Recognizing that foundations are key players in deploying a wide variety of levers to push for change beyond grantmaking, the NetGain Partnership began exploring opportunities to use shareholder advocacy and finance-focused strategies to hold platforms and tech investors accountable and create a healthier digital public sphere. Partnering with Open MIC and Whistle Stop Capital, NetGain has created a comprehensive series of reports on opportunities to use shareholder advocacy and finance-focused strategies to hold platforms accountable and create a healthier digital public sphere.
This effort will also help lay the groundwork for additional funder learning for foundations to leverage investment-decisions around their endowment, as well as create pathways to influence private equity and venture capital.
Finance-Focused Strategies Report: Executive Summary
NetGain Partnership | September 2023
In September 2021, the NetGain Partnership initiated a research process designed to explore finance-focused strategies that would hold leading internet platforms accountable and create a healthier digital public sphere. In April 2022, the partnership commissioned Open MIC and Whistle Stop Capital to produce a series of reports that addressed those issues. Since then, the research teams have conducted interviews with more than 40 practitioners, analysts, and observers of shareholder engagement and finance-focused strategies in the global technology sector. The research teams have also explored current tactics and strategies employed in the finance-sector globally to check the power and harmful behaviors of Big Tech companies. The resulting reports summarized key learnings from the research, and provided recommendations for philanthropy’s role in advancing finance-focused strategies. This executive summary is designed to provide a high-level overview of the research and findings in an accessible format for peer funders and other interested stakeholders.
Finance-Focused Strategies: Moving Forward Tech Accountability
Whistle Stop Capital | December 2023
Significant opportunities exist to utilize investor influence to encourage technology companies to take greater accountability for their societal impacts. However, the necessary infrastructure is missing. Tools that have proven successful in past investor engagements must be developed and tailored in new ways. These efforts will be more effective if the broader environmental, social and corporate governance (ESG) investment ecosystem is also strengthened. Foundations are able to play a unique and catalytic role in providing capital and leadership, as grantors and as investors themselves.
Framework Assessment Report
Whistle Stop Capital | December 2023
Key indicators and their associated infrastructure are an essential aspect of a shareholder engagement campaign. Investors need a system that allows them to compare and benchmark companies – both against their peers and relative to their own performance over time. In this report, key indicators are divided into two component parts, with the portion focused on governance and oversight applicable across all issue areas. The second component part is tailored specifically towards quantifying privacy policies and practices.
Landscape Report on Shareholder Engagement and Activism Strategies: Lessons from the past, guidance for the future
Whistle Stop Capital | December 2023
To only invest to preserve capital, or to beat the market, is now at odds with best-practice investing. Investors now allow for more complexity and nuance when they consider environmental and social topics. There is a greater understanding of the financial value that sustainability leadership might bring to a company and to the broader health of an investment portfolio. This more nuanced perspective is the result of long hours and multi-faceted coalition-focused efforts by investors and activists.
To better understand the tools and efforts that led to successful change, Whistle Stop Capital examined case studies and identified eight key tools investors have used to push publicly traded companies to change their practices.
Shareholder Engagement in Tech: Status Report
Open MIC | December 2023
A dramatic growth in ESG investing in recent years has created momentum for successful shareholder engagement across multiple industry sectors, including technology, where investor advocates are successfully pressuring companies for accountability on a range of critical digital issues — from privacy and artificial intelligence to surveillance and racial equity.
As shareholder engagement on digital issues matures, there’s need for greater coordination and action by advocacy organizations across a broad range of potential “finance-focused” initiatives, which will entail focused and long-term support from the philanthropic community.
Private Capital in Tech: Untapped Potential for Impact
Open MIC | December 2023
Two sources of private capital - venture capital (VC) and private equity (PE) - play critical roles in the overall economy of the tech sector. VC firms typically fund ventures in the early stages of a company’s development; PE firms typically acquire or help fund more mature ventures.
The high degree of leverage that private capital actors hold over the tech sector at its most formative stages presents a high impact opportunity to shift the negative drivers that are impeding entrepreneurs from becoming leaders in responsible tech.
ESG (+D)? Bridging the digital rights data gap
Open MIC | December 2023
For responsible tech investment to be feasible, investors need reliable information on how companies manage their impacts on digital and other human rights. There is an opportunity to bolster the leverage of responsible investors interested in promoting greater accountability in the tech sector by increasing transparency and regulation around mainstream ESG products and by redressing the ESG data deficit on tech-specific impacts through investor-friendly standards and metrics that accurately assess the human rights risks of the digital era.
AI Investment Standards: Building consensus from emerging efforts
Open MIC | December 2023
Companies and public service providers have adopted AI systems at such a rapid rate that these tools can now be found in nearly every industry and public sector. This widespread adoption is exposing communities to potential bias and rights violations, while also introducing new legal, financial, and reputational risks for companies.
Investors have an opportunity to support the evolution of specific, operationalizable ethical AI standards by demanding transparency regarding these “black box” technologies and the processes companies use to develop, assess, and deploy them.