In 2008, the Rockefeller Foundation gathered a group of pioneering impact investors to identify and begin to address critical barriers to for-profit investing for social and environmental impact. These investors, many of whom became the founding members of the Global Impact Investing Network (GIIN) Investors’ Council, identified a lack of transparency and credibility in how funds define, track, and report the social and environmental performance of their capital. This scarcity of consistent credible non-financial performance information also prevented fair comparisons between impact investing opportunities, social and environmental performance benchmarks, and other aggregate industry analyses.
To address these challenges, The Rockefeller Foundation, Acumen Fund and B Lab initiated the Impact Reporting & Investment Standards (IRIS) initiative to create a common framework for defining and reporting the performance of impact capital. Acknowledging that significant progress had already been made in sectors like microfinance where standardized measures, data aggregation and rating tools had already been developed, the IRIS founders mandated that the IRIS initiative would build on these sector-specific efforts. As a result, the common language encompassed by the IRIS framework is designed to enable comparison and communication across the breadth of organizations that have social or environmental impact as a primary driver.
In late 2009, IRIS became an initiative of the GIIN, an industry group whose mission is to increase the scale and effectiveness of impact investing. One key part of this work is to develop critical infrastructure like IRIS which can legitimize impact investing and attract private capital to funds and businesses addressing entrenched global challenges.