Sooo, the article for the week is...How to measure social impact?
It is increasingly more important to have a standard procedures to measure social success of social enterprises as in this day and age, we see more of such businesses.
Moreover, it is more important or minimally equally important to have both the social and financial aspect adequately analysed.
The article proposed a few methods of analysis, of which two are an extension of the IRIS system.
IRIS (Impact Reporting and Investment Standards)
- Organization Description – metrics that focus on the organization’s mission, operational model, and location
- Product Description - metrics that describe the organization’s products and services and target markets
- Financial Performance – commonly reported financial metrics
- Operational Impact – metrics that describe the organization’s policies, employees, and environmental performance
- Product Impact – metrics that describe the performance and reach of the organization’s products and services
- Glossary - definitions for common terms that are referenced in the metrics (Ip, 2012, para.7)This internal tool helps to standardise impact reporting and thus measures impact more effectively. Though this method is not unique to social enterprises, it is a set of performance measures that can be used to describe social and environmental performances.
In my opinion, it is good to have such measurements. But to improve the governance of social enterprises, the measures should be further developed. Currently the above stated measures are not specific to social enterprises, perhaps in the future there will be standardised social and environmental measures that can be implemented across all social enterprises. I believe other factors such as impact on beneficiaries can be included in as well, though it may be a little difficult to measure environmental impact (no. of trees dying???!!!).. I am sure though that some day, someone will develop a comprehensive and detailed set of analysis methods. Could it be you?
References
http://www.socialenterprisebuzz.com/2012/10/16/how-to-measure-social-impact/
Hi Grace,
ReplyDeleteI agree with your points. It is hard to come up with standard measurements for social impacts made by the SEs because different SEs have different goals and public are looking for different things. Thus hard to please everyone but there must be some measurements if not anyone can claim that they are a social enterprise.
For me, I would think that it is more important to make sure that the beneficiaries are able to walk out of their current situation and lead a better life with higher standard of living. The number of beneficiaries do not matters to me; the quality of help is the one I am looking out for.
If a social enterprise, provides fish instead of teaching them the skill of fishing. I don’t see a difference between them and charity.
Don’t you agree? (:
Jia Ning