Social Audit

Impact Reporting and Investment Standards (IRIS)

Submitted by Hugo_Minney on Mon, 10/31/2011 - 14:27

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IRIS logo (which isn't available from their web site)

Impact Reporting & Investment Standards, or IRIS, is a common language for describing the social and environmental performance of an organization.  IRIS was developed by Global Impact Investing Network and provides an independent and credible set of metrics for organizations to use when reporting their impact. 

IRIS indicators span an array of performance objectives and include specialized metrics for a range of sectors including financial services, agriculture, and energy. Like financial accounting standards, IRIS provides a basis for performance reporting and organizations need only report on applicable metrics from the IRIS library.

 

How to measure and report Public Good

Submitted by Hugo_Minney on Sun, 06/19/2011 - 23:29

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AlternativesWe want to understand what's good, and what's not so good, in services paid for either by charity funding or through public money.  There are a number of alternative ways of describing value "for the public good", and I'll explore the advantages and disadvantages.  I'll use SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) tables for each one.

I've described this in terms of the Quality Checker report to give an example and bring it to life

 

Measuring Social Impact - Conclusions

Submitted by Hugo_Minney on Sun, 06/19/2011 - 23:28

Social ImpactWe've been on a journey together, looking at why you would want to measure social value, and some of the ways to go about this (read about the journey here).  Now it is time to draw some conclusions.

1. each approach has strengths and weaknesses . . .

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Outcomes approaches eg Charities Evaluation Service

Submitted by Hugo_Minney on Sun, 06/19/2011 - 22:49

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Outcomes approach asks the stakeholder what the benefits are, rather than the organisation  making assumptions.  This gives them much better results because an organisation may not know how much difference it has made, perhaps if the main differences happen after the organisation has left.

Social Audit Network (SAN) Frameworks

Submitted by Hugo_Minney on Sun, 06/19/2011 - 22:38

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Social Audit establishes a team to measure the creation of social good, which includes representatives of the stakeholders.  It is extremely powerful for ensuring that an organisation is clear about its social aims, values and objectives, and that the outcomes or objectives of a particular programme or service are clear and align with the organisation's social aims, values and objectives.  It is a comprehensive framework which allows an organisation to build on existing information systems to account for and report on its social, environmental and economic performance.

Local Multiplier 3 (LM3)

Submitted by Hugo_Minney on Sun, 06/19/2011 - 22:25

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LM3 onlineLM3Local Multiplier 3 (LM3) is a structured way to assess the local impact of a project or organisation, measured in terms of its own spend and the spend of its suppliers and beneficiaries.  In other words, the “3” refers to the number of steps – how much does the project or organisation spend/ give locally, then how much do each of the suppliers or beneficiaries spend locally, etc. 

What is Social Return on Investment (SROI)?

Submitted by Hugo_Minney on Tue, 06/14/2011 - 14:45

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Audit

Hopefully I've whetted your appetite, with the SROI audit of Quality Checkers. Now it's worth explaining a little bit about the SROI audit process (you can compare this with other ways of auditing social good on the next page).

WHY do an SROI audit?

 

SROI is a framework

SROI takes two forms, it can either be an evaluation, or forecast.

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Recent Additions and Updates

PwC Report on the Current State of Project Management

Submitted by Hugo_Minney on Fri, 05/17/2013 - 10:44

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PwC Project Management ReportPwC found that successful companies are getting more mature in their project management ability.  This raises the game – successful companies have lower costs from fewer failed projects, and less successful companies have to work harder to catch up.  There are some important lessons to take this report for everyone – Read more…

Joy instead of tedium

Submitted by Hugo_Minney on Fri, 05/10/2013 - 21:04

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The Office

Every office has them - the tasks that have to be done that nobody likes doing.  Whether it's the audit, the wages, standard letters, whatever it is - someone has to do it and it feels like a waste of time and money.

Why should you care?

So you employ somebody, so why do you care about how tedious the task is? Well they are costing money, to do something that could be done far more effectively.

Learning from the Past

Submitted by HugoM on Fri, 05/10/2013 - 20:27

Evidence for service improvement

Many public service changes have little basis in evidence. Their success (or otherwise) does not appear to depend on how 'good' the policy itself is, but rather on how it has been implemented. This relies on staff attitudes and relationships. My research falls into a number of broad categories: finding out what is currently happening; what people think about it; and what people think it will mean.

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Taxonomy upgrade extras:

Consumer Price Index (CPI) Calculator for SROI

Submitted by Hugo_Minney on Tue, 04/16/2013 - 10:05

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CPI components

When calculating a Social Return on Investment (SROI) evaluation or SROI forecast , sometimes you have to rely on published figures from reports.  But if these are from a few years ago, then they probably need adjusting for inflation.

There are calculators on the web to do this for you, but I found them cumbersome and it was difficult to keep a record of what calculator I'd used, and how, for which value - auditability and transparency is vital for SROI.  So here's a spreadsheet to do this properly!

Leadership and Margaret Thatcher

Submitted by Hugo_Minney on Tue, 04/09/2013 - 14:19

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Margaret Thatcher - a greta leader?

Leadership is one of those characteristics that most people recognise, some people claim, and nobody manages to explain.

We can identify the great leaders from the past and present, and talk about their characteristics, but it is too easy to overlook the hundreds of thousands of people who claimed to be leaders or tried to be leaders, and who shared these characteristics.  We need to identify what the great leaders have that the failures or mediocre leaders don’t have, or we will be no nearer to identifying the characteristics of leadership.

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