impact.
The birth of your Reef Reports provides us with a virtual experience into a journalistic preview of current events needing our attention so that hand to hand, eye to eye, we can impact the social changes that you have stirred in our heart. What a gem!