Episode 9
Measuring your social impact
This is the next stage of your journey. Now that you've got the groundwork sorted for a lot of the structural elements of your social enterprise, it's time to think about how to considerately and efficiently manage the social impact work you are looking to do. Here, it's important to have a holistically sensitive approach with precise mechanisms that help you orchestrate this. This episode will explain the importance of making these inclusion, accessibility and ethical considerations and then help you to personalise some procedures you can use in your social enterprise.
Social Entrepreneurs Discuss
Further Reading
As the video mentioned, measuring social impact is not always about undertaking the same approach to all stakeholders. In this section, we will provide some information about the flexibility needed to adapt to a wide range of beneficiaries with varying lived experiences, strengths, and abilities.
Firstly, think about your beneficiaries and their needs and wishes. Not all methods of collecting impact and outcomes must be the same. Have a holistic think about the change you are creating and w...
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As the video mentioned, measuring social impact is not always about undertaking the same approach to all stakeholders. In this section, we will provide some information about the flexibility needed to adapt to a wide range of beneficiaries with varying lived experiences, strengths, and abilities.
Firstly, think about your beneficiaries and their needs and wishes. Not all methods of collecting impact and outcomes must be the same. Have a holistic think about the change you are creating and what might be the most important changes you have made in the lives of your stakeholders. Then think about the design of your methodology. Is it inclusive, accessible, and non-assumptive? Is it aligned with your overarching objectives and what you are trying to achieve as an organisation?
Then think about consent. It's good practice to have a consent form (there’s a template linked in the resources that we'll ask you to personalise as part of this lesson's activities). Still, consent can be fluid depending on the cognitive understanding of the individual. If you work with more marginalised individuals, you may want to take extra steps to make sure that you aren't just implementing a tick box process, but are instead reaching out, engaging and creating the fairest possible process you can. If you feel that your beneficiaries cannot consent, you may also want to speak with their support workers, carers and guardians to understand the impact that your services have had on their lives.
While collecting data, be careful not to isolate the beneficiaries you work with because your modes of data collection are not inclusive or accessible enough or are out of sync with the aims and vision of your organisation.
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Resources
Showcases the services offered by the social enterprise Lingo Flamingo,
The third comprehensive account of social enterprise activity in Scotland. It provides a good overview of the key facts and dissects some of the quantitative data.
This is a basic template of a consent form that you'll use as a basis for your social enterprise's own consent form. You'll create this as part of this lesson's activities. You can have a look online at other examples to see if there's any other sections you might want that are missing or constructed differently in this template.
Activities
Today's activities will ask you to flesh out the formalisation of the procedures you can use to make sure your social enterprise is being considerate of inclusion, accessibility and ethical requirements.
Episode Summary
Try your best to enjoy and take pride in the collection of social impact. It’s something which can fall by the wayside, as income generation is often prioritised for the purposes of the sustainability of your organisation. The desire to create social change is highly likely why you are starting a social enterprise in the first place, so don’t let social impact measurement pass you by.
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