My answer.......YES! But it should never be your primary focus!
Of course SROI is important, being able to show financial value to the impact you have in society is crucial, especially in these days of private investment and Big Society over public spending. But i think there is a great danger of industry/community support organisations, social enterprises, charities and any other service deliverer for that matter becoming bogged down with the fear of not showing a high ROI.
My advice ... remember the problem you are trying to solve, focus on that and work your way back. Ask yourself the following questions:
- What is my service going to change? What is it going to improve? What is my Impact!
- What behaviours need to change to make that improvement? What is my impact!
- What do I need to deliver to affect that behaviour? What is my impact!
- How will people feel about what I am delivering? What is my impact!
A chain of impact
My first point - it’s all about impact! Building a chain of impact as shown below creates the link to ROI. In order to reach the ROI select the attributes of your impact that can be converted into financial value, but consider your impact first.
Consider this chain of impact and map out needs and objectives for each stage. For example:
Business versus society
When measuring ROI for programmes within vision+media this is the approach I take. As an industry support organisation it easy to know what impact creates ROI, we look at jobs created, increased turnover, capital investment, improved performance etc etc etc. However the path used to get there is no different to that of any service deliverer. We develop programme, deliver skills, influence behaviours and measure impact.
The trick for social enterprise or community support organisations is to identify attributes early, by asking yourself that first question, what are you going to change or improve?
If you are going to improve school attendance, what is the cost of absenteeism? If you are reducing service dependency, what is the cost of service use? This leads to my second point – get the facts! They are out there. Research exists that has standard values for social costs such as the ones mentioned above. Find it, record your changes and improvements and apply the values to it.
So, to round all this up. . . . Is SROI important? Yes. Is impact more important? Yes. Remember the problem you are trying to solve, map your impact, get the facts and you can evidence your return on investment.
