What’s the Best Way to Measure Social Value?

Delivering social value through a local authority property services partnership seems like a natural thing to do. Organisations working with and within communities are ideally placed to offer practical and meaningful support to those communities.

But how do you evaluate social value both during the tender process and while the contract is being delivered? Put another way, can you know how valuable something is without measuring it?

Objective Measurement

Anecdotal reporting is fine, up to a point. And whatever the numbers and statistics say it’s always helpful to see the human stories that lie behind them. But ultimately you need data that is objective and verifiable.

Osborne has always been committed to delivering social value. We have a proud track record of supporting local community groups, schools, colleges, individuals and SME businesses. We also have targets for social value delivery as part of our strategic business plan and annual reporting.

The breakthrough was when we found a tool that allowed us to easily capture, quantify and report on our social value contribution.

How We Use Thrive

To ensure there’s substance behind the objectives Osborne adopted the Thrive tool to measure the social value we deliver across our business units. This offers our customers complete transparency and allows us to track whether we are delivering our commitments.

The tool is aligned with the government’s Social Value Model and the UN Sustainable Development Goals. It uses a standardised methodology to calculate a numerical value across several dimensions including the following:

• Local value – including spend with local businesses, and job creation.
• Employment, education and skills – including work placements, apprenticeships and work with schools and colleges.
• Sustainability – including actions to reduce our use of fossil fuels, carbon reduction, biodiversity and support for environmental programmes.
• Social, wellbeing and community – including fundraising and time and materials donated to support community groups.

Adopting Thrive has been transformational. It brings greater clarity to our social efforts so that we can report our contributions with confidence and have a clear measurement to ensure we continue to make year-on-year progress.

To find out more about how we use Thrive to record and quantify our social value contribution contact Jo Fletcher ([email protected]) or visit our resource centre.