Can social impact really be measured? Really?

Can social impact really be measured?

I've been thinking about Rob Edwards' comment on my last blog and have decided it deserves a blog of its own. In his response Rob, reflecting on Magic Breakfast's call for investment of £13 million in a social impact bond that offers £28 million in savings from the additional Government expenditure needed to address the social problems of children too hungry to learn, Rob said, "This is the whole problem with social enterprise. The returns can be somewhat ephemeral, and an awful lot of time and money goes into setting up organisations rather than actually delivering services that people want."


Is this the case? Is measuring social impact ephemeral and therefore too academic to bring into a discussion about investment? Can social enterprises miss the point and make an offer that is not really what people want?


Clearly some people think so and if we are to make any real progress, we have to address these criticisms, and not just by refuting them from the vantage point of the moral high ground, but by generating the data that proves our services are needed and our social return has been critically assessed and properly measured.  


Just after the election I had a meeting with the man put in charge of regeneration in a major Government department, he asked me, "How do we create regeneration and cut spending?"

I advised introducing social impact assessment across the whole department and insisting that the impact of cuts were assessed for their wider social impact and concomitant cost before decisions are made about what stays and what goes. Needless to say he didn't, or couldn't, follow my advice, but I am sticking to my guns, because despite a slow start, members of the Government namely, Nick, Hurd, Francis Maude, Ken Clarke, George Osborne and the Prime Minister himself have shown growing enthusiasm for social impact bonds making this an ideal time to take out the tape measure.


I do appreciate this is not easy. When I started looking into impact measurement I too was baffled and because I found it tough, I made sure SEL had the brains to work it out with people on the team like Ali Somers who devised the first social value balance score card and went on to head up the social impact unit at Goldsmiths. Also, Sabina Khan came to us from the impact assessment team in Lehman Brothers in New York and has since founded the world's leading Social Enterprise Journal, developed  SEL's SIMPLE programme – our how-to guide to assessing which tool is right for you – and launched our fantastically popular Introduction to social impact assessment training. Because SEL has been developing tools with real social enterprises working on the ground, often in the most difficult circumstances, we have come up with solutions that work for busy social entrepreneurs not just academic exercises. The goal has been to move social enterprise from being characterised as warm, fuzzy charity to one where hard evidence shows how it really works.


As times get tougher, the clamour for evidence will get louder. Occupying the moral high ground with its stunning views no longer guarantees any of us a future. Being able to produce data about the exact cost of your product or service and measure its impact will give you future contracts, boost your bottom line and ensure you offer services that, as Rob recommends, "people want". I know because we have done it at SEL and it really, really works, honest Rob.

Sophie's choice or social reformation?

I have a piece in Guardian Public today on asking people what they think about the cuts within the context of using social impact assessment. I know that sounds deathly dull but what I am trying to say is not. If you count more than the financial cost of a service, and instead focus on moneterised social impact, you can prioritise with minimal long-term regret. At the very least you can make the process transparent and one which people can consult on. Without social impact assessment you may cut a service because it looks expensive now, only to find out later that not providing that service has caused a far greater drain on the public purse. Cause and effect, 20/80, the six ‘p’s’.........


Tell me what you think http://www.guardianpublic.co.uk/social-impact-public-services

Another mad weekend, in so many ways.... On Saturday, whilst womaning the book stall at our local primary school I bumped into Zac Goldsmith, see picture below with fellow school mum. Zac was doing his star turn at the Sheen Mount Primary School Fair, much to the delight of the Mum’s. He and I had a quick catch up on an event we are putting on together, next month, to launch a social enterprise hub in Richmond. Strangely enough Richmond has become quite a hotbed of innovative social enterprise activity, to the extent critical mass has been reached. Watch this space.

After the fair, and with my 2 carrier bags of summer reading, I headed home to get back into the garden. My big job this weekend was to dig out the Phyllostachys Nigra (black bamboo) out of my herbaceous border. It was less gardening and more your navying. The shrub had really taken hold, to the extent that by the time I had finished I had enough plants, some of them standing at 20 feet, to fill 2, one metre planters. In the spaces left in the border I had the joy of planting out my homage to the Eden Project, ‘Places for Change garden at Chelsea Flower Show’ 2010 designed by Paul Stone. This garden was put together by 6 groups of homeless people from centres around the UK. It emphasised veg growing, recycling and the more traditional approaches to English gardening using heart warming planting which brought in the usual chic purples, mauves and blues with fiery oranges and yellows, perfect. To achieve this I planted in my newly peat free composted beds, perennial geraniums, Oxalis and Icelandic poppies. I asked one of the exhibitors of the garden about a particularly ice catching Geranuium which turned out to be Sanguineum which I now have 15 dotted around my garden. I finished at 10pm so had to wait for the sun to come up to admire my handy work.

Unfortunately a combination of old, baggy gardening jeans and late night gardening meant I fell foul of mosquitoes. Which in turn leads me to an explanation of this morning’s tweet concerning my bottom (thank you to those who have made enquires). We were at my Mother’s yesterday afternoon where, whilst showing her my fine array of bites, as you do, a wasp flew in through her kitchen window, and unhindered by her, stung me on the arse. On the way home something flew up my trouser leg and bit me on the calf. I am, frankly, feeling got at.

Tomorrow we have our breakfast meeting (08:30 – 10:00) on governance and risk with Price Waterhouse Coopers at 1 Embankment Place, London, WC2N 6RH, which is fully booked but I’m sure we can find room for a few last minute social entrepreneurs if you call the SEL offices (020 7022 1920). My day will conclude at the Acevo New MP’s reception in Westminster, where I have been asked to follow our new Minister, Nick Hurd’s address, with some thoughts about the future opportunities and challenges for the sector as I see them. Any top tips or thoughts on that, as always, will be very gratefully received.

SELing social reformation

It's been quite a week; so much so that it's taken me until now to blog - so I've got a great many things that I want to share with you.

I'll start with the last half an hour and work my way back to the start of the week.

I have been watching the Twitter feed on Bigotgate and whatever you might think of what the PM said and how he and his team subsequently mishandled it, the one issue that is only just surfacing is that very little has been said in defence of the Eastern Europeans in the UK who work hard, pay taxes and nonetheless can't vote.

What's happening in social enterprise? I have to tell you it is frantic, behind the scenes SEL and our members are having a thousand conversations about the changing landscape and how social enterprise is going to deliver social reformation.  As a trained historian I keep coming back to that which went before. What social enterprise is proposing is a Reformation, we want to challenge conventional thinking that neatly divides the world up into business, government and charity. Top of the list are education, health, energy, regeneration and above all money. We can do this, but only with the support of a Government that carefully listens to the detail and helps us put into place the necessary investment.

Today 2000 charity leaders came out in defence of the Future Job Fund. I am not a charity leader but if they had asked me I would have joined them.  At SEL we put together London's Future 500 which is putting over 500 young, unemployed people into social enterprise jobs, and I have to tell you, it is going well.  The applicants are enthusiastic, the employers are being, as you would expect from social entrepreneurs, supportive and early findings show that the number of permenant job offers coming out of the scheme is high. Surely no government could contemplate ending a program like that? Not when all of us fear growing unemployment, particularly in the young.

That is the saddest thing about new governments; change for change's sake. They often think ending things will save money and on the face of it that can be true.  But then the social cost is felt and then they have to invest in a new program to address the problem which ends up being more costly than keeping what was originally there in place. I have seen it in further education, the FEFC becoming the LSC and that being abolished in favour of...well, what?

Last night I had the Tory local authority candidate, Paul Hodgins, on my door step.  I must have been one of the few people he spoke to that evening who had actually read his parties manifesto, as I have poured over all the major parties proposals (incidentally, in return, increasing numbers of candidates are looking at SEL's own manifesto; encouraging) I asked him if their commitment to enabling communities to run local schools would, if they won, lead to something being done about our local school. I have met our local MP Susan Kramer and she seems like a good egg, and yet Shene School remains an unacceptable choice for many local parents.  Having said that Paul didn't seem to share my fury over the shambles that is Richmond secondry education, so I'm not sure he's going to get it sorted either.

On Tuesday we had an amazing event on the crucial issue of social impact assesment.  Like it or not, and despite what anyone says to the contrary, in future there will be more counting.  If its jobs, contribution to GDP or energy consumtion savings there will be more counting and those who get on board with how to do it will be in the strongest position.  The event was held in conjuction with PricewaterhouseCoopers and the London Development Agency and attendees were social entrepreneurs and accountants.  One lot knew all about social impact and the other, measurement and assessment. Combining the thinking of the two is the challenge.  Having been involved in this field for over 4 years and with our resident expert Sabina Khan, SEL's Director of Policy and Research at the helm, we are doing a great deal on this. So if you are interested check out our website for more information.

Finally, a few quick gardening updates.  I have got in my beetroot, salad, chard and carrot seeds, and I am preparing my runner bean beds.  But the crops at the moment are the real highlight of the week.  We have had our first asparagus, delicious and sweet and my purple sprouting is, as you can see from the photo, outstanding!

Both of them have interesting effects on the colour of your wee, so eating them together can provide endless entertainment.  All good clean fun! Talking of which, I'm off now to watch the leadership debate.