We'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.  Now it is time to draw some conclusions.

This page is part of a longer article on how best to measure and report social good.  I hope you enjoy it and I'd be delighted with comment and criticism.  You can find out more about the whole series at this page.

1. Each approach has strengths and weaknesses, and many are required in specific environments - especially true of specialist assessments like EIA
2. Low resource approaches can be valuable for early assessments of viability before the resource is committed to planning and a full forecast
3. Organisations may be put off by the amount of time and effort - however at < 10% of the total cost of a commissioned service it is probably money well spent on evaluation to make sure it is achieving the desired outcomes, and the amount is often much less than this
4. Social Auditing applies to the whole organisation and helps to clarify the social good aims, and ensure that staff, volunteers and stakeholders focus on the social good to be achieved.  Social Audit reports are valuable internally and are often issued annually as a section within an organisation's Annual Report.
5. SROI is a generalist approach to evaluating individual programmes, projects or services (or forecasting them for investment purposes), rooted in stakeholder feedback & with high levels of verification and cross-referencing which makes it time-consuming and less easy to control the outcome (it also makes it more difficult for an organisation to try to get the answer they first thought of – which is a distinct advantage)
6. Different frameworks can be combined: for example SROI has built on many of the best features of other frameworks and stakeholder engagement performed for Charities Evaluation Services can be applied directly:similarly the Theory of Change determined by Sustainability Reporting is directly equivalent. SROI has taken the best of many other approaches and "assigns a financial equivalence value" to aid investment decisions
7. Frameworks can be combined.  Particular candidates are Social Accounting, which shows how an organisation is fulfilling its social good strategic aims and values, and SROI, which provides a financial equivalence of the difference being made