This summer I was contacted by David Baumhauer, a student from the Otto Beisheim School of Management in Hamburg, who was researching his Bachelor thesis on the topic “Financing of Social Entrepreneurs” and had a few questions regarding betterplace.org. David, now studying for a Masters in Finance at Erasmus University Rotterdam, was kind enough to agree to write a blogpost about some of the interesting conclusions of his thesis.
Here is David writing about a subject we are deeply concerned about ourselves: How efficient is the Social Capital Market?
In this article I am writing on the question “How efficient is the social capital market?”. This question is highly relevant because an efficient social capital market would allocate capital to those organizations that earn the highest social return on capital without many losses due to market frictions. In an inefficient social capital market many resources are lost in finding good investments and investing in them and even organizations with excellent social results might struggle to get capital.
If we compare the capital market (and here, the stock exchange) with the social capital market (the market supplying money for social innovation and NGOs) with regards to their operational, informational and allocation efficiency, we observe a number of striking differences.
Many small organizations seek capital from many small givers
On the stock exchange only small transaction fees have to be paid to buy and sell securities. Costs to raise capital in the capital markets are estimated between 3-10% of the amount raised for private companies.
On the social capital market, these costs are estimated to be 22-43%. Furthermore, NPO executives spend 30-60% of their time with fundraising.[i] The reasons for these high costs lie in the fragmentation on both the capital providing and capital seeking sides. A study of The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and McKinsey&Company finds 450 organizations helping children in Portland, USA and 125 organizations supporting the homeless in San Francisco.[ii] In private industries, a high number of organizations often leads to consolidation and top Management is incentivized by stock options for mergers. These financial incentives do not exist in the social sector. Also, there are few matchmakers that exploit Merger Opportunities and help companies find suitable partners. These are some of the reasons why there is a low Merger rate in the social sector.[iii]
On the capital providing side, the majority of the capital comes from millions of single givers (9 million in Germany, 40 million in the USA). So in the end many small organizations are looking for capital from millions of single givers, an inefficient process.
Capital aggregation on both sides would help to make the investment process easier. This could happen through a consolidation of smaller NPOs on the capital seeking site and through intermediaries like venture philanthropy funds on the capital providing side. These intermediaries bundle capital supply and demand. They also share due diligence costs between many investors and can thereby work more efficiently.
Donation marketplaces and social stock exchanges can too play a special role as intermediaries. They reduce information costs and information asymmetries, for example by screening the NPOs that want to use the platform for their fundraising prior to listing them. BOVESPA (http://www.bovespasocial.org.br), a Brazilian “Social Stock Exchange” has only accepted 30 out of 1000 Projects in its first year. There are several other online donation platforms such as GlobalGiving, Give, Helpdirect, Justgiving, Charitynavigator and betterplace. Two projects try to create real stock exchanges for Social Enterprises: Recently the Rockefeller Foundation has given 500,000$ (360,000€) to develop the idea of a Social Stock Exchange in which shares of British For-Profit Social Ventures can be traded. The Genesis Institute also plans a Social Stock Exchange.
“A millionaire does not really care whether his money does good or not …”
The private capital market is so informational efficient that 75% of actively managed mutual funds underperform their benchmark index. That means that they cannot gain an advantage by reacting quickly to new information, because everybody else also does that and all information is reflected quickly in the market price. It is obvious that investors have every incentive to react quickly to news because they want to maximize their future payoffs and will try to allocate their funds such that they get the highest risk adjusted return on capital.
On the social capital market the informational efficiency is inhibited by the operational inefficiency: It is costly to obtain information about NPOs.
Furthermore, the incentive to get the highest social return on capital for private investors is not as obvious as for the investors on the stock exchange. This is particularly important, as the vast majority of funds is not given through intermediaries, but comes directly from private givers (75% or $229 billion in the US in 2007 and 90% or €3.3 billion in Germany in 2004).
Bernard Shaw argued back in 1896 that for private givers the incentive to achieve a high social return on capital does not even exist: „A millionaire does not really care whether his money does good or not, provided he finds his conscience eased and his social status improved by giving it away…“[iv]. Practical literature for NPOs also assumes that prestige motives exist and suggests that NPOs pay special attention to their biggest donors and honor them. Economic theory on the other hand firstly assumed that people only give for altruistic reasons. In 1989 James Andreoni came up with the impure altruism model, which says that people not only give for altruistic reasons, but also for a so called warm-glow effect. This warm-glow effect includes the improvement of his social status and the good feeling that one gets from giving.[v] Andreoni proves that this effect exists, because his model can explain donation patterns that cannot be explained with purely altruistic giving.
A study by Cunningham et al. from 2004 supports this impure altruism model by noting that private investors often do not care much about performance measurement and rather assume that “all giving is good”.[vi] If private givers do not pay attention to the performance of their investments, we cannot have an efficient social capital market. A solutions to this problem must be a change in paradigm from seeing the transfer of money to a social organization as a donation to seeing it as an investment that should yield a high social return on investment and which performance should be monitored. Again, intermediaries can play a role here. As many investors will lack the time to constantly monitor their investments, they can invest it via a venture philanthropy fund.
The lack of standardized performance measurements
On the stock exchange, the past performance of a company is easily observable from the financial statements of the company. Stocks are constantly monitored by analysts and the media who make projections about the future performance. If a company has performed poorly and the future prospects look bleak, then people will start selling its stock. An entrepreneur with a good idea on the other hand can get it recognized and will find investors that support him.
On the social capital market, it is very difficult to determine where the capital is allocated best because there are no standardized performance measurement methods. The performance cannot just be read of a balance sheet. There are several approaches to tackle this problem, for example the Social Return on Investment method developed by REDF (www.redf.org.). This method monetizes the cost savings to society that a certain project achieves and compares them to its costs.[vii] There also exist many other performance measurement tools, but none are universally applied and accepted and many NPOs are not using them at all, which makes it difficult for investors to compare investments.[viii] Solutions can again be achieved by Rating agencies and Venture Philanthropy Funds that develop and implement performance measurement methods.
Rating agencies provide standardized, comparable information about the performance of NPOs and reduce information costs for investors. Two European rating agencies are New Philanthropy Capital (www.philanthropycapital.org) in the UK and Bertelsmann Stiftung (www.bertelsmann-stiftung.de) in Germany.
Intermediaries can make the market more efficient
Concluding it can be said that the Social Capital Market today is likely not very efficient when compared to the stock exchange. However, in the past few years many intermediaries have emerged that play a key role in making the social capital market more efficient by reducing transaction costs through agglomerating supply and demand and reducing information asymmetries. Intermediaries can be banks and investment funds as well as pure information intermediaries like marketplaces and rating agencies. In developing economies, the existence and development of (financial) intermediaries has been an important factor for overall economic growth and in the social capital market they can play a similar role. In order to make these intermediaries succeed, there has to be a demand for the services of venture philanthropy funds, rating agencies and donation marketplaces. This demand has to come from private givers who want not only to give to ease their conscience, but also to achieve a high social return on investment and realize that they can best find these investments with the help of intermediaries. The recent public attention to the Social Entrepreneurship phenomenon will do its part to develop a more performance oriented, more efficient social capital market.
[i] Meehan, William F., Derek Kilmer, und Maisie O’Flanagan. „Investing in Society.“ Stanford Social Innovation Review 1, Nr. 4 (2004): 34-43.
[ii] The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation und McKinsey&Company. The Nonprofit Marketplace: Bridging the Information Gap in Philanthropy. 2008. www.givingmarketplaces.org/materials/whitepaper.pdf.
[iii] Cortez, Alexander, William Foster, und Katie Smith Milway. „Nonprofit M&A: More Than a Tool for Tough Times.“ The Bridgespan Group. February 2009. http://www.bridgespan.org/uploadedFiles/Homepage/Articles/Mergers_and_Acquisitions/091702-Nonprofit%20Mergers%20and%20Acquisitions.pdf.
[iv] Shaw, George B.. „Socialism for millionaries.“ In Essays in Fabian Socialism, von G.B. Shaw (Hrsg.). London (Neuauflage 1949): Constable, 1896.
[v] Andreoni, James. „Giving with Impure Altruism: Applications to Charity and Ricardian Equivalence.“ The Journal of Political Economy 97, Nr. 6 (1989): 1447-1458.
[vi] Cunningham, Katie, und Marc Ricks. „Why Measure? Nonprofits Use Metrics to Show that They Are Efficient. But What if Donors Don’t Care?“ Stanford Social Innovation Review Summer 2004 (2004): 44-51.
[vii] For a German application see Jahnke, Thomas. „SROI Kalkulation · kurze Zusammenfassung case study · enterprise 2001 - 2006.“ iq consult. 2007. http://www.iq-consult.com/files/enterprise_Zusammenfassung.pdf.
[viii] For an overview see Clark, Catherine H., William Rosenzweig, David Long, und Sara Olsen. Double Bottom Line Projekt Report: Assessing Social Impact in Double Bottom Line Ventures, Methods Catalog. 2004. http://www.impactalliance.org/file_download.php?location=S_U&filename=11767042041Clark_etal04_DBL_IA.pdf.