I recently took part in a discussion on the LinkedIn Guardian social enterprise network on whether or not social enterprises should be more proactive in measuring their social value. The timing of the discussion was very apt as it coincided with my poring over the first of a series of social return on investment (SROI) evaluations of my own organisation and trying to make sure in my own mind that I had grasped what SROI actually meant.
Nine months previously that organisation, SoberLink, was a young, specialist community interest company grappling with how we demonstrated not only that what we do works, but also all the knock-on social benefits generated to boot.
SoberLink offers a recovery mentoring service for alcoholics at the end of detoxification and statutory treatment services in Exeter and East Devon. Each client is assigned a mentor in long-term recovery who shares with them how they stayed sober, tries to ease them through some of the challenges early sobriety throws up and encourages them to get to know others in recovery through mutual aid groups like Alcoholic Anonymous.
It's not rocket science, and we knew both anecdotally and from personal experience that it is a successful formula.
We needed to find an evaluation that quantified and gave credence to the efficacy of what we do, and encapsulated all the social benefits that follow from helping previously often chaotic individuals (many with a range of problems caused or aggravated by their drinking) maintain sobriety, start to feel better about themselves and the world around them and by doing so keep them out of the revolving door of treatment and relapse.
It wasn't something we were equipped to do ourselves, nor were we content to simply record the number of people who turned up for appointments, send out follow-up questionnaires in the hope of getting a few back and call them meaningful outcomes.
We got lucky. Thanks to the local community foundation we latched on to the third sector capacity building cluster under the Institute of Public Affairs at Bristol University who were looking for subjects of all shapes and sizes for independent, academically robust evaluations of economic and social value of social enterprise.
Our designated researcher, Stephen Halsey, and his supervisor, professor Leroy White, have been superb. Stephen went to great lengths to ensure we understood how he arrived at the evaluation model best suited to our remit and what we needed to do to make it work.
It took three months of intensive discussion around the impact and workings of the mentoring programme, trying out various data collection methods, testing the information gathered against existing theory and practice, tweaking, and finally a series of interviews with clients to get it right.
The 27-page SROI evaluation (the road Stephen decided to take) is already proving a considerable asset to both SoberLink and Bristol.
It gave us a headline figure that every £1 invested in us would deliver a social return of £4.03, with a further 28 pence added value for each additional client maintaining sobriety throughout their engagement with us.
For the Bristol team, Stephen's use of the fabulously named Monte Carlo Simulation technique, which mitigates the lack of depth in the data (we have only been operating in earnest for a year), by bombarding it with up to 1,000 different input and output scenarios and taking the average, is viewed as a significant improvement on previous SROI methodology for evaluating small organisations, and has already been employed in three further evaluations and trailed to service commissioners nationally.
So what have we learned from this promising start?
• We need to produce long-term SROI evaluations by continuing to gather data focussed on putting an even more precise social and economic value on sustained recovery from alcoholism. Under Stephen's tutelage, we are now looking at setting up panels of clients at different stages of their recovery, volunteers and other stakeholders to build an even clearer picture of the changes attributable to SoberLink's programme and when and how they occur.
• In our current position as an organisation needing to develop the capacity to compete for local and regional contracts, we have to focus on and convince those who hold the purse strings - be they public or third sector beneficiaries, charitable funders, philanthropists or corporates - that they should be investing in us. Having put in the time and effort, we have to make sure that investment pays off by targeting the results at the right people.
This is not so easy as it might sound, as the mapping of stakeholders the evaluation entailed clearly reveals the breadth of the beneficiaries – from families, employers and GPs to hard pressed housing providers, city centre beat police officers and A&E nurses and doctors.
• As a social enterprise we are constantly mindful of the experience of many charitable organisations over recent years and the need not to become dependent on a single income stream or funder, or be at the mercy of shifts in local and national health policy and priorities at a time of massive public spending cuts. Ultimately we need to become self-sustaining. That said, what we mustn't do is end up going round and round in circles and chasing money by trying to squeeze what we do into gaps in which we don't fit.
• And finally, if our initial SROI evaluation teaches us anything, it is that all these benefits result from what we set out to do in the first place, namely putting a recovering alcoholic in front of another in that scary place which is early sobriety and helping them believe they too can recover.
If we keep doing that and commit to increasing our understanding of how it works and for whom then maybe, just maybe, those investors and beneficiaries will start coming to us rather than visa-versa.
Tom Gard and Sean Wheeldon are directors of SoberLink CIC. Twitter: @Soberlink11
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