Measuring Social Good - What WE Get For YOUR Money - Page 3
Social Return on Investment (SROI) is valuable in a different way and gets you different information.
SROI asks the people who get benefits from the program or service, what benefits they got. What difference did it make, to them? A user (our unemployed person, for example) says "it made this difference to me". 100 users say "well for me it was this, for you this". A local council says "we spent this much on the program, and we saw that it made these differences". An employer says "I got involved and it did this". Then SROI has a framework for assigning financial equivalences - for saying "that change is probably worth this much money; this much as a minimum, this much as a maximum and this much most likely". Lots of the good a program does can't be valued this way, and I would expect only about 1 in 3 benefits to be valued and the other 2/3 just described, but it does mean that you can make a comparison - how much did I put in, and how much was the benefit worth (the social Return on Investment or RoI).
So SROI is very appealing when the money gets tight.
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