A Personal Journey into Social Value
I have been in a fortunate position to work with Social Entrepreneurs for the last 25 years and have always been mesmerized by the good that they do! In the early days, my work with the Royal Voluntary Service, I was inspired by volunteers that would give up their time to work for free, making profit on cups of coffee so that it could fund essential equipment needed by the hospital. It wasn’t just the time they gave; it was the happiness that came with them, the warmth and dedication to the NHS.
Moving on to work with the League of Friends, I found the same hard work and dedication to make life that little bit easier for people visiting hospital, the magic that came out of their work was captivating. These early experiences inspired me to spend my life surrounded by this magic and so I set up my own organisation supporting people who wanted to make a difference and run a business that was capable of generating profit that could be re-invested back into social change.
The magic followed, and for those who know me, I became obsessed – this work took over my life, you see, experiencing the magic is addictive – those who know, know!
My own challenge has been trying to figure out how I can share this magic, it’s a feeling, it’s an experience, well – its magical. And why? Why was it so important?
The people that I met along the way, the diamonds, weren’t millionaires – in fact, they struggled financially, they suffered from a lack of confidence and had experienced life’s traumas yet still wanted to give so much, I wanted to shout from the rooftops for people to give, to support, to VALUE their work, but how exactly could I do this?
Searching for Ways to Prove Social Value
Along came my journey into Accounting for Social Value, my drive being the ability to communicate the worth of these wonderful people, I worked with the NHS for many years on Social Value Commissioning, with the methodology of SROI, whilst it made an attempt to prove the worth of public service contracts, it didn’t quite get there. I studied for my MBA (Social Enterprise) to try and get more answers and was introduced to the Social Audit Network, working with Alan Kay on their Prove and Improve framework showed me how important storytelling was and that capturing the Theory of Change was essential to proving Social Value, but I still wasn’t quite there. So, on I went to undertake my PhD on my plight to be able to showcase the magic that I had experienced through my life.
It was during my study time that I came across blended Social Accounting, throughout the years I’d been left to believe that there was only one way to Account for Social Value and that was set by principles, methodologies, and reporting methods – I realized that I had more work to do.
Using my own framework ‘Accounting for Social Value,’ “ I experimented, played around with different methodologies and ways of reporting that could have the capability to showcase the worth of the Social Entrepreneurs that continued to inspire me daily. I have learnt many things over the last few decades and most importantly that VALUE is in the eyes of the beholder – how can we assume it’s the same for everyone? We all have our own set of values and levels of value. But how do we capture that? It’s easy… we just ask!
Asking the Right Questions
Three key sentences help us understand value more clearly:
What do you value about this activity?
What are you doing differently as a result of this activity?
What has changed as a result of you doing things differently?
We call this process Value Intelligence – being intelligent about what people value about your work, it gives us a benchmark to measure against, it gives us Key Value Indicators (KVI’s).
But of course, there is more work to do to provide an evidence of how we have faired against our KVI’s…..but that’s for another time – watch out for ‘Part 3’.
So… Where is the Value in Social Value?
Back to the initial question ‘Where’s the VALUE in Social Value’ – it’s in front of us, we just need to ask, and we must do to understand the value of our work; it really does help to raise your confidence and shout about the worth of what you do.
Let’s spend time talking to people instead of following complicated frameworks that only aim to tick our funders, commissioners, investors boxes and in fact tell us nothing about Social Value.
Social Entrepreneurs be bold, be proud, be your wonderful, magical self always!
You can find out more about Accounting for Social Value here: https://profitforpurpose.co.uk/our-work/business-services/social-accounting/