A guide to Social Return on Investment - Learning Ecosystem
Skip to content
Resurse Vizualizare calendar

A guide to Social Return on Investment


Medii digitale

Despre

This is a manual of understanding and implementing S-ROI in your organization.

Every day our actions and activities create and destroy value; they change the world around us. Although the value we create goes far beyond what can be captured in financial terms, this is, for the most part, the only type of value that is measured and accounted for. As a result, things that can be bought and sold take on a greater significance and many important things get left out. Decisions made like this may not be as good as they could be as they are based on incomplete information about full impacts.

Social Return on Investment (S-ROI) is a framework for measuring and accounting for this much broader concept of value; it seeks to reduce inequality and environmental degradation and improve wellbeing by incorporating social, environmental and economic costs and benefits.

SROI measures change in ways that are relevant to the people or organisations that experience or contribute to it. It tells the story of how change is being created by measuring social, environmental and economic outcomes and uses monetary values to represent them.This enables a ratio of benefits to costs to be calculated. For example, a ratio of 3:1 indicates that an investment of £1 delivers £3 of social value.

SROI is about value, rather than money. Money is simply a common unit and as such is a useful and widely accepted way of conveying value.
In the same way that a business plan contains much more information than the financial projections, SROI is much more than just a number. It is a story about change, on which to base decisions, that includes case studies and qualitative, quantitative and financial information.

An SROI analysis can take many different forms. It can encompass the social value generated by an entire organisation, or focus on just one specific aspect of the organisation’s work. There are also a number of ways to organise the ‘doing’ of an SROI. It can be carried out largely as an in-house exercise or, alternatively, can be led by an external researcher.

Înapoi sus