News

SROI Exchange 30 May

New Reports from Northern Ireland posted in Case Studies

Stage 1

What impacts, which will you manage and report on

Who are your stakeholders?

The organisations, people or communities who are likely to be effected by the activities of your organisation, programme or policy.

Are you evaluating historic performance or projecting future performance?

Historic evaluation may include future projections of  impact on stakeholders. Future projections may be based on historic performance.

Have you decided to focus on only part of your organisation's activity, the whole organisations activity or a new investment where there will be benefits for several years (eg new building)?
What do they want to achieve in their relationship with you?

Describe achievement as their objectives (direct outcome)
Develop and test with a small sample of stakeholders
Identify any unintended consequences (indirect outcome) both positive and negative

Is the value of these already captured in your financial transactions?

If yes drop this objective or consequence from the analysis

Does this achievement depend on activities within your organisation that you had wanted to exclude from the analysis?
Does this achievement depend on other organisations?

If yes realise that the value gained by the stakeholder will need to be shared with other activities and organisations (attribution)

Decide if all stakeholders will be included in the next question?
Decide if all outcomes will be included (or are you focusing on only some of your activities or some of the outcomes identified by stakeholders)?

This process of selection requires an assessment of materiality. All outcomes which are material should be included. An outcome is material if its exclusion would lead to a stakeholder making a different decision as a result

Can you develop an impact map for the objectives?

Describe the way in which you contribute to achieving outcomes in terms of inputs and outputs leading to this outcome
For each stakeholder, each of their outcomes (sometimes linked to an indirect outcome) map against the inputs and the outputs.
Where you have identified other organisations that are involved in achieving the outcome, these may already be stakeholders. In this case there will be an impact map for the stakeholder and they will appear again as providing inputs and outputs that contribute to the outcome for another stakeholder.

What are the indicators for each of these outcomes?
How will you estimate what would have happened anyway?

It would have happened anyway if your outcomes are at the cost of another organisation (displacement)
Or if the stakeholder would have found other ways of achieving their desired outcome (deadweight)
You will need benchmarks, indicators of the outcome gained from a control group to estimate this
These indicators allow you to report on the impact, the outcomes less what would have happened anyway

Where will you get the information for your outcomes and the information you need to estimate impact?
Have you decided to drop out any outcomes because of difficulties in gaining data?
What financial proxy are you going to use for each outcome?
Have you decided not to monetise any indicators?
How much does it cost?

If you are only including some activities, you need to analyse your costs and allocate costs between those relevant to the activities and those that are not relevant
If you have recognised that some of outcomes depended on activities that you were not planning to include, the relevant share of the costs of these activities will also be included
If you are only including some stakeholders or some of their outcomes (and possibly therefore only some of your activities, you need to analyse your costs and allocate costs between those relevant to the activities stakeholders and outcomes you are analysing and those that are not relevant
(It would be possible to then group the analysis of costs by stakeholder outcome according to whether these outcomes are social or environmental or economic)
If the outcome depended on activities of other organisations you could either include the relevant costs from these organisations and then report on the value of the total benefit compared to total cost and your share based on your share of cost,
Or you could attribute the outcome between the organisation so that your total relevant costs are being compared with your share of the outcome

You can now write up a plan and assess how much time or other resources it will take to complete the analysis

Stage 2

Collecting information

From existing information systems in your organisation

This may be summary transaction information - how many people
This may be information collected from stakeholders in the course of your work

From new research with stakeholders
From external sources necessary for benchmarking

Reassess the plan against what it was possible to collect.

You may have had to revise outcomes as a result of more more detailed engagement with stakeholders, use other indicators where they were found to be for example more accurate or cost effective, use benchmarks which are not as representative of your stakeholders as you would have wanted

Stage 3

Reporting

Bear in mind that the report is prepared on behalf of stakeholder not for the organisation. This may need section for each stakeholder or be presented in different formats or styles

Write up the results of stage 1 and 2
Summarise financial values of direct and indirect outcomes
Summarise costs
Project costs and benefits into the future over the period that you expect them to occur
Calculate NPV, Social Ratio, Payback period
Analyse these by stakeholder if required
If analysis is of several organisations work in achieving an outcome, analyse these indicators by organisation
Complete the report to include social return

SOCIAL RETURN OF INVESTMENT european network