Where to Go to Learn What’s Working in Your industry?
Where do go to learn what’s working in your industry?
Deborah Keller is with Impact for Breakfast. It’s is an organization working to share best practices in impact investing with its nearly 4,000 members in 35 chapters around the globe. 70% of their members are impact investors. See if there’s a chapter near you or join the online group at https://lnkd.in/gzgCvNy3
Building the connective tissue in an ecosystem is so important but can be a thankless, long-haul job that can be difficult to monetize. Thankfully, Impact for Breakfast was founded and funded by Artha Impact (Rianta Capital) which has insisted on keeping it free to join.
Podcast Transcript
Jacob: [00:00:00] We’re here with Impact Stories and have Deborah Keller. Please introduce yourself.
Deborah: Thank you, Jacob. Thank you for having me. It’s such a pleasure to be here with you. My name is Deborah Keller and I’m the head of the Global Impact for Breakfast Network, which we started back in 2008. Impact for Breakfast is an initiative supported by Artha Impact, which is the impact investing arm of the Rianta Capital family office.
I’m based here in Switzerland, Zurich and I have been running IFB for five, or six years.
Jacob: Tell me a bit about your journey to get here. What brought you to this opportunity?
Deborah: We started it as something for us, a value add that we needed for when we were doing our first impact investments in the early days when it was called sustainable investing or social investing. And what always fascinated me is how people, when they come together, what they can achieve together when they collaborate.
And that’s something we learned early [00:01:00] on, when we started this network, it was that we came together with people that also were doing impact investments, but also were ready to learn and were in their very early days. And so we started partnering and collaborating with those people and we started learning from each other and co-invest with them.
And we shared so many experiences. So this network grew and grew in the past years, and still today that’s our DNA. We make sure people come together and collaborate and that’s something that still fascinates me and with the Impact for Breakfast, we have a very wide spectrum of topics that we cover. And I think that’s great because we want to be open to new possibilities, new ways of investing, new business models. We want to be, and we are a driver of cross-pollination, I think that’s something we really want to see out there.
Jacob: For someone who hasn’t heard of it or never experienced it, walk somebody through what an Impact for Breakfast experience is like.
Deborah: So, it really [00:02:00] depends whether you’re new to impact investing or if you’re an expert. And so these are both target groups and people that we want to have in the network. Within IFB, we keep our entry barriers low because we want to allow anybody who’s interested in learning to come and join us. And for those, the newbies of impact investing, they can join our online sessions, they can be part of the online sessions, and learn from experts who share their knowledge in these sessions around various topics.
And then we also have the experts that are, I would say probably the heart piece of our network. They are the ones coming together in local chapters over a breakfast, of course. At a breakfast event in the morning, they would come together and talk about topics, issues, or anything that is of interest in that local community, city, or country.
Today we’ve expanded to 35 chapters around the globe. That’s where people come together and meet and learn from each other and help each other building [00:03:00] impact spaces where there is no impact space yet. It can be in countries where the term doesn’t even exist and they come together there and learn from each other. And so, therefore, both are really important to us.
The newbies who want to learn and can learn from experts and can have access to all of our knowledge centers or anything that we have to share and the experts who are the drivers and who share the expertise in a transparent and open way. So people can learn and that’s something we really that is really important to us. We like to say that we are an informal network. People come together and we want to leave. They should feel comfortable discussing issues and topics that maybe in a different other space, they wouldn’t do. So we want to give them that space to speak openly about their experiences, what has worked, what hasn’t worked. And there, together, others can learn from them and maybe not make the same mistakes.
Jacob: About how many members would you say you have right now?
Deborah: Today, the network [00:04:00] consists of 3, 980 members, so close to 4, 000. It’s growing with every chapter that we are launching and we have four more chapters in the pipeline that will be hopefully launching this year.
Jacob: And if you had to say what a, what is a typical Impact for Breakfast member look like? Are there particular job types or characteristics that your membership tends to look like?
Deborah: We’re an investor-centric network. So 70% of our members are investors. I think we have a whole range of investors who are active in the sustainable finance, philanthropy, or the impact investing space. And then we also have consultants and service providers that also have lots of expertise and knowledge to share. And the smallest group are the observers and the students that are here to learn.
Jacob: It’s mostly primary investors talking with their peers, sharing best practices. How do you measure success for Impact for Breakfast? So there are obvious things [00:05:00] like growing the number of chapters and membership, but how do you know that you’re creating value for those people, like any success stories or ways to quantify that?
Deborah: We haven’t been doing a very good job at this but we receive informal or indirect feedback from our members and people who came to our network and hosted at an event or spoke at the event. And the investors who are interested are investing in those businesses. We have had investors who presented and found investors that they would co-invest with. We had speakers who found strong partners where they followed the same journey as they did.
But from this year on we’ll be a lot more specific with the Impact for Breakfast Network is having. We’ll try to capture that more, more systematically. And we’ll be doing this because we are gonna do more specific events, more systematic events for organizations that are [00:06:00] interested in doing a series. And there, it would be much easier when we work with the same organization to see how these events impact those organizations.
Jacob: What is the business model for this?
Deborah: Up to now, this network has been fully supported and funded by Rianta Capital, which is the family office behind Artha Impact and Impact for Breakfast. The family behind Rianta Capital has been supporting this network because they believe it is so important to have a network out there which shares knowledge and brings people together so they can build on the knowledge that is already there and help grow the impact space. So this has been the main driver in the past years, but in the meantime, we have moved into also helping organizations with the service packages, where we’ll support them to find the right people in the room because this network is so big.
It’s very easy for us [00:07:00] to make sure that the right people are in the room for those organizations and speakers that come in. And this, is because we want this to be a win-win for the organizations that come and speak and for the ones that will be in the room and come join events. And so what we do with organizations that have an interest in doing more than one event is building a strategic series of events for them. They have a channel where they can get the word out about the work that they do. And that’s something that we’ve started.
But I think what is really important to us is that we remain independent, 90% of these topics are shaped by our members. We think it’s very crucial to do so because every chapter has its own experts who understand what are the most pressing issues. What are the topics that are of interest? And therefore we wouldn’t be the right ones to decide the right topics for them to discuss.
Jacob: And so it’s very locally led and [00:08:00] guided in terms of what the topics are. How do you go about finding the local chapter managers?
Deborah: We’ve been very lucky, we don’t have to go actively look for them. They reach out to us. They’ve been members of our network for a while and have been at the Impact for Breakfast event in a different location and they just saw the value in having something similar. Those are the ones that reach out to us and ask us if they can start a chapter. And then we’ll find out with them, whether it’s something that makes sense. The most important bit for us when we onboard a new chapter and new chapter manager is that we want this network to be of value for those chapter managers as well.
This chapter is going to grow with them and they have a similar mind, so it has to be someone, a networker who enjoys creating and organizing those events. We’re helping our chapter manager with the whole back-end system where they can manage everything, so we try to keep [00:09:00] their work as small as possible. But of course, they still have to organize the logistics and do the invitations, but then in the end, it’s definitely has to be a value add for them otherwise it wouldn’t make sense.
Jacob: This is somewhat of a soapbox for me, there’s probably precious few that invest in the connective tissue as it were in the industry of building these networks because it takes a long time, it doesn’t necessarily monetize quickly. And yet if we want to reach these goals and we’re trying to tackle some of the world’s biggest challenges in impact investing, and yet we’re trying to do it in our own little silos on our own little islands separated, and yet we need collectively everyone’s input. It can be a thankless and uphill battle. What things have helped Impact for Breakfast succeed, where maybe others haven’t?
Deborah: I definitely do think it’s our informality and that we create events where people come and feel comfortable to speak and share [00:10:00] and not having the intention to, create a business model out of it. Because there were thoughts about how about we ask for a membership fee. But then we thought, why? Because there are so many networks out there where you pay thousands of dollars to be part of it and how do you know if it adds value to your work? So for us, it was always important to keep those entry barriers low and let people come and see whether this is beneficial to their work, or whether it’s beneficial in growing their network.
And I think that’s something we’ve been doing well. Our network grew by word of mouth only. We only started a LinkedIn profile a couple of years ago. The first, I would say probably six, seven years, it was just people coming to our events, telling their colleagues. The heartpiece of our events is the discussions. So we have people coming in that present, but then we open up, and then we have discussions, we have honest discussions, we have open discussions where people share [00:11:00] their expertise. When people sometimes even rant about certain situations and issues. So it’s a quiet dynamic dialogue going back and forth. And I think that makes it very friendly and a nice place to go to. And I think that’s our secret sauce.
Jacob: What’s your vision for this organization? Where do you want to see this go?
Deborah: I want this to be the biggest impact investing network that you can find, in number, but also in a sense, what it can do and what we can achieve when people come together and collaborate. Our world is changing quickly and there is so much innovation. There are so many new ways of doing things and there is so much to learn and I believe this is the right network where people can come and they can learn from each other.
And implement it into their business, and into the way they invest. And also share it and pass it on to others
Jacob: What are the biggest hurdles you face right now?
Deborah: I would say the biggest hurdle at the moment is there are so many topics. And so many [00:12:00] requests for sessions that it’s very difficult to manage all of them. And find out where it works for which location. I myself manage London, Zurich, and Geneva. These were the first chapters that we launched before we opened it up to other chapters and other chapter managers. And managing the events for them and at the same time, we are upgrading our system on the website.
So it becomes a bigger value added to our members. So we’ll have a resource center, people will be able to connect us online and yeah, the whole testing of the system is that it takes quite some time. But at the moment, yeah, we are very lucky it’s growing and we’re receiving great feedback and that gave so much energy back to us that we know that we are on the right path and we wanna grow this even further as much as we can.
Jacob: Most people that we’ve Interviewed on this podcast tend to say, they’re looking for capital, they’re fundraising. Sometimes it’s about attracting [00:13:00] talent or they’re looking for partners in certain regions or markets. You might be in a unique position, but if there is one thing that the community could benefit from most service to Impact for Breakfast, what is it that you’re most looking for right now?
Deborah: People that are interested in speaking at our events, people that have really cool businesses that they wanna talk about the experience that they wanna share. So everyone who’s ready to be open to give some insight into their day-to-day. Doesn’t even have to be something new or a new innovation or a new business model that we haven’t seen before.
We want the platform and Impact for Breakfast to be the one that speaks up and also, share about current issues where we should not be investing, and what we should keep our fingers away from because it is creating more damage than it is having a good impact.
Jacob: If someone is interested in learning more, what are the best places for them to find you online?
Deborah: You can find my LinkedIn and of course at our events [00:14:00] and our online events, you can join them. I’ll be hosting most of them. We’ll soon do an upgrade of our system and we’ll be building our resource center, reports, documents, and anything that could be of interest to our members will make sure that we’ve saved it in our system.
Jacob: Thank you so much for sharing your insights and wish you all the best success moving forward.
Deborah: Thank you very much, Jacob. And you’re already helping a lot. Thank you for the support.
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