Week 8: Measuring Social Impact

In today’s post, I will be sharing with you my view on how social enterprises measures social impact. Indeed, there are more and more SEs in the world are trying their very best to make the world a better place to live in, to increase the awareness of social value for their investors and consumers and creates a better understanding of the way social issues are perceived and addressed.

But how do we know if these social enterprises are really doing good. I believe that more and more consumers and investors would want to know how these social enterprises measure their social and community impact. But we cannot measure it using the way corporates measures profits, yet, we need to find out the ways to measure such social efforts made. Therefore, many social enterprises measure the number of people they have ‘helped’. 

Even though the reality is focus on the sustainability of the social enterprises and little is known to measure the worth of social enterprises. We hope that every social entrepreneur will still continue to be firm and walk towards their social mission to attain real change in the society.

Traditionally, many organizations increase their impact by focusing on expanding and setting up new sites. However, it may not be the right thing for social enterprise to do. Even though it has been typical to judge the success of social enterprise by how rapidly it has grown but this comes with challenges that might be very difficult for social enterprises that have just started. This is so as by expanding, it requires a lot of money and it may also require social enterprise to give up part of its ownership and control.

For normal businesses it is the profits that count but for social enterprises, it is the number of people they helped that count. But society has a common perception that social enterprises solve society’s “big problems” created a predisposition toward “bigger is better”. But it is more important to find good approaches or ideas to maximize the number of people that benefit. Many do not realize the importance of measuring social impact of social enterprises; this is so as they do not realize that by ‘teaching them the skill to survive in the world today would benefit more than providing them with food. Therefore, what social entrepreneurs actually need is a more useful measure of social impact that merges both the quantity (number of people) and quality (how deeply lives are transformed) of impact.

There has not been a really accurate way to define the success in the social enterprise sector thus far. Hence, I think that we should consider how social enterprises could maximize their impact through building networks, sharing knowledge and supporting others to replicate and adapt approaches. One of the ways is the network of social entrepreneurs; it is definitely one major factor that would generate more opportunities for substantial impact than a social enterprise alone can with its limited resources.

This is so as they can connect people from business groups or non-profit groups together. With the help from both sides, there will be more opportunity for social enterprises to create a social enterprise-friendly business environment which brings greater magnitude of social impact. And also, by measuring it at the network level is more accessible and easier for social entrepreneurs.

References:

The Information Daily. (2012, April 25). ‘UK Social Enterprise: Growth is not the only way to increase impact, says social enterprise research’. The Information Daily. Retrieved December 14, 2012, from http://www.egovmonitor.com/node/49417