Jun 27, 2022 | Conal Love
Social value is now a core part of winning public sector bids, and is increasingly important for private sector companies. With sustainability weighting up to 20% of your scoring, and social value accounting for almost 10% of that score under PPN 06/20, ensuring your business is making a social impact, but more importantly reporting on it, is crucial for competitiveness.
What is social value however, and how do you measure it? Let’s discuss.
What is Social Value?
“Social value is the quantification of the relative importance that people place on the changes they experience in their lives. Some, but not all this value is captured in market prices. It is important to consider and measure this social value from the perspective of those affected by an organisation’s work.”
Put simply, social value is the tangible market value associated with positive social impacts of businesses on their stakeholders’ lives – whether that be supporting charities with donations, volunteering, apprenticeships, placements and so on.
The key challenge for social value reporting is the lack of consistency in approach across the UK within frameworks – trying to establish a concurrent way of reporting can be difficult.
Moreover, when it comes attaching monetary and financial proxies such as in the SROI model, determining how to value activities can be a real challenge for business professionals, and may lead to certain activities being weighed too heavily in their impact.
Keep it simple – start with what you do, measure it, monitor it and report, then consider how to build that into frameworks. That’s exactly how we work at SustainIQ.
SustainIQ – Internal & External social value
Using two of our pillars – People, Health & Diversity and Community Engagement & Partnering – SustainIQ makes it simple for companies to measure, monitor & report on their social value activity.
People, Health & Diversity
SustainIQ’s People, Health & Diversity pillar helps businesses report on their internal social value.
Using our mobile app, easily input or pull data with API connectivity on apprenticeships, health & wellbeing, and diversity & inclusion actions, as well as training and health and safety initiatives.
With SustainIQ reporting, you can then break down:
- Amount of training hours, wellbeing hours, apprenticeship hours
- The cost of those activities
- Beneficiaries, causes or themes of those activities
Analyse by site level or company level, allowing for quick comparison across the organisation, and allow for opportunities to create more social value to be easily identified.
Community Engagement & Partnering
SustainIQ’s Community Engagement & Partnering pillar helps organisations report on external social value with ease.
Again, using our mobile or web app, input or pull data with API connectivity on community initiatives, volunteering hours, charity donations, education engagement and leadership examples.
More importantly, with our all-new community engagement planner, set plans, goals and measure toward them on a site and company level, allowing for internal benchmarking and performance monitoring.
With our community pillar, report on aspects like:
- Amount of volunteering, community hours & initiatives
- Product and financial donations to charities
- Engagements with education
- Beneficiaries of causes
Increasing competitiveness
When bidding for public sector work, you can use SustainIQ’s instant reporting as evidence of your social value impact on a site or company level, making it easy for public sector authorities to award your organisation maximum points in social value weighting.
More importantly, once on site SustainIQ can help you take the lead to showcase the social value of the project to the local authority client, with active real-time reporting from project launch to handover.
SustainIQ provides all this functionality, as well as the added ability for Environmental & Procurement reporting – the perfect all-in-one ESG solution.
Discover how SustainIQ could work for resolving your social value reporting challenges – reach out to us or drop an e-mail to [email protected].
Related blogs or resources
When bidding for public sector work, you can use SustainIQ’s instant reporting as evidence of your social value impact on a site or company level, making it easy for public sector authorities to award your organisation maximum points in social value weighting.
More importantly, once on site SustainIQ can help you take the lead to showcase the social value of the project to the local authority client, with active real-time reporting from project launch to handover.