Project Update:
Detailed Questions
1. How much money have you spent so far? Have you gotten more funding from other sources? Do you need more funding?
I spent about 30 hours working on this project, conducting research and testing my approaches to impact market reporting with my other projects as test cases. This project did not directly use the funds allocated from investors, so no other funding was used or necessary.
2. How is the project going? (a few paragraphs)
The project went well and is now complete! You can see my results and thoughts in detail at the links above, but I've adopted them here as well:
My work on this project is intended to speed the growth of future impact markets by developing a standardized system for grantees to report on their impact, making retro funding decisions easier and encouraging future market participation.
In order to achieve this, I conducted research on different markets, their evolution, and how their associated technologies and norms that affected their growth. Specifically, I looked at:
1. The growth of bond trading during the 70s and 80s
2. How markets for carbon offsets operate, and how their reporting standards are gamed by some particpants
3. How Hawala brokers operate in parallel to the established financial system.
From this research, I developed a standardized template for reporting impact market results, which I then used to report results from my related forecast dissemination projects. I've published an essay with my findings here: http://ryankupyn.com/tools-for-impact-market-reporting/
This essay also includes the standardized template for other impact market participants to use, as well as examples of this template used in practice.
I think that the valuation of this project is largely dependent on two questions:
1. Whether you think my approach to reporting is easier for retro funders to work with than the current status quo.
2. Whether you think this approach will be adopted for impact markets, and if so, whether this adoption with encourage future impact market growth.
If this work is both an improvement and likely to make future impact markets more successful, I think the value would be high! Otherwise, I would assign a lower value.
The "impact" of this project in a societal sense is also dependent on how much better impact markets might perform than a the current prospective funding approach to philanthropy. If markets are much more effective, even a small increase to their likelihood and rate of adoption will have large societal benefits.
3. How well has your project gone compared to where you expected it to be at this point? (Score from 1-10, 10 = Better than expected)
I would rate this project at around a 8-out-of-10. I think there's a lot more work that could be done to develop useful infrastructure for future impact markets, but I think this project has already led to some useful tools for future impact markets to use. I found them to be very helpful when reporting on my other projects, and I hope that the information I present in them is useful for retro funders in making their decisions.
4. Are there any remaining ways you need help, besides more funding?
Not at the moment - I consider this project to be complete for now.
5. Any other thoughts or feedback?
Not on this project specifically, but I also published my thoughts on challenges impact markets face and how to adapt to them at the link above.