The SROI Network

Two applications in the private sector
1. For their funding decisions or
2. To assess their activities?

Can (2) become a marketing tool? Is a danger? (To feed into a “blended” ratio and CSR discourse)

(2) Often on specific projects within company
- is it followed up by structured change where relevant (or suggested by evaluation)

Is this a common scenario?
SROI is seen as useful for social enterprise and
ROI is seen as useful for "business"

General discussion
• Can we use as a tool to establish negative social/ environmental impact?
• Is SROI attractive enough as a tool to be taken up by the private sector in this way?
• Can _link_ing in to existing standards and practices aid take up?
• Does the ability of SROI to internalise externalities that you choose to consider, play out differently in private and voluntary sectors?
• Can/ should government use its purchasing power to require private sector to use SROI process?
• Key question for private sector- management tool (forecasted SROI) or evaluation? (or both?)
• What about internally esp. employees?

Two issues to feedback to the group
1) No reason why can’t work in private sector
2) Incentives- _embed_ into organisation
a. Market opportunities- process demonstrations
b. Investment in staff- provides dialogue
c. _link_s to shareholder value

Asks of the SROI UK Network
- Needs to promote in private sector as well
- Do via good case study

The converstaion at the exchange on this topic was also about how SROI can be used as an internal planning session and also for forward planning. Tis is much more how and whay the proviate sector should be encouraged to use SROI rather than - as perhaps some of the other sector/discussion reports seem to indicate - a more retrospective and "proving worth" tool. Any comments or is this a bit too harsh?

I'm interetsed in how we engage with the private sector on this. It is not easy. The roundtable feedback asks that the network promote SROI to private sector, but I was unsure how we could make this appeal to the private sector until Sara's post.

My question is, is the planning hook big enough? Better than anything I have tried before and worth a try, but I'm not sure how far we can go down that road as SROI is not primarily a planning tool. Will it meet enough of a business need to warrent the time and resources required?

Thoughts on how we present (sell) this to private sector organisations?

If people start writing "it is not easy" I always get a little bit upset. If you say that ten times you really start to believe it will not be easy... Fact is: more and more privat companies contact SROI-experts in order to work together. Because themes like CSR are becoming more and more general (vague) issues.
I believe the business sector needs tools like SROI; the issue however is that we tend to talk about SROI in the language of the non-profits and not in the language of private companies. Most case-studies are on projects, for whom the social issue is priority nr. 1. For a for-profit, social impacts will (very often) be priority nr. 2: financial returns will always be the most important issue.
So the questions are:
1. do we accept that SROI will be used, even if the S is not the firts priority of an investment? I would say: yes. (if not: how could you ever measure the social performance of a for profit?)
2. if so, shouldn't we adapt the SROI-tools a bit more to the use of for-profits, by including financial shareholder-returns and other data, that are relevant to the for profits and thinking about strategies for Venture Capitalists to work with SROI? Demonstrate Blended Values instead of articulating only social values.

I'm not sure whether it's appropriate to just jump in here as I've only just discovered this website but this I think in relevant to both ROI and SROI.

First I think I should mention Peter Burgess, of the Transparency and Accountability Network who's been doing quite a lot in the area of impact assessment.

We go back to origins in the US, which began with a pitch for a new approach to capitalism.

In 2006 having established in the UK as a social enterprise, we put a paper to the US Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, proposing a multi-component development strategy. For reasons that I hope will become clear by reading it we describe it as a microeconomic 'Marshall Plan'

4 major components in this plan combine, each with a SROI element and varying degrees of ROI, from full to less than full cost recovery. This gives an overall strategy designed to achieve nil overall cost in terms of financial investment.

target="_blank">http://www.p-ced.com/projects/ukraine/national/

One of the first resonses to the paper came at Davos 2008, in the creation of the East Europe Foundation, to promote CSR and support sustainable community enterprise, as recommended in the social enterprise component of the paper.

Hi..i'm yusof.working now in MOSTI, Malaysia. we are currently do SROI. i want to get your opinion and your experience. How do we calculate or monetised equivalent values for the indicators? let say the outcome we get is 100 publications.how to measure that value. another else is like award received, scientifis discovery etc. please help. TQ.