How far is my social impact reporting really ‘fit for purpose’…?
Most people may be aware that to my knowledge I’m the only freelance consultant globally to openly and annually publish a social impact report on myself. And while it attracts widespread interest and applause every time I do, I always struggle to make sense of how well the framework I’ve developed is ‘fit for purpose’ (there is no reporting standard for sole traders), and how far I should take pride in my ‘results’ (no other freelance consultants’ generate impact reports to hold mine against).
While I’ve started to make some firm plans for addressing the bench-marking of results question from next year, I took the opportunity to take the Social Value Self Assessment Tool to see how well I’ve actually thought through my framework, measures, and overall approach — https://socialvalueselfassessmenttool.org
Like all ‘multiple choice quizzes’ there’s some assumptions and bias in the questions which I recognise — it assumes that you’re incorporated with staff (I’m not), that you have ongoing contact with a core group of customers (I very rarely do), and that you have a small number of activities you offer support through (I have lots…). However, it’s a useful starting point and echoes some of what I already suspected: that I’m highly transparent, but struggle to engage stakeholders over the long-term and so have access to wider data sets to help identify how far my contributions contributed to the final generated impacts clients tell me about:
So — an overall ‘score’ of 56% may not seem great. But the tool allows you to benchmark your overall result against a number of others by sector, turnover, and type of activity.
Bench-marking my result against these others in this way suddenly shows that actually 56% means I’m still showing leading practice in how I’m going about reporting my social impacts:
- Similar aged businesses to mine = 30%
- Private businesses in general = 31%
- Other businesses with a similar turnover to me = 34%
- Other businesses offering enterprise support = 21%
- All UK based organisations = 33%
So — all in all, still room for improvement (which stops me getting complacent), but potentially ‘top of the class’?
