Glossary of Social Investment Terms
26 June 2012 at 9:23 am
The Centre for Social Impact (CSI) has developed an online glossary of terms for social investment.
CSI’s director of research Les Hems said CSI has produced a social investment glossary because it demonstrates its ambition to help build knowledge and promote professional understanding of social finance across the social, business and government sectors of Australia.
CSI developed the glossary following on from its work with the Commonwealth of Australia Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet.
“What we have done is create a share function from 117 terms relating to social investment. This will enable others working to deliver social impact to link to these definitions from their websites, documents and articles without having to go through the exhaustive process of defining terminology,” Hems said.
“We aim to respond to the needs of all those interested in promoting and developing social finance, and the emerging frameworks of social investment, social impact measurement, social enterprise, social entrepreneurship and social innovation.
“We need to develop a mutually agreed shared language for social finance. Without it, the waters are quickly muddied and discussions descend into debate over semantics rather than been focused on making meaningful, measurable, effective change happen for the benefit of society.
“Our glossary aims to lead the way on this and we will add to it in the future with glossaries on social enterprise, demonstrating and measuring social impact, corporate responsibility and creating shared value.”
The glossary offers the chance to ‘share’ and to copy and paste the permalinks, so people can use the terms as hyperlinked definitions for their website, for student papers and for documents.
The infrastructure was developed by CSI’s web agency, Harvest the Net.
The online glossary is based on the Glossary of Terms for Social Investment developed for the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet last year, which is published under Creative Commons licence.”
