Power to the people: evidencing true social value

Only by talking and listening to those whose lives they are hoping to change can housing organisations understand the ‘true’ social value of their work, say Jenny Rouse and Matt Bowen  

In the current economic environment, housing associations are making difficult decisions on how to spend limited resources in communities decimated by public spending cuts and rising inequalities.

Mounting pressure to ‘do more for less’ is forcing many organisations to profoundly consider: what is the ‘true value’ of our work? What is the impact of our community investment? And, what should we invest in for the future?

As a result ‘social value’ is now top of the agenda for many social landlords. However in the midst of other pressing concerns, many housing associations are opting for the most readily available and quickly administered ‘tools’ to guide their social value approach. However doing this risks social value becoming just another box-ticking exercise, rather than a genuine opportunity to truly understand communities and work with them to achieve the best-possible outcomes.

‘Social value’ is a collective term for acknowledging the value of all outcomes (not just economic or fiscal) in project planning, delivery, evaluation and decision making. Whilst an appreciation of ‘triple bottom line’ economic, social and environmental outcomes has long been business-as-usual for strategic decision making in the housing sector, approaches to evidence the ‘social’ outcomes have lagged behind.

The reason for this is that ‘social’ outcomes refer to impacts on people. People are complex and live complex lives and this means that social outcomes such as improvements in community relationships, good physical health or an individual’s self-esteem, can be difficult to assess. This complexity particularly holds true when trying to evidence impacts on the people who live in the often deprived communities that housing associations serve.

In response to this difficulty in evidencing social change, recent standardised tools that include universal survey questions and valuation approaches have emerged to support organisations to make sense of the outcomes that matter most to affected stakeholders. The upshot of the new approaches and tools is that we can use quick ‘off the shelf’ frameworks to identify outcomes, and then assign monetary or other values to these.

Numbers are undoubtedly a crucial part of the story,

but a true understanding of social value lies with the people.

For an employment programme for example, we would find that two well-known outcomes are the number of people finding ‘full-time work’, and the number of people feeling more in ‘control of their lives’. We would use standardised surveys to measure the extent to which these occur, and then calculate the total social value of the programme by assigning defined social valuations to these measures and subtracting the ‘deadweight’ i.e. the number of people who would have found work or felt more in control of their lives anyway. The Hact social value model, which has been well-received by the sector, follows this basic structure.

However this move to ‘one-size-fit-all’ social value tools brings with it two problems. The first is that there may be myriad other outcomes that customers and stakeholders identify, beyond the ones suggested in the literature, so we may be undervaluing the programme. The second is that evaluating social value needs to help us improve as well as prove. Social value calculated from frameworks tells us nothing about the how or why we have achieved, only the what.

So how do we overcome these two problems? The solution is simple. We have to take the crucial but straightforward first step of talking to our customers and stakeholders.

Only by understanding from a customer’s perspective their experiences, opportunities and barriers to change will we know how a programme has exceeded and where it has fallen short, and learn for next time. Taking again our example employment programme, by speaking to customers we could find that a number of individuals achieved ‘full time work’ and felt more in ‘control of their lives’ (the what has been achieved) because the programme was outsourced to another specialist provider, and as a result customers felt comfortable speaking to the advisors about their circumstances without risks of losing their housing or benefits.

Speaking to customers who have been part of the programme could also reveal that those who have been away from the labour market a long time need a bit of emotional support too, and if future employment programmes place a greater emphasis on this kind of support they could get more people into employment. These are two possible reasons why the programme has achieved positive outcomes, and how programme delivery could be tweaked to deliver more positive outcomes. Without this deeper level of understanding, ‘social value’ evidence cannot, and more importantly should not, be used to make strategic decisions.

For the large part people get into housing because they want to make a difference to people’s lives and create true social value. However, it turns out that the best tool in the box – the power of communication – is largely being overlooked in determining social value in the quest to get at an answer quickly and while sat at a desk. By creating ‘off-the-shelf’ solutions we have inadvertently lost sight of the need for regular time spent with stakeholders to ask the important questions: are we making a difference? Why? How can we achieve more?

If your organisation is hungry to prove and improve, there’s no better place to start than with your customers. Capturing and articulating the real difference you’re making to their lives has got to be better than making a poor numeric approximation. Numbers are undoubtedly a crucial part of the story, but a true understanding of social value lies with the people.

• By Dr Jenny Rouse, policy consultant at the Centre for Local Economic Strategies, and Dr Matt Bowen, head of research at Our Life