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Two events this month should give believers in social finance a lift. On September 1st nearly 900 people, from institutional investors to social entrepreneurs, gathered in San Francisco for SoCap09, a conference dedicated to building "social capital markets". The event was abuzz with novel ideas such as a "social stock exchange" and "sustainable hedge funds".

And on September 25th, at the meeting of the Clinton Global Initiative in New York, the Global Impact Investing Network (GIIN) was due to be launched. This is, in effect, a commitment to create a new asset class - impact investing - yielding a financial return alongside a social or environmental benefit. The network's 20 or so members include big banks (Citigroup, Deutsche Bank, JPMorgan), philanthropic institutions (such as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation), the Acumen Fund, which invests charitable donations in firms supplying health care, clean water and so forth in Africa and India, and Generation Investment Management, a green-tinged fund manager co-founded by Al Gore.

GIIN and tonic.

The GIIN's goal is to share information on what works and what does not, to agree on common language and measures of performance, and to lobby for helpful laws and regulations. The creation of just such an organisation was a priority set out earlier this year in a report by the Monitor Institute, the research arm of Monitor, a firm of management consultants. If this group succeeds, the report argued, within five to ten years impact investing could grow to $500 billion, around 1% of the world's total assets under management in 2008.

Sir Ronald Cohen, Social Finance: "This reminds me of private equity in the early 1980s, just before it started to grow," he says. It was only when the disparate private-equity firms got together and formed a network that things really took off, not least because they began to standardise and speak with one voice to regulators about what the industry needed to thrive. He hopes the same will now be true of impact investing. As a participant in the GIIN puts it, the real test will be "whether people put their money where their mouth is. Will you see deals done together?"

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