Guest Post: Mick Minard, REEF Reports

Visual Journalism and the Growth of Social Capital Markets

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, satisfy 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 (i.e., my profession) 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 practice
• 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

Early in 2011 I founded REEF Reports (Realizing the Ecosystem Effects of Finance) 
to document, communicate and publicize impact investing opportunities and successes worldwide by using the most powerful 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.

- Mick Minard, Strategic Communications Consultant