Here at Co-relate, as a team we’re always looking to upskill and expand our practice so we can deliver more for clients. I recently attended the Measuring Social Impact course at the School for Social Entrepreneurs. 

The course is designed to teach how and why to measure social impact. At Co-relate we regularly produce impact reports with the data already gathered for us and this course allows us to step up that work in order to also offer consultation on how organisations might collect better insights.

We recently produced the 2023 social impact report for our long-term partners a Mediorite - and the impact we’ve helped them to communicate has helped them to win several awards last year. See our work on Mediorite’s social impact.

Principles of good impact

The course talked about the principles of good impact; measuring money, our planet and people. 

• How to shift the focus more towards people and the complexities of understanding that accurately. Mapping ways of understanding if change has happened. 
• How to identify and eliminate deadweight; the change that would have happened without interventions. We looked at the validity of scales and their usefulness. 
• How to combat issues like survey fatigue and account for marginal utility skewing your results. 

We explored the limits of cost/benefit analysis. Our course leader, Tim, was great at guiding us through these investigations.

"I was surprised to learn about the response shift bias in pre- and post-test studies that show that without some insight of what you don’t know, there’s no way to measure any concept of that."

Having measured my own impact in the community over the past twelve years, I felt I had a good appreciation for the fundamental principles of how and when to ask questions. When Tim asked whether it was better to analyse a statement before and after an intervention or just after, it was obvious to me that the more data you could gather the better. 

I was surprised to learn about the response shift bias in pre- and post-test studies that show that without some insight of what you don’t know, there’s no way to measure any concept of that. Therefore, the notion of a testing statement like ‘I know 9/20 about how the end of the world will happen’ to indicate progress after this unknown has been revealed to you is a flawed methodology.

This led me to reflect on the true value of data we’d recently analysed that used goal tracking for young people who previous to joining the programme were likely to be limited in their scope of knowledge for what might be possible for them to achieve

Know your limitations

"It is near impossible to say exactly what would have happened had your intervention not happened but that doesn’t mean we can’t claim a fair estimation."

As I’ve previously written reports I’ve found I’m often bogged down by the feeling that we might be over or underclaiming. Quoting John Maynard Keynes, ‘It is better to be vaguely right than precisely wrong,’ a sturdy yet imperfect structure for identifying where one might overclaim was demonstrated to us using a highly amusing role play exercise. 

With this came a level of acceptance for the limitations of all analysis - it is near impossible to say exactly what would have happened had your intervention not happened but that doesn’t mean we can’t claim a fair estimation.

Find the right value

Perhaps most interesting of all to me was the introduction to an approach for what I see as essentially monetising the value of feelings; a concept I am instinctually appalled by but came to see as extremely useful.

You can value carbon by the tonne or by the cost of offsetting a tonne of carbon somewhere else in the economy. Equally, you can list a series of wellbeing outcomes for an individual or you can give an equivalent figure of how much you are likely to have saved the NHS in the cost of medical care.  

Places like the HACT Social Bank have done some of this work for us by providing figures. For example, they say, a person’s level of satisfaction gained from volunteering would match the equivalent rise in wellbeing garnered from a £5,000 increase in salary.

When writing these reports, since it is often funders who we are seeking to communicate our success to, it makes a lot of sense to translate these outputs for them into a monetary value.

Capture the personalities

All of this knowledge shared was grounded in the latest most credible resources, arming us with the evidence to back up our approaches. To close, there was an enjoyable segment our group affectionately termed, 'bring your collie to a Zoom meeting'… When Co-relate come to consult on your social impact we are happy to include this service. 

Learn more

• Find out about the Measuring Social Impact course at The School of Social Entrepreneurs
• Visit HACT Social Bank 

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