Our Mission: To strengthen trust in impact investing by delivering independent, incisive verification services, enabling the market to scale with integrity.

Our Mission: To strengthen trust in impact investing by delivering independent, incisive verification services, enabling the market to scale with integrity.

BlueMark was founded with a mission to “strengthen trust in impact investing” and to help bring more accountability to the impact investment process. We believe impact verification is a key ingredient for establishing and maintaining trust between impact investors and their stakeholders. By providing a reliable resource for independent, third-party assurance of impact claims and practices, BlueMark plays an important role in advancing best practices and ensuring the impact investing industry scales with integrity.

Our Commitment

Consistent with our goal of contributing to public education, and continued practitioner learning and improvement, we are committed to analyzing verification data and results, and publishing research based on our sample set of verifications so that the impact investing field can learn from best practices and address shared challenges.

In 2020, we published our inaugural report — “Making the Mark“™ — on best practices in impact management based on verifications of investor alignment with the Operating Principles for Impact Management.

The 2021 edition of Making the Mark introduced the BlueMark Practice Benchmark™, the first definitive resource in impact investing that allows market participants to differentiate between Practice Leaders (those in the top quartile) and Practice Learners (those in the bottom quartile).

The 2022 edition of Making the Mark featured the launch of the BlueMark Practice Leaderboard™, which highlights the impact investors that earned top quartile ratings according to BlueMark’s verification methodology.

Diversity & Inclusion

At BlueMark, our commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion manifests in three key ways:

• The mission and vision of BlueMark
  Our firm’s vision of shared, sustainable prosperity is inseparably rooted in the credo of a diverse, equitable, and inclusive world.
• How we conduct ourselves as an employer
  BlueMark is an equal opportunity employer, and we value the unique contributions of each of our team members. Through our hiring, mentoring, and managing, we encourage our team to bring their full selves and individuality to BlueMark’s work.
• How we use our influence
  In our work with clients, we strive to be an enabling force in the equitable distribution of wealth, opportunities, and privileges within our society.

Our Origin

BlueMark was incubated and launched by Tideline, a leading women-owned impact investing consultancy. It became clear through dialogue with clients that the next essential step in the market’s development was independent impact practice and performance verification. Since 2014, Tideline has played a central role in developing market infrastructure and standards, for example, by conceiving of impact classes with Duke University, which was foundational to the formation of the Impact Management Project. Tideline remains at the forefront of impact management practice, as the preferred advisor to many leading asset allocators and managers and with 125 projects completed to date. Tideline was founded by Christina Leijonhufvud, Ben Thornley, and Kim Wright-Violich, who together brought over three decades of impact investing experience to the firm.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank our founding investors, The Rockefeller Foundation and Radicle Impact. Both organizations have committed to make catalytic investments in BlueMark in recognition of the powerful role that impact verification can play in the future of impact investing and finance as a whole.

We would like to also thank George Steinmetz for the use of his extraordinary images throughout the BlueMark website. His images add meaning and new understanding to the impact investment issues on which so many of our clients are focused. Learn more George and his photography here.