SROI Social Return on Investment

My programme recieves funding from primarily 1 source, a Housing Partnership . To identify their "value for money" investement they, like many other investors in the main choose to identify the numbers of young people engaged as their main indicator on the projects success.

My project has the personal development of young people as the main core aim and I find numbers of engagement is a very poor way of assessing the success of the overall project and therefore cannot reflect true value for money to the investor.

For instance, the project aims are to prevent young people from steering towards the Criminal Justice System therefore saving the community valuable taxpeyers money. Additional benefits are the the community benefits from the reduction in ASB.

SROI (as and eveluation tool) is something I am aware of which potentially could apply to the young people on the project which would assist our funders to continiue with the project.

e.g. We have recently employed one of the young people who had attended sessions with the project. Prior to the project he was about to be issued with an ASBO. What monetary value does this represent to my funders?

The Police are able to provide financial figures (costs) on the numbers of service calls they may recieve as a result of a young persons involvement of ASB. They also have a price for how much it would cost for officers to attend a burglary or other offences.

Additionally, court costs, social services, schools, family intervention costs could all be applied. And what would be the cost saving to the local community who may have suffered at the hands of ASB from young people. This is a significant benefit (but how do you apply a cost to emotional stress etc?). It seems almost impossible to assess and apply a monetary value which benefits the community, but nevertheless there must be a way of doing so.

So, if my project was to steer just 1 young person away from "the life of crime"

1) How much is it worth to the Police, Community, Council etc in monetary terms? 2) The potential social impact to the community in less ASB etc must also have a cost saving.

Which (easy to use) tools are available to hard working project leaders like myself to help monitor and accurately evaluate all of the outcomes (with financial savings) so we are able to present to our funders in the hope that they continue to support the programme.

There must be many other projects who have similar issues.

Hi Mark, There are indeed! You raise a really important issue, one which I think concerns many organisations. It was in fact a key point made at a conference I attended recently - the annual conference of South West Forum (who are going to be our partners for our infrastructure work). The event was called 'Value, Voice and Vision' and the opening speaker Sir Harry Studholme spoke on just the point you make - how to put a value on social and environmental issues, ones that aren't typically monetary? (I tweeted about it).

I'm afraid that I don't have concrete answers to give here, but you might be interested in the Measuring Social Value Programme. This discussion on the NCVO website focuses on social media and return on investment, but it might give you some ideas.

I attended a seminar about Measuring Social Impact recently, and heard for the first time about the huge initiative that SRoI appears to be. I may not have all the facts right (so, apologies for that), but what I heard alarms me. My understanding is that SRoI "attempts" to quantify the savings that could be made by investing £1 in a charitable project - in other words, what Mark is trying to get to above. I completely agree that it is a laudable concept, but I am also deeply suspicious about whether it is possible to attempt it in a meaningful way or with any hope of accuracy. I understand that a lot of effort has gone in to developing complex models that attempt to do just that - but the variables are immense, and the chances of achieving a truly useful answer must surely be remote. However - the attraction of an SRoI "answer" is very obvious, and any charity that can afford the time and money to pay an accredited SRoI practitioner to calculate its SRoI will have a winning card in any competition for funding or support; because the funder will always be attracted to the notion of a scientifically calculated "saving" that arises from investing in that project. I am very worried that funding and support decisions will be made on the basis of who can afford to calculate their SRoI, and also those who can afford to pursue the answer to the nth degree in the quest for a spectacular saving. Intuitively, I just don't think it is possible to present "savings" so (apparently) accurately. I have read that SRoI numbers should not be taken as pure "fact", but it is human nature that they will be - what funder would decide in favour of a project that does not present its SRoI, compared to one that does? Or one that has an SRoI of £5, compared to one of £20? Subjectivity, policy change, uniqueness, technological change, the impact of averaging and assumptions - all these and more will have an impact on the SRoI result surely. Can anybody reassure me about my concerns?

I saw some practical examples of something similar to SRoI recently at a lecture at the Natural History Museum - in the field of environmental science. Below is my blog post from the NCVO website about it:

I was lucky enough last night to attend the Natural History Museum's Annual Science Lecture 2009. It was given by Pavan Sukhdev, an economist with the United Nations Environment Programme, and took place in the museum's magnificent Central Hall - complete with bronze diplodocus.

His team are in the process of reporting on "TEEB" (The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity). These reports aim to show that saving the world's environment, whether its tropical forests, coral reefs or fish stocks, is not just a moral imperative, or an aesthetic one, but is also vital to the world's economy.

A hard sell from both sides - with ecologists insisting that you can't put a value on nature and free-marketeers questioning the place for nature in economics -but Pavan put forward a convincing case of the real and measurable value of protecting biodiversity across the world.

In one of many examples he explained how setting up ocean reserves where fishing was prohibited actually led to an increase in the number and size of fish caught in the area. The reserve becomes a breeding ground for fish who would normally be caught young, and their offspring are then caught elsewhere without the same loss in sustainability.

Discussing the lecture in the pub afterwards, my friends and I were thinking that similar ideas could be used to measure the contribution of civil society to the economy. We spend a lot of time measuring the finances of the sector - what does it spend? how does it make money? what are its assets? what is its contribution to GDP? - while the value it has for society is thought of as unmeasurable or in some way above monetary value.

But perhaps in the same way that the value of nature can be found - without degrading its "priceless" qualities - it is possible to measure the wider value of civil society to society and the economy. In many ways we're doing this already - whether through our QMF project, or through work to measure the success and results of charitable activities (see NCVO's work in this area, or NPC's). But as in other fields - this work will only become more important as a new economy takes shape.

Apparently a phrase that has currency at the moment is "theory of change". According to Beth Kanter, this term refers to a fairly new way of evaluating the effectiveness of projects by drawing out the underlying assumptions about how they lead to social change. She explains it as:

"The way you do it is to start with the intervention - in this case - social media - and trace it backwards to your proposed social outcome, behavior change, or action as a result of communication. " Useful? Something you've been looking at? Share your thoughts!