Final Good Intentions forum closes the series with its most telling lessons yet
Our fourth and final forum in our Good Intentions 2026 series examined the final three criteria in our ten-point Assessment Framework – and told a striking story.
Last week's Good Intentions 2026 Forum focused on Criteria eight, nine and ten in our Faith-Consistent Investing (FCI) Assessment Framework: Professional guidance, regular review & monitoring, and continuous improvement.
Study co-author Catherine Devitt described the three as a kind of lifecycle: 'What you ask for from the people managing your money, whether you actually get it, and whether the whole thing keeps up with you as circumstances change.'
The scores for this session's three criteria told a striking story. Regular review & monitoring came out at 3.1 out of 5, the highest of all ten criteria in the entire study. Professional guidance scored 2.5, and continuous improvement 2.2.
“That spread is revealing,” Catherine said. “Financial monitoring is one of the strongest things faith-based organisations do. But the moment you ask whether that same discipline extends to faith alignment, the picture looks quite different.”
How scoring works
Each of the ten criteria in our landmark Good Intentions 2026 study is scored out of 5, based on how clearly and consistently investment policies addressed it, and the ten scores combine into a total out of 50.
That total places each organisation into one of four tiers, from minimal implementation through to outstanding alignment.
Across the full 275-policy sample, none reached the top tier, 11% achieved a 'good foundation', half showed basic effort, and 39% were assessed as minimal.
The three criteria in more detail
Professional guidance asks a simple question: if your organisation hires an adviser or a fund manager, how do you make sure they understand what your faith commitments actually mean in practice?
Time and again, the study found that expectations of advisers were implicit rather than explicit. Organisations trusted a manager to work in the spirit of their policy but rarely wrote down, in the mandate itself, what that spirit required, leaving generic ESG approaches to stand in for something more specific to their tradition.
Regular review & monitoring is the strongest-scoring criterion in the whole study, and for good reason: faith organisations are disciplined about checking on their money. But that same discipline rarely extends to faith alignment.
Financial performance gets reviewed as a matter of course; whether the portfolio still reflects what the policy promises is, for most organisations, a question nobody is formally asking.
Continuous improvement looks at whether the policy itself is treated as a living document. Most of the policies in the sample were written once and then filed away, revisited only reactively, prompted by a controversy, a change in leadership, or external pressure, rather than on any kind of proactive schedule.
What does this mean for faith-based asset owners? Across the three criteria, Good Intentions 2026 identified three connected gaps.
A Guidance Gap: advisers are trusted with an organisation's faith commitments but rarely told, in writing, what those commitments mean in practice.
A Verification Gap: financial performance gets checked rigorously, but almost no organisation has a formal way of confirming that faith alignment is happening as the policy promises.
And an Improvement Gap: policies tend to be written once and filed away, revisited only when a controversy or a change in leadership forces the question.
Suggestions for improvement
FaithInvest Executive Chair and study co-author Dave Zellner joined Catherine for a conversation exploring what good practice looks like on each front, including practical, low-resource steps that even smaller organisations without specialist investment staff can take.
These included:
Writing faith expectations directly into adviser mandates in a page or less;
Asking advisers pointed questions that go beyond their standard ESG language;
Checking actual holdings against a policy's stated exclusions;
Folding faith-alignment checks into the meetings organisations already hold rather than treating them as a separate exercise;
Setting a fixed cycle, even once every two or three years, for reviewing the policy itself.
Watch the full session above. You can also download a transcript of the webinar below.
Looking back across the series
This was the last of four sessions built around the Good Intentions 2026 findings. In May, we launched the study globally and walked through the headline findings. In June, we looked at the four foundational criteria:
Faith documentation
Ethical exclusions
Positive screening and
Investment vehicle selection.
In July, we turned to:
Governance
Stakeholder communication and
Education & expertise.
And, as outlined above, last week we closed with:
Professional Guidance,
Regular review & monitoring and
Continuous improvement.
Across all ten criteria, not one of the 275 policies we assessed reached the top tier of our framework. As the series has shown again and again, that isn't a failure of commitment. It's a gap in infrastructure and support, and closing it is exactly what FaithInvest exists to help with.
If this conversation has made you wonder how your own organisation's investment policy measures up, FaithInvest offers a free assessment against all ten Good Intentions criteria, with a clear roadmap for strengthening it. Get in touch at info@faithinvest.org.
Visit our Good Intentions 2026 page to watch all four webinars and download the full report.
