Since 2005, Minney.org Ltd now trading as The Social Return Company has helped care organisations to demonstrate value for money. This book organises the case studies and the work we've done. Read on . . .

Quality Checkers reviews the user experience of people who receive support or assistance in their daily life.  But how valuable is this?

The Social Return Company's lead consultant Hugo Minney did a full audit.  It turns out that there are some very definite things that change when you audit user experience, and some of these represent savings of tens or hundreds of thousands of pounts.

These are real savings - money that can be taken out of the system and used elsewhere.  So it is well worth exploring

The Quality Checkers service was developed by Skills for People and delivers checks and training throughout the country. Quality Checkers audits focus on supported living services for adults with learning disabilities to make their own choices and enjoy largely independent lives and the support they receive in their own homes, day services, health services, housing and where people have moved from campus provision. 

Huffington Post published this beautifully presented business case for the true cost of oil

It explains clearly what makes up the price of a gallon of "gasoline", from the price at the pump, through the pollution with greenhouse gases (as cocker spaniel' weight blocks), pollution with other toxic gases, and so on all the way from a price to buy ($5) to a real cost

We 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

SROI is a framework for evaluating a programme or service, to decide whether the resources about be invested (or already invested) are justified. It is mainly used in situations which deliver a social or community benefit - where it has been difficult to justify investing money because the returns aren't shown in financial terms. For example, in a for-profit business, you buy a new machine for your production line because it saves you more in the long term than it costs to buy and maintain. This means you can directly compare the cost with the return and decide whether to invest.

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.

LM3Local 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.