Позитивные изменения. Том 2, № 3 (2022). Positive changes. Volume 2, Issue 3 (2022) - Редакция журнала «Позитивные изменения»

• Personal well-being;

• Work-life balance;

• Stress related to responsibility;

• Connecting with the social entrepreneur community;

• Income level.

QUANTITATIVE DATA COLLECTION

The following metrics were taken into account in the evaluation:

• Number of jobs, including for people with disabilities;

• Volume of tax deductions and payroll insurance payments;

• Corporate profit dynamics;

• The level of income of entrepreneurs and its change related to the program;

• Funding raised from other sources.

In addition to information about social outcomes, such as changes in the lives of social entrepreneurs, as well as economic outcomes for their employees and local communities, the questionnaires also contained factual information about the work of social enterprises to better represent the products of the activities implemented under the program and information about additional components of the SROI model (program impact, monetization of outcomes, etc.).

Some of the quantitative data used in both the report narrative and the SROI model were gathered from information provided by local city governments and the Social Innovation Centers. In particular, this included data related to the volume of tax deductions and payroll insurance payments from social enterprises that received support under the Start Your Own Business program.

PROGRAM IMPACT EVALUATION

Social projects and programs always take into account the specific regional and local context, so it is very important to consider the influence of other factors when analyzing their outcomes. For example, the program being analyzed may be affected by other projects and organizations, the general socio-economic environment, and, of course, by the specifics of the program participants themselves.

This approach allows us to model a picture of social impact that reflects reality more objectively. The resulting information allows one to manage the impact more effectively.

Typically, the following aspects of impact are considered in SROI analysis:

• Deadweight (based on the data obtained in the control group) — an estimation of the value that would have been created if the program activities did not happen;

• Attribution — to what extent other organizations and projects contribute to the outcome;

• Displacement — to what extent the project does not solve the problem, but transfers it to another area (another geographical area, another group of people, etc.);

• Drop-of — if the outcome continues to exist after the project, how long it will still be connected to the project, and how that connection will weaken with each year. This does not necessarily mean that the outcomes people get will also decrease, but they will be more related to other factors: their own work, new projects in which they will participate, etc.[28]

The focus group discussions did not highlight any opportunities to transfer the outcome to another stakeholder group, and in order to account for deadweight and attribution, the questionnaire included an impact question asking respondents to indicate how much of their achievement of certain outcomes was related to their participation in the Start Your Own Business program. The corresponding program impact metric was included in the SROI calculation as an element of the model, and the model was further tested for sensitivity to the metric (see below).

All outcomes were evaluated retrospectively for five years of program implementation, from 2016 to 2020 inclusive, and forecast calculations were not carried out. Based on discussions with SEs in focus groups and from the experience evaluating similar programs and projects, researchers decided that on average, the correlation of outcomes to the program drops by 20–25 % per year for different localities. This metric was included in the SROI calculation model and the model was also tested for sensitivity to the metric (see below).

VALUE OF OUTCOMES AND MONETIZATION, CALCULATION METHOD USED

An important phase in the analysis of social return on investment is the so-called monetization of outcomes — the search for and identification of financial proxies, which will denote the value of outcomes that do not have a market value for stakeholders. It should be noted that in this case we are not talking about the cost or price of these outcomes, but about their use value: how well they meet the needs and demands of the stakeholders for whom they are achieved.

In SROI practice, it is acceptable to use ready-made proxies that have already been used in other reports, as long as the stakeholder group for which the proxies were defined is similar to the one being analyzed.

It is important to note that financial proxies, denoting the consumer value of different outcomes of one project for one group of people, must be related to the relative importance of these outcomes. For this purpose it is recommended to use the anchor method in proxy calculations, when a proxy of one outcome is taken as a basis, which can be obtained by any of the above methods, and other proxies are calculated on the basis of the anchor proxy value using weights, i.e. indicators of relative importance of different outcomes for stakeholders in percentages or any other units.

This was the approach used in determining the proxy for social outcomes for Start Your Own Business stakeholders. The anchor of the calculation was the change in monthly income of social entrepreneurs.

The weights used to calculate the value of the other outcomes were the average importance of the outcomes and the impact of the program: to what extent the SEs perceived the outcome to be related to their participation in the program.

MODEL DEVELOPMENT AND SROI CALCULATION

Based on the data obtained from the quantitative study, a model was developed and the SROI metric was calculated for each locality (Chusovoy, Blagoveshchensk and Vyksa) and the combined model for the program as a whole.

The model was developed using five years worth of historical data from the Start Your Own Business program to the present moment, without projecting social and economic outcomes for the future, in accordance with the principle “do not over-claim”.

To calculate the value of social outcomes by year, financial proxies adjusted for program impact were multiplied by the number of social enterprises/jobs supported in the