A strategy consulting company founded in 2010 specializing in product and service design, marketing communications, and impact measurement and management. Clients are primarily social enterprises, impact investors, foundations, academic institutions, and international development organizations (projects, teams, and networks) working to design, support and/or scale early stage, income-generating opportunities for the rural poor. REEF begins each project engaging with and learning from our client's key constituents in order to best assess and further define an organization's mission, vision, values and performance. We use our findings to guide our clients toward proven strategies to create total, blended value through maximizing the performance of capital, products and services (nonprofit and for-profit) and networks to improve performance, attract investors, engage stakeholders, and influence policy. A list of Featured Clients.
If you would like more information regarding our consulting services, please contact us.
Visual Journalism and the Growth of Impact Investment Capital Markets
I wrote this piece to introduce my new company, REEF Reports, in June 2011. I share it here to provide context for its founding, which ultimately provided the first visual narrative framework and creative device for systematically transforming key messages, impact data and digital media into a compelling visual storyline to explain what value is created when investors invest and organizations act to pursue their social mission.
“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, engage 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
I founded REEF Reports(Realizing the Ecosystem Effects of Finance™) to document, assess and promote 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.”
*In 2020, the global impact investing market, which seeks to generate social and/or environmental benefits while delivering a financial return, is estimated at nearly $502 billion.
