Why measure social impact?

Photo by Steve Harris

The majority (68%) of social enterprises now measure their social impact, according to Social Enterprise UK's State of Social Enterprise 2013 Survey.

Social enterprises Poached Creative and Iridescent Ideas recently teamed up to find out why:

“As a social enterprise providing communications services to the social enterprise sector, we wanted to understand the motivations for social impact reporting and identify the barriers for those social enterprises not already doing it.” said Jessica Smith, Director of Poached Creative.

Together they decided to run a campaign to discover the answers to these questions. They produced a white paper on social impact reporting - Why impact? – and ran a twitter social debate using the hashtag #whyimpact.

As part of the debate, social entrepreneur Liam Black shared his top two reasons for social impact reporting on twitter: first, you owe it to the taxpayers who subsidise you, and second, you find out vital data about your business.

Social impact reporting can also help prove your business is making an impact, define the need and market for your services, motivate your team, help publicise your work and secure future business.

But with all these benefits, why are over a third (32%) of social enterprises still not measuring their impact?

The Why Impact white paper identifies that social enterprises can find social impact reporting time-consuming, expensive and confusing.

One of the confusing aspects is that there is no single social impact measurement, but a variety available. The main two are social auditing or accounting and social return oninvestment (SROI), with other methods usually a variation on these approaches.

As for being time-consuming and expensive, proportionality is key (according to think tank Demos) –the amount of work needed for evaluation should be in line with and not outweigh the size of the organisation. Larger social enterprises may have the capacity to take on a fuller SROI type of assessment, whereas smaller enterprises may need a simpler approach.   

Social enterprise Iridescent Ideas has addressed this issue, by offering their ‘simple’ social impact report service:

“Monitoring and evaluation methods to prove impact need to be simple, commensurate with the outcomes expected and, critically, make it easy to collect meaningful data. This takes planning, of course, but thinking it through at the start will mean that what is valued gets measured and what is measured gets valued.” said Gareth Hart of Iridescent Ideas.

To find out more visit www.iridescentideas.com/impact

Social Enterprise Day 2013

The contribution of social enterprises was recognised in Parliament today with a special event held in the Commons by the APPG on Social Enterprise to mark Social Enterprise Day 2013. 

Highlights of the day included: a new supply chain guide for businesses by Social Enterprise UK, a new Buy Social animation narrated by John Bird, founder of The Big Issue, and Social Enterprise Belu Water won a contract with the Houses of Parliament.

MPs and business leaders attended the event at the House of Commons, hosted by the All Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on Social Enterprise, to learn more about including Social Enterprises in their supply chains. They heard from speakers including Karen Lynch, CEO of Social Enterprise Belu water, Hazel Blears MP, and Jo Swinson, Minister for Employment Relations and Consumer Affairs.

Poached Creative's work was a key part of Social Enterprise Day 2013. We designed and produced the new materials to support the second phase of the Buy Social campaign - encouraging corporate businesses to buy from social enterprises. This included new display boards featuring Edwin from Give Me Tap, a We Buy Social badge for commercial organisations to show their commitment to social enterprise and Buy Social postcards to promote social enterprise to the public.

A new supply chain guide to help businesses learn about including social enterprises in their supply chains was designed by Poached Creative and we featured alongside several case studies for our work designing the first Social Impact Report for Landmarc, the UK’s 3rd biggest Land Manager.

Jo Swinson encouraged the businesses in attendance to 'buy social':

“Customers and investors are increasingly thinking beyond simply the prices they are paying and the returns they are seeing. They rightly want to know what steps a business is taking which will have a positive effect on the environment, society, their local community and the employees, before making their decision. In order to build a stronger economy and fairer society we need more diverse businesses - social enterprises very much fit the bill.”

Social Enterprise Day marks the one year anniversary since the Buy Social campaign, conceived and created by Poached for Social Enterprise UK, was first launched. Peter Holbrook, Chief Executive of Social Enterprise UK, said:

“Just like having a carbon footprint, every business has a social footprint and this can be strengthened by the purchasing of goods and services from social enterprises. Lots of social enterprises are small to medium sized businesses that operate locally and so what might be a relatively modest spend for a corporate can make a very big difference to a social enterprise and their impact on a local community.”

Find out more on Social Enterprise UK's  Buy Social page  and join the conversation on Twitter using #buysocial