So relieved to hear that Jen. I have sat in communities where the NGO community leader was trying to do just that, explain SROI. You should’ve seen the blank stares and I felt so bad for the community members. One of them just rolled her eyes and said “nosebleed”…
Transparency about social impact is important. Many times we don’t have all the answers and need to be honest about that. Often we know the direction of travel but not exactly how to get there. Transparency about failures as well as successes is important. Companies should be able to be open about their failures as well as successes. Increasingly senior leaders are being open about it and this needs to continue…
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that is assuming investors need it…but why won´t the underlying enterprise use it? if they don´t see value in it, little will be done…
I do think that to create a single, completely interoperable social value is not an exercise that will yield much benefit. To say that one company has 3 units of social impact and another has 4 is a bit futile. I do think that in some areas we can create more universal and global standards. It’s more that I think a top down approach to standards setting does not seem to empirically work quite well when it comes to very actionable and usable information. So we need to continue to nurture it in the field and hopefully standards will converge and some standards will win out over others to begin to create more universal standards.
I do think we will always have subsector standards. Impact in education looks different than in workforce than in environmental impacts. We need to treat them differently.
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This ties into earlier questions about defining impact. Some of us view it as neutral - negative and positive. And if you want to avoid negative impacts, affected people would be the key stakeholders and they may or may not be end users.
I agree - the reporting/ disclosure piece is as important as the measuring. and needs to be honest about the challenges
Yikes! I’m happy to share all of the information I’ve collected with you. I had a call with Social Progress last week https://www.socialprogress.org/ They seem to be making progress with governments, business et al.
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I too would be very interested in learning more about this.
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Third and final question of the day:
Q3. a) Where are the current gaps in social impact measurement?
Q3. b) And what could be some of the possible solutions to these?
Understood, I guess it depends on the service / product you offer, but also on how actionnable it is. There currently are two views on impact measurement:
- Client satisfaction (careful, not the same!)
- Academic view (traditional RCTs analysis of impact): it is a broader overview, but difficult to act upon it
- Link business offering to client “performance”: for us, this is impact, and how we have measured it.
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A3: I think the biggest gap is data standards and data sharing to allow impact measurement to be done at scale. Until we can do this work at scale and compare the impacts of various programs and interventions it will be extremely challenging for impact measurement to really drive increased impact.
New efforts that promote data governance and the sharing of private information in ethical ways, like data trusts, is important. This is allowing multiple organizations to share information securely and ethically.
We need funders to step up and not create standards but support the creation of data standards in the areas they work. This kind of data infrastructure work is massively underfunded.
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A3: I think in some places companies are using the wrong proxies for impact - for example ‘taxes paid’ or ‘wages paid’. Taxes and wages are two key elements in terms of social impact, but they must be seen in light of their context. For example, total salaries paid is meaningless without knowing the number of staff, their geographies etc. More useful would be to also know the proportion of employees paid a living wage that has been developed for a particular geography. Similarly for tax. Tax revenues enable governments to protect, develop and care for their people. Aggressive tax policies severely undermine any claims of positive social impact. Total tax paid is a pointless measure without knowing things like the proportion of taxes paid in regions where the value is created or where the work is done.
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Fully agree! assuming people share the data and findings, which is not always the case.
I think there can be gaps in agreeing what a ‘good’ social impact is. Unlike environmental impacts where good usually means ‘no impact’. And what good looks like may be different for individuals/ communities, e.g. some people in a host community might welcome the job opportunities provided by a new mine; others won’t.
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Data sharing is super important and why we need to create more standards and better governance models to facilitate it. The work BrightHive.io is doing around data trusts is really interesting for this.
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linked to your point and A3 - A second point is that much of the impact of companies happens in the extended supply chain, but too many companies do not put the resources into understanding and mapping their supply chain. The problem of quantifying impact won’t be solved by coming up with a list of indicators and metrics alone. Supply chain mapping and sharing those data sets would be a good start.
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At the ecosystem level, the field of impact measurement has evolved considerably in the last few years especially with the IMP Structured Network arriving at a global convergence on how we understand and describe impact. One gap that persists is the availability of comparable data and benchmarks against already developed standards and frameworks. Solutions such as World Benchmarking Alliance’s benchmarks should over time will that gap. There are also other actors working on impact monetization and standardization of data that will refine the field with more rigorous assessments.
At the company level, we continue to see businesses struggling with understanding which standards, tools and reporting frameworks are relevant for them. At the Business Call to Action we guide businesses and help them navigate the available standards and principles to develop an impact measurement and management approach suited to their needs and purpose.
Another challenge companies face is the time and money resources needed to accurately and consistently manage impact. One way to overcome this challenge of resources is to find more ways to leverage technologies to reduce the cost of gathering evidence. BCtA designed Impact Lab, a free online platform for measuring impact on SDGs to subsidize impact management for businesses for example. The Impact Lab guides companies on developing impact plans focused on decisions that can improve the business. When the scope of evidence gathering is narrowed down to what will make better business decisions, we begin to see less resource-intensive impact management in practice.
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A3: Some of it was already brought up in this discussions when answering Q2, but from my experience, what we struggle the most with is:
Aggregating the impact of seemingly unrelated propositions together : The propositions, products and services that I work with have widely different orders of magnitude. For example I work with propositions in the retail bank that affect our individual customers but I also work with investment bank and our largest corporate clients. Both propositions might be in the financial inclusion space, but the scale and reach of the impact (and the commercial metrics as well) is vastly different.
How do we measure beyond linear impact?: Again, speaking from my own struggles, we can report what has been the direct effect of any given proposition – but it is a lot more difficult to infer anything beyond that. And equally, just because we have facilitated something through financing, does that mean that we can ‘attribute’ ourselves all the impact that has been achieved?
Sorry this is not really touching on the solutions but keen to hear everybody else’s views.
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I think there is a steady move towards your first definition. The British Academy’s ‘Future of the Corporation’ program has done a ton of work on this: https://www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/programmes/future-of-the-corporation
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Q3. a) gaps: Transparency and actual cases of how impact measurement has been used to implement change. There are few current cases of actual ongoing- measurement that has “shifted the needle”.
The main challenge in impact for use is: scale and time-horizons. Impact takes time! and real-deep impact is often not at scale. how can we design short-term projects thet help effectively manage and implement impact-oriented solutions?
Q3. b) And what could be some of the possible solutions to these?
Applied research and more collaboration.
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