Позитивные изменения. Том 2, № 3 (2022). Positive changes. Volume 2, Issue 3 (2022) - Редакция журнала «Позитивные изменения»
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Whether or not to post the report in public domain is a matter for the project team to decide. But what you definitely shouldn’t do is create a report just for the sake of a report. This practice is unproductive. The report data can help answer many questions and should not be neglected. The work you’ve done will help you look at the organization from above and see what could have been done more efficiently, with fewer resources, and with greater benefit to clients and beneficiaries.
Another important question is whether you should compare your report with other reports? Once again, this is something to be decided individually, but it is worth remembering that social business is not homogeneous and works with very different problems and target audiences. Social entrepreneurs have different resources and are also territorially specific. If you decided a comparison is needed, it is better to analyze the reports of a particular organization in different periods of time and observe the activity in dynamics, to assess the changes that have occurred with it over time.
If you decided a comparison is needed, it is better to analyze the reports of a particular organization in different periods of time and observe the activity in dynamics.
The reasonable frequency of assessment depends on the resources available for such work and the maturity of the organization.
WHO TO LOOK UP TO
Social impact assessment can take a project to the next level and become a competitive advantage. So far few social entrepreneurs have taken this approach, but we already have someone to look up to.
A good example of an estimate is shown in Everland’s 2021 report. It is unique in that it presents not only the achieved results, but also the goals for the next year. The company indicates that in 2022 it plans to employ more than 500 people with disabilities and provide more than 800 new registrations on the platform[17].
This point should be highlighted separately, because often impact assessment reports only show the results achieved, with very few organizations showing their goals for future periods (which requires a lot of courage and a lot of preliminary work). “Impact measurement is a must. It helps develop the organization, work on internal efficiency and make processes cheaper,” emphasizes Everland co-founder Elena Martynova.
Another important factor to pay attention to is that the company reports cover a period starting from 2019, which allows you to trace the dynamics of its activity. For example, in 2019, the agency employed 84 people. By 2021 this number had grown to 390. Also, three years ago, the team noted that with the launch of the special testing and training platform, the cost of integrating a person into the work process dropped more than three-fold — from 120,000 to 36,000 rubles. Today that cost is probably even lower.
What else is important about the Everland example? Its hybrid nature. The social part of the project is represented by “Equal Opportunity Space” ANO, while the business component is represented by EVERLAND LLC. In its reports, the project combines both the experience of non-profit organizations regularly publishing performance data and the business metrics inherent in the commercial part of the project.
Social impact assessment can become a competitive advantage. So far few social entrepreneurs have taken this approach.
It is worth noting that assessment does not always have to be presented as a separate report. Instead, information about the social impact of the business can be published in the “About Us” section of the project website. That’s what the Bright City Children’s Center team, founded by Nadezhda Samoilova, did. These are the only kindergartens of the kind for children with special needs in St. Petersburg, which offer intensive correction, development, school preparation and socialization activities.
Their website states that in just six months, the center’s students improve their communication skills by 25 %, thinking skills by 23 %, and attention span by 42 %. The project also notes that over a year, more than 50 % of children exceed their parents’ expectations and even “hopeless cases” are not hopeless 97 % of the time[18].
Retrieved from: https://svetlyjgorod.ru/o-nas/ (accessed: 23.09.2022).
Currently the network has three children’s centers, and the project has good potential for scaling up, which allows the social effect to spread to other regions.
Another example is BuySocial, a platform that brings together products from social enterprises. BuySocial producers give jobs to people with disabilities and the elderly in remote areas; they care for nature and preserve cultural heritage, and donate profits to charity. The project team proudly states right on their website’s front page that in 2021 the company provided jobs for 452 people from vulnerable groups, sold more than 32,600 units of products from 41 social enterprises from 11 regions of Russia[19].
According to Lubov Ermolaeva, the project founder, the team conducts social impact assessment primarily to make sure they are still on the right track as a social business. For BuySocial, this is expressed primarily as the number of social enterprises to which they gave orders and their production volumes, and the number of people who received gifts and thus became consumers of products with meaning, on the other. The company also identifies deeper social effects: how its orders affect not only social enterprises and their financial performance, but also those people from vulnerable groups, for which the platform was created.
Regular, systemic impact assessment is a great tool for making management decisions, because as economist Peter Drucker said, you can’t manage what you can’t measure.
Another link in the chain of recipients of the assessment are the company’s corporate clients. Big and small businesses buying gifts from BuySocial are also interested in getting data on how they affect their surroundings.
