Nicola Lynch, Independent Social Value Consultant & Impact Management Specialist
What does social value mean to you?
The answer to what is social value is a relatively easy one for me, because I fully buy into the definition we use within the social value international community.
And our definition of social value is the importance that people place on different aspects of their wellbeing, and the changes in those aspects of wellbeing. For me, it is a deeply important statement about the right of stakeholders to own their wellbeing, to express what matters to them in terms of their wellbeing, and to have decisions take that into account.
It's about centring the voices of those most impacted when we're making decisions.
My view of social value isn't shaped by procurement legislation, and I think that's a great privilege. I think a lot of people get stuck in a narrow view of social value, which is entirely procurement focused. And I do believe that procurement still has the potential to be a lever for generating social value and improving wellbeing, but it's not the genesis or the end point of social value. Social value is bigger and exists well beyond the walls of procurement.
Fundamentally the bookends of our social value principles are to involve our stakeholders and to be responsive, understand what matters to people and do something about it.
Can you talk a bit about the Principles of Social Value and how tools can be used to measure them?
The principles are there to help us understand how we impact people's wellbeing, understand where we're creating positive and negative impact, and do something about it.
That can apply in every possible situation you can think of. Whether it's running a business, running a charity, procuring, whatever activity you might be doing, you can apply the social value principles to it. The reason that I find the principles so useful is that they exist in a way that is framework agnostic.
We talk about involving our stakeholders, understand what changes for them, value the things that matter from the stakeholder’s perspective, be responsible.
All these great principles are there, but none of them say use this tool or take that approach, use that framework. Some of us within our space are social return on investment practitioners, and SROI is one way in which you can deliver a process that adheres to the social value principles. But you don't have to use SROI to apply the social value principles. You can use any tool you want as long as it is responsive to the needs of your stakeholders and actually gets you somewhere useful.
Remembering the social value principles are key for me here. That definition of social value that cites it completely in people's ownership of their wellbeing is so deeply important, and where so many of the tools and methods can fail.
Can you explain the difference between inputs, outputs, outcomes, impact, and value?
This is why I became interested in this space in the first place, this key difference between outputs and outcomes.
What I often use in my training is a very simple flowchart that goes from inputs, activities, and outputs through to outcomes, impact, and value. And what we tend to do in most of our frameworks, which is quite limiting, is stop at outputs.
We'll describe the resources required to deliver an activity or intervention. We'll describe the activity itself, and we'll describe the quantitative result of that activity. We'll say a training course was delivered and X number of people passed it or achieved the qualification. This is also where things like the number of jobs created sit. We’ll get this far, the output box, and that's often where we stop because the next question is: what difference did that make? And that's hard. It's a hard question to ask. It's a hard question to answer. It's a very hard thing to measure. But if we keep stopping at outputs, we're going to just be repeating the behaviours that got us here. And not generating any change in these wider systems that desperately need it.
Outcomes, we talk about within the social value international movement as the impact on wellbeing. The changes people experience in their wellbeing as a result of an activity. That's the outcome.
Impact is an assessment of that outcome when we ask some other key questions, and they have bits of jargon attached like dead weight and counterfactual. The kind of questions we're talking about to establish impact are; what would have happened anyway, which is a really important one in the corporate social value space, and who else contributed to that change?
So, we have an outcome that is increased confidence, for example. We want to know how much of that confidence increase would have happened anyway if we hadn't done the thing we did. Who else contributed to that generation of increased confidence? We also have some other stuff we tend to look at in terms of duration and drop off to get a sense of how the longevity of outcomes has changed.
Value then takes another step beyond impact and goes not only what change happened and how much of it do we think was due to us and what we did. Value asks, did it matter? Who values this? And who's deciding what is important and what matters?
That for me is the political and ideological piece that got me interested in social value in the first place.
Not only are we pushing beyond outputs and outcomes, we're pushing into impact and also asking some more questions about power and ownership - who values what?
Principle number three; value the things that matter from the stakeholder perspective.
What is a theory of change and a logic model? What is the difference?
Theories of change are generally ways in which we plan for impact.
There are ways in which we look at the activity or the intervention we're proposing and think about the outcomes and the impact that we're going to generate through that activity. Traditionally, they're the kind of thing you wrote behind a desk on your own to put in a funding bid.
What we encourage people to do in line with the social value principles is co-produce your theories of change. If you want to create a particular change and you want to see a particular change in the world, sit with the people impacted by whatever you're proposing and co-create that articulation.
Logic models are a kind of theory of change, but they strain more into evaluation space in that what they start to do is add in indicators of change. And they are generally much more about establishing the kind of things you're going to measure. Usually in a way that's more output focused.
Logic models also don't go into articulating your assumptions and your situation and your enablers and your preventers and all these things that theories of change do. There are both mechanisms for describing how you're going to rate logic. How you're going to generate change through an activity or intervention, that's what they're designed to do.
They're both slightly different. What I always ask people to do if they're considering theories of change and logic models is to think about the audience and the purpose. What are you trying to do when you do this? They're both mechanisms or pieces you can use as part of your impact management puzzle overall.
The important piece with all these elements that you might use within an impact management process is to test them against the social value principles. What the principles do is give you a way in which to test all these different methods and models and approaches.
Whether it's an old school tool like theory of change or whether it's a new digital platform, hold on to the social value principles as a way of testing the utility of whatever tool or method you're looking at, because often they will feel the test in some areas against the principles, and that will generate information you can use about what's really going to be useful to you to generate and evaluate social value.
Resources:
The Principles of Social Value
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