At a conceptual level, RS Group understands its aggregate performance to comprise of financial returns together with positive social and environmental impacts, all of which are “rolled up” into the singular concept of Total Portfolio performance.
In practice, however, any efforts to capture a single or integrated assessment of our total portfolio have proven to be significantly challenging for a number of reasons, which include:
1) Our strategy evolved over time affecting the ability to develop a unified performance metric framework from the outset;
2) The varied stages of organizational development of our investees and grantees; and
3) The lack of a universal measurement system.
Furthermore, some of the impact we are seeking, particularly in the area of “Advocacy” generally requires a longer time to appear than within the duration of a single grant.
While each of these factors has made our case for impact assessment to be a continuous work-in-progress, today we are comfortable operating within a broad framework that allows us to consider performance within each asset class of capital allocation and / or on a project-by-project basis across our grant portfolio. Therefore, we have adopted different metrics for evaluating performance and impact under different parts of the portfolio, as detailed in the following sections.
