Strategy Development
Collaborating with clients to launch and strengthen impact investing products, strategies, and practices.
Optimizing Impact Strategies
Asset owners, allocators, managers, and market builders entering or becoming more active in impact investing face a number of common challenges:
Understanding
the Landscape
Synthesizing market data and intelligence on investable opportunities, client expectations, peer practices, and the competitive environment.
Aligning
Aspirations
Achieving alignment on what to call and how to communicate ESG and impact activities internally and externally.
Specifying
a Market Role
Carving out a differentiated market role, supported by strong impact practices that create value, mitigate risks, and ensure integrity.
To help address these challenges, we have developed several strategy development services that can be customized depending on the type of client and the client’s ultimate goals:
Asset
Managers
Design and co-create new investment funds and vehicles in targeted market sectors like community finance, social infrastructure, global health, and racial and gender equity.
Wealth Managers
From discovery through execution and reporting, create unified taxonomies, tools, and content to ensure authentic marketing and a seamless customer experience.
Asset
Owners
Facilitate decision-making for consideration of new impact investing mandates and deeper forms of ESG integration.
Impact Businesses
Co-develop launch strategies and advise on growth plans.
Field Builders,
Networks
Sponsor and conduct research, developing field-advancing thought leadership.
Asset Managers
Design and co-create new investment funds and vehicles in targeted market sectors like community finance, social infrastructure, global health, and racial and gender equity.
Wealth Managers
From discovery through execution and reporting, create unified taxonomies, tools, and content to ensure authentic marketing and a seamless customer experience.
Asset Owners
Facilitate decision-making for consideration of new impact investing mandates and deeper forms of ESG integration.
Impact Businesses
Co-develop launch strategies and advise on growth plans.
Field Builders, Networks
Sponsor and conduct research, developing field-advancing thought leadership.
Tideline’s Thought Leadership
Tideline has been an influential contributor to the growth of the impact investing field:
- Developed institutional impact investing mandates and funds.
- Created market infrastructure and standards.
- Provided practical approaches that can be executed with ease.
- Established new pathways to growth and sustainability for impact organizations.
- Elevated professionalism, transparency, and integrity in impact practice.
Tideline’s Impact Integrity Framework
When advising on fund formation, Tideline is guided by our framework for establishing a client’s impact integrity , which features three key pillars: Target Market (identifying the impact characteristics of the target market in which a fund is investing); Capabilities (developing the capabilities of the investor to deliver and demonstrate impact); and Positioning (advising on the appropriate positioning for the fund). When all three pillars are aligned, investors will significantly enhance their ability to achieve targeted impact, client satisfaction, and avoid accusations of impact washing. Once an impact fund is launched, Tideline is often retained as a provider of ongoing implementation services.
For each client assignment, Tideline’s strategic development services follow a tested sequence of activities: discovery and education in order to set priorities and identify organizational constraints and requirements, followed by customized market research, and finally the development and prioritization of client-specific solutions and operating plans.
CASE STUDY
UNITED NATIONS DEVELOPMENT PROGRAM
In 2018, the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) recognized the need to mobilize private capital for the achievement of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and reached out to Tideline to help identify catalytic ways to accelerate investment flows. Tideline led UNDP through an iterative design process that involved interviews with a broad range of investors and active engagement with UNDP bureaus and country offices around the world to better understand the key barriers that investors face when trying to allocate capital to the SDGs.
Tideline helped translate UNDP’s core strengths and capabilities into a functional business model designed to remove these investment barriers. The end result was SDG Impact, a global flagship UNDP initiative, that was launched in September 2018 by the UNDP Administrator at the UN General Assembly. Since its launch, SDG Impact has gone on to publish global standards and develop assurance mechanisms to bring confidence and clarity to investors seeking to advance progress toward the achievement of the SDGs.