Measuring Social Impact - Conclusions

Submitted by Hugo_Minney on Sun, 06/19/2011 - 23:28

Social ImpactWe've been on a journey together, looking at why you would want to measure social value, and some of the ways to go about this.  Now it is time to draw some conclusions.

This page is part of a longer article on how best to measure and report social good.  I hope you enjoy it and I'd be delighted with comment and criticism.  You can find out more about the whole series at this page.

Conclusion

  1. Each approach has strengths and weaknesses, and many are required in specific environments - especially true of specialist assessments like EIA
  2. Low resource approaches can be valuable for early assessments of viability before the resource is committed to planning and a full forecast
  3. Alternative approaches to measuring social goodOrganisations may be put off by the amount of time and effort - however at < 10% of the total cost of a commissioned service it is probably money well spent on evaluation to make sure it is achieving the desired outcomes, and the amount is often much less than this
  4. Social Auditing applies to the whole organisation and helps to clarify the social good aims, and ensure that staff, volunteers and stakeholders focus on the social good to be achieved.  Social Audit reports are valuable internally and are often issued annually as a section within an organisation's Annual Report.
  5. SROI is a generalist approach to evaluating individual programmes, projects or services (or forecasting them for investment purposes), rooted in stakeholder feedback & with high levels of verification and cross-referencing which makes it time-consuming and less easy to control the outcome (it also makes it more difficult for an organisation to try to get the answer they first thought of – which is a distinct advantage)
  6. Different frameworks can be combined: for example SROI has built on many of the best features of other frameworks and stakeholder engagement performed for Charities Evaluation Services can be applied directly:similarly the Theory of Change determined by Sustainability Reporting is directly equivalent. SROI has taken the best of many other approaches and "assigns a financial equivalence value" to aid investment decisions
  7. Frameworks can be combined.  Particular candidates are Social Accounting, which shows how an organisation is fulfilling its social good strategic aims and values, and SROI, which provides a financial equivalence of the difference being made

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Recent Additions and Updates

If I were running the country - encouraging business

Submitted by Hugo_Minney on Tue, 05/21/2013 - 09:33

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Minimum wage

Fantasy government - what would I do if I were in government?  Well how about reduce corporation tax, increase income tax, increase minimum wage and invest in job creation in the regions?  That would be a good start - create jobs where there are workers, then make sure that the right amount of tax is collected and at the same time reduce spend on benefits which are only used to increase profits of selfish organisations.

Would it work?  Have your say.

PwC Report on the Current State of Project Management

Submitted by Hugo_Minney on Fri, 05/17/2013 - 10:44

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PwC Project Management ReportPwC found that successful companies are getting more mature in their project management ability.  This raises the game – successful companies have lower costs from fewer failed projects, and less successful companies have to work harder to catch up.  There are some important lessons to take this report for everyone – Read more…

Joy instead of tedium

Submitted by Hugo_Minney on Fri, 05/10/2013 - 21:04

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The Office

Every office has them - the tasks that have to be done that nobody likes doing.  Whether it's the audit, the wages, standard letters, whatever it is - someone has to do it and it feels like a waste of time and money.

Why should you care?

So you employ somebody, so why do you care about how tedious the task is? Well they are costing money, to do something that could be done far more effectively.

Learning from the Past

Submitted by HugoM on Fri, 05/10/2013 - 20:27

Evidence for service improvement

Many public service changes have little basis in evidence. Their success (or otherwise) does not appear to depend on how 'good' the policy itself is, but rather on how it has been implemented. This relies on staff attitudes and relationships. My research falls into a number of broad categories: finding out what is currently happening; what people think about it; and what people think it will mean.

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Consumer Price Index (CPI) Calculator for SROI

Submitted by Hugo_Minney on Tue, 04/16/2013 - 10:05

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CPI components

When calculating a Social Return on Investment (SROI) evaluation or SROI forecast , sometimes you have to rely on published figures from reports.  But if these are from a few years ago, then they probably need adjusting for inflation.

There are calculators on the web to do this for you, but I found them cumbersome and it was difficult to keep a record of what calculator I'd used, and how, for which value - auditability and transparency is vital for SROI.  So here's a spreadsheet to do this properly!