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Measuring Social Value 

The Office of the Third Sector (OTS)’s Measuring Social Value project aims to increase the capability of third sector organisations to understand, measure, prove and articulate the social and environmental impact they have, and the value this creates. It also aims to support social investors and commissioners of public services to understand this social value and thereby make more intelligent investment or purchasing decisions.

The project builds on existing work on impact measurement, and focuses on increasing the accessibility and affordability of using Social Return on Investment (SROI), by:

• Standardising the approach to using SROI
• Increasing the accessibility and affodability of SROI for comissioners, social investors, policy makers and third sector organisations
• Developing a network of practitioners to raise awareness of SROI and social reporting

The project is being delivered by the SROI Network [external link], with New Philanthropy Capital, New Economics Foundation, Charities Evaluation Services and National Council of Voluntary Organisations as members. Further details on who's involved in the project and how you can be updated and attend SROI events can be found here: Who's involved?

One of the project outputs is a new set of guides on  Social Return on Investment (SROI):

The Guide to Social Return on Investment is a guide to the methodology used for SROI, and includes a toolkit and work book. You can download a free copy of the guide here:
 
• Download the Guide for Social Return on Investment [external website]

This is supplemented by three further guides:

• 'Social Return on Investment – an introduction' gives an overview of SROI, what it can do for organisations, commissioners and investors and signposts where more information and support can be found.
• 'Social Return on Investment - and commissioning' explains how SROI can be used by commissioners and helps commissioners to use SROI to achieve more social value when commissioning services.
• 'Social Return on Investment – for social investing' explains how SROI can be used by investors if they want to integrate SROI approaches into investment decisions to help them decide which investment will achieve the most social impact.

For more information and to download copies of the guides, visit:

• Downloand the supplementary guides on SROI [external website]

The project is being run alongside a complementary project funded by the Scottish Government’s Third Sector Division (TSD). The Scottish Government’s project has responsibility for the development of a SROI portal of financial indicators and new training materials for practitioners.

For more information on the Scottish Government’s SROI project, visit:

• The SROI project [external website]
  

Further background on the project and OTS development work on SROI can be found below together with details of hoe the OTS will be working with HM Treasury to explore how SROI can be integrated into Green Book methodology.

• Further background
• HM Treasury's Green Book