When is it good business practice to invest for social good? What are the most innovative and effective business strategies for developing positive social impact around the world? Designed by renowned Wharton professors Katherine Klein and Chris Geczy to help individuals, organizations, and investors bring about societal change, this course introduces the fundamentals of impact investing, and developing a business strategy that drives social impact. You’ll learn how to become a leader who cultivates purpose and inspires change, measure societal impact through evidence-based models, and invest in ventures effectively and meaningfully. By the end of this course, you’ll have a deep understanding of the realities of leading an organization with purpose, and be able to build successful strategies that bring impactful change to the world.
Great introduction, definitely provided me with a better understanding of where organizations can have impact, and how to measure it.
A course well worth taking. It handles a lot of ethical and moral situations and provides interesting real life anecdotes.
This was a good course until Module 4. The lecturer for Module 4 was dry, uninteresting, used a lot of jargon, and used a lot of filler information that was distracting.
Very interesting and useful, especially as viewed from the perspective of an environmental scientist interested in how business strategies could be aligned with environmental conservation.
Awesome courses with great lecturers. It takes commitment and discipline to complete an online course. The lecturers really helped in keeping my interest alive.
A​ bit basic and slow to start with, but gets quite good on the impact and measurement side of things, to make it more real and practical (vs just theoretical)
Very interesting course, however the Impact Investment module was sometime a bit too technical which prevented from understanding the entire outcome of some experiments or studies.
Great course; very insightful look into how business and other organizations can effect positive social impact in the course of achieving their objectives and completing routines.
First two weeks were OUTSTANDING!!!!!! I personally found the last week to be a bit overly detailed for the scope of the course. But overall I loved this and learnt a lot. Thank you!
Excellent set of lectures very useful and enlightening, well organized and explained. I highly recommend taking these lectures to anyone interested or involved in social impact.
This is one of the best leaning experience i had. The detailing while keeping the simplicity in teaching methods are really appreciated.
This is a very awesome course. Although it is a relatively new field for me, I have really learned so much about social impact and investment in general. I really hope to put this to good use.
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Great course, except for module 4 witch has a very different style, excessively technical for people starting on the subject (would trade for the EVPA kind of approach to impact investing)
Still I would defenetly recommend the course for people that want to start to understand more on social impact.
A course for that is practical and straight forward in the delivery of management framework, governance framework for managers or investor to understand how impact investment benefits are delivered and measured .
I really enjoyed the first three modules since they were delivered in a manner even a person without any background knowledge on the topic could follow and understand them. This was fully different for the fourth module on Impact Investment. I really had to 'listen' between the lines to be able to follow what was being said. Too much use of jargon. And definitely you need some prior knowledge on Finance/Investments. Also, I experienced several issues with the quizzes where answers were marked wrong which were obviously correct (I checked the course materials and even online sources). And even worse, some answers which were correct in a first try, where marked wrong on a second try. It seems like a bug to me. Since this is a continuous course, available to start at any time, I feel the support on this course is accordingly. The support staff is not getting back (quickly enough) on questions asked on the Discussion Forum.
That being said, I would still recommend this course since at the core of it the topics being discussed are of great interest to those who want are interested in doing well in business as well as doing good at the same time.
Great course on how Business works according to demographics, investment type, interest of the stakeholders and the strategies used. Lectures offered on Impact Investing were more useful in improving one's basic managerial skills.
Very interesting and useful, especially as viewed from the perspective of an environmental scientist interested in how business strategies could be aligned with environmental conservation.
Very interesting course regarding the social impact on business. A course that any business leaders should take to better understand the impact that social measures have on the business.
Great course; very insightful look into how business and other organizations can effect positive social impact in the course of achieving their objectives and completing routines.
Modules 1-3 are spectacular and very informative with a fantastic professor; also easy to absorb no matter your baseline understanding of the topic. Module 4 is another level of difficulty, made more confusing by the teaching style, which is full of run-on and clause-ridden sentences and lack of detailed slides. I already have an MBA and it was hard to follow, so I imagine for those with no foundation, this would be near impossible to fully absorb.
The first 3 modules were very ordered in concept with short and summarized concepts . The last model instructor was talking too fast and didn't run summarizing notes or ordered presentation and each session was 5 times longer than the one in modules 1,2,3. Both professors are amazing, but you should think about aligning presentation format
This was a good course until Module 4. The lecturer for Module 4 was dry, uninteresting, used a lot of jargon, and used a lot of filler information that was distracting.
Although I gave it 3 stars, it doesn't mean it's not good enough. I just have two criticisms: first, the actual strategies that can be used by social-impact businesses could have been better conceptualised. The interviews are very useful because they offer real-world examples, however in a training provided by academics I would expect to see a systemisation by general categories, not just specific examples. In this sense, I don't think the interviews are optional, but actually form a great part of the course itself. My second criticism echoes what many other students said about the gap between the first three modules and the fourth. I found the last module to start quite abruptly on the assumption that we should know already basic notions like assets, for example, to which the previous ones had not contributed at all. I wasn't even sure what the base of the pyramid was referring to in this context and had to wait a little bit to understand. Apart from these criticisms, I actually enjoyed a lot the course and did learn many useful things, especially as a person new to social impact.
1. First 3 modules (Klein) should have been either shorten or made in more than 6 modules. 2. Significance of the module description was lacking the conclusion relevance. 3. Module-4 (Geczy) of finance has very little significance for the course . 4. The module-4 needed several detailed financial terminology understanding and that had very less correlation with the main program of Business Strategies for Better World. 5. Finally, it could have been better to have short videos (each module should not have more than 5 videos and no video should be more than 15 minutes) for first 3 modules and whole last module of finance should have been a single video of not more than 20 minutes.
Relevant, well developed and simply amazing. I finished the entire "Business Strategies for a Better World" program, and this course specifically was much more well developed and to be honest, difficult, than the previous ones. At week 4, Dr. Gates mercilessly bombards you with technical terminologies within dense concepts and ideas, so It required much more patience, attention, and TIME to really understand (or not) what he was talking about... but in the end it is a very satisfying feeling to look up and remember everything you learned about the topic.
This program was life-changing, with no exaggeration at all. Of course I will revisit the material several times in the future to really understand each little detail before I can fully think I properly understand it, but as for now, I am happy to be able to say that I can grasp the topic Social Impact. Thanks for the opportunity and for all the professors involved!
Great Job by the university and the instructor. I loved all the videos of this course. The instructor explained everything in simple terms as well as quite thoroughly and use of interviews with the people who are already working in the field supplemented the content very well. There are a couple of things that I think can make this course even more valuable such as in-depth analysis of any particular company and comprehensive view of the whole social impact business landscape. Some hyperlinks after each video related to the content for deeper understanding will also add substantially to the output.
This course was an absolutely unique learning experience that may turn to be a valuable asset in an understanding of the corporate social impact. I really enjoyed Prof. Katherine Klein's lectures. The way she structured her course contents made much easy for students to learn. I really wish there is more opportunity to learn from her in my academic journey as well as on my career path in advance. In the meantime, the way Prof. Christopher Geczy delivers his lecture was not well organized as Prof. Klein does. Maybe he knows a lot but, I hope his teaching method sharpens a little further.
This course has a direct relationship and answers questions I have on the sustainability and impact of my non-profit organization, MyJal.org, I founded when I was 6 years old. I have recently started questioning the financial sustainability of organizations with social impact purposes.
Big thanks to Professors Ms. Katherine Klein and Mr. Christopher Geczy, they have explained this so well that I feel like learning more from them and apply it to MyJal.org.
All the answers & direction I needed. Just the right education & skills I required to understand how to run a business responsibly & be a purpose driven leader. Course content is good, the depth cannot be underrated, the lecturers are good & the material is clear. It is deep enough & hard enough. Thank you for this course. I now see things differently. You solved my problem. Thank you.
The course is very helpful to me. First 3 modules are well-instructed, easy to follow up and understand for me as a non-native English speaker. Module 4 is more difficult to understand and I have to replay several times for each video. and read the slides several times to understand the Instructor. I am looking for a more comprehensive courses in Impact Investing subject. Thank you.
As someone interested to work in the social impact space and currently working with a public sector undertaking in the energy space in India, I found this course to be very relevant and useful. It would have been great if the instructors could share more readings. The 4th-week study requires some knowledge about finance, which fortunately I had. Great course overall!
I really enjoyed this course and the instructors. Professor Katherine Klein was very knowledgeable and her presentations were thoughtful. I can see why she is the Vice President of for the Warton Social Impact initiate. Out of the 4 courses in this certificate, I feel like this course is what I'll be referring back to a lot. I will definitely recommend this course.