In 2023, the Intentional Endowments Network (IEN) completed a successful pilot to test the Endowment Impact Benchmark (EIB) – a new assessment, rating, and benchmarking framework that enables endowments to earn recognition for their progress on sustainable and impact investing.
Participating endowments found the verification process effective and the feedback and recommendations they received to be valuable to their ongoing processes related to sustainable, mission-aligned, impact investing.
Learn more about the participating endowments and results of the pilot in this summary report:
Pilot Participants
Five leading endowments representing public and private colleges and universities, with assets under management ranging rom $50 million to over $20 billion, showcased their pioneering institutional leadership by piloting this new instrument:
- Arizona State University Foundation
- California State University Foundation
- Lewis & Clark College
- University of California
- University of Toronto
The Framework
We ultimately designed the assessment framework as a questionnaire organized around four key pillars:
- Strategy: The scope of an endowment’s social and/or environmental objectives, including its approach to establishing these objectives.
- Management: The robustness of an endowment’s policies and practices for integrating its strategic social and/or environmental objectives into its investment processes.
- Governance: The level of oversight, resourcing , and training an endowment has in place in relation to its social and/or environmental objectives.
- Transparency: The scope of an endowment’s disclosures with respect to its policies and performance related to its social and/or environmental objectives.
Looking Forward
In 2024, IEN will engage a second cohort of endowments to participate in the EIB, working with BlueMark to conduct the third-party verification process. Participation in the EIB offers unique benefits. Participating endowments will:
- Learn where they are on their sustainable investing journey, relative to best-practices,
- Receive high-value feedback and recommendations from BlueMark, the leading impact investing verification provider, on improving sustainable investing policies,
- Be able to benchmark their progress against that of their peers and access aggregated data of participating endowments, and
- Gain recognition* for their progress by earning a rating of Participant, Bronze, Silver, Gold, or Platinum.
(*Participants will also have the ability to participate anonymously to realize the benefits of the benchmarking and advisory feedback without being required to make their participation or rating public).
IEN aims for the EIB to offer participating endowments both a branding tool to demonstrate their leadership and engage students, alumni, donors, and other stakeholders; and an action-oriented feedback mechanism to enable benchmarking against peers and support further improvements on sustainable and impact investing strategies.
About The Intentional Endowments Network
The Intentional Endowments Network (IEN) supports higher education institutions to adopt investment strategies that create an equitable, low-carbon, and regenerative economy. IEN connects endowments, asset managers, investment consultants, nonprofit partners, and individuals, to advance the field of mission-aligned, sustainable investing.
About BlueMark
BlueMark is a leading provider of impact verification services for investors and companies. BlueMark’s verification methodologies draw on a range of industry standards, frameworks, and regulations, including the Impact Management Project, the Operating Principles for Impact Management, the Principles for Responsible Investment, SDG Impact, and the Sustainable Finance Disclosure Regulation.
Endowment Impact Benchmark 