The heartbeat of Inspire Investing is to bring glory to God through Biblically Responsible Investing (BRI) excellence and innovation; helping believers invest in a way that supports biblical values rather than opposes them. At the core of BRI lies the provision of meticulously curated data on corporate activities congruent with or divergent from biblical precepts. This data is synthesized and disseminated through Inspire Insight, designed to be the world’s most comprehensive faith-based investment screening tool empowering investors with the data needed to make informed, God-honoring decisions.
Inspire Insight distills that data into an easy-to-understand numerical score that ranges from -100 to +100 called the Inspire Impact Score and makes it freely available to the investing public. This score, which is assigned to publicly traded stocks, ETFs, and mutual funds, reflects a rules-based, scientifically rigorous methodology of faith-based analysis which creates a level of consistency and reliability of results necessary for making well-informed, quantitatively sound, biblically responsible investment decisions. You can read more about Inspire Insight and the Inspire Impact Score here.
In our unwavering commitment to continuous improvement in furnishing investors, advisors, and stakeholders alike with the most robust and accurate data possible, several pivotal updates are slated for integration into the Insight platform. These enhancements are strategically designed to optimize and streamline the research and screening process, instilling further confidence among users leveraging this platform for their faith-based investing decisions.
Our engineering team is completing the first stage of a back-end update of the Insight platform. This update allows us to refine and streamline how data is ingested, processed, and audited within the Insight database, creating additional safeguards for data integrity, reduced downtime, and enhanced processing speed. We are also deploying several bug fixes to provide a consistent user experience for those who rely on the data presented through Insight.
Inspire has historically screened companies with problematic LGBT activism involvement by employing several different subcategories: LGBT Philanthropy, LGBT Legislation, and LGBT Promotion. These categories are critical to a biblical approach to investment screening; however, the increasing complexity of these issues in the corporate world, the more varied ways that companies are involving themselves in LGBT issues, and our dedication to providing an objective, rules-based approach to screening motivated us to find a more comprehensive, scalable and easy to understand method of screening these categories.
The outcome of our efforts is to combine the aforementioned subcategories into one category called LGBT Activism, which will report using a comprehensive data source that provides information on philanthropy, legislation, and promotion, but goes further with additional visibility into internal corporate policy and marketing efforts. The result is an easier-to-understand, more comprehensive, more objective data set surrounding corporate LGBT activism.
Starting April 2024, screening for the category LGBT Activism will be defined as, “Companies earning an above-average rating according to an annual self-reported survey conducted by a national LGBT advocacy organization, which rates companies based on their corporate LGBT activism across several areas, including philanthropy, corporate policy, marketing efforts, and legislative support. The average score is calculated from the scores of the Fortune 500 companies that participated in the annual survey.”
The new LGBT Activism organization source gives us deep insight into the internal, often non-public details of a corporation as well as its external activities, whereas we were previously limited to making best-effort assessments from external viewpoints only. We believe the result of this enhancement is a more thorough and accurate measure of a corporation’s LGBT activism involvement. We are very pleased to provide faith-based investors with this enhanced clarity and transparency on such a critical issue in the evolving corporate landscape.
In a similar vein to the changes being made to the LGBT category, the Abortion subcategories of Abortion Philanthropy, Abortion Legislation, and Abortion Travel will be consolidated into one category titled Abortion Activism, as of March 2024. This new subcategory will be defined as “Companies that promote abortion access through legislative support, corporate philanthropic activity, and/or employee travel benefits.”
Please note that this is simply a change to the categorization, but not the sources of data. Additionally, other subcategories that fall under the Abortion category such as Abortifacients, In Vitro Fertilization, Embryonic Stem Cells, Abortion Services, and Barrier Contraception will continue to be screened separately within their own subcategory.
Overall, these changes to both the LGBT and Abortion categories are designed to allow for greater transparency, objectivity, and clarity as Inspire Investing and the Insight platform continually strive to inspire transformation for the glory of God. If you have any questions about this change or any of the current Insight screening categories, please feel free to contact us.
An indispensable function of the Insight platform is the calculation of the Inspire Impact Score, a faith-based scoring algorithm informing investment decisions on billions of dollars across the globe, which seeks to provide a rules-based measure of a company’s alignment with biblical values, or lack thereof. Concurrently with the updates related to LGBT Activism and Abortion Activism discussed above, we are introducing small refinements to the Impact Score in order to provide consistency given these data category changes.
One factor of the Inspire Impact Score has been measuring the “depth” of involvement in screening issues, adding additional negative weighting for multiple violations in a certain category. For instance, a company with multiple donations to abortion philanthropies would receive a lower Impact Score than a company that gave only one donation to a single abortion philanthropy because of the greater depth of involvement.
Due to the changes made to sourcing in the LGBT and Abortion categories noted above, the depth factor has become obsolete within the structure of the score as it is only possible to receive a single mark in each category. To adjust for this we are increasing the “severity” factor of these two categories, seeking to maintain scoring consistency with the historical process. As such, the severity factor of the LGBT Activism and Abortion Activism categories has been adjusted from “1” to “3”, multiplying their weight in the Impact Score calculation, since each of those is consolidating three previous categories into one category and compensating for the lack of a depth factor.
Additionally, the Impact Score process previously carried a two-year lookback period which assigned a negative score to a company if they have engaged with a violation category at some point in the past two years. With the updated data sources for LGBT and abortion issues, this look back period is no longer necessary as the type of data and combination of multiple data points into single categories greatly reduces the possibility of whipsaw, wherein a company flags for a violation one year, goes “clean” the next and then back to “dirty” the next and so on. Accordingly, we are removing the two-year lookback and moving to a one-year lookback for violation relevancy.
This simplifies and clarifies the screening process, and also enables improved engagement efforts with corporations, allowing us to reward a company that responds positively to our requests to honor biblical values with a more immediate improvement in their Inspire Impact Score, rather than having to wait until older violations drop off the look back period. Faith-based investors following the Inspire Impact Score methodology will also be able to more immediately incorporate companies that have moved in a positive direction into their portfolios rather than waiting an additional calendar year.
We are enthusiastic about the forthcoming developments in Insight and are confident that these modifications will enhance the experience for investors committed to honoring God through their financial endeavors. We are dedicated to the pursuit of excellence in faith-based investing and will continue to seek improvements to our systems and processes as we find opportunities to advance. We appreciate your collaboration on this journey as we exercise stewardship over the resources entrusted to us, and thank you for your partnership in our mission to inspire transformation for God’s glory throughout the world with biblically responsible investing excellence and innovation!
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