today we'll be talking about how to maximize social return on investments of your programs
in this journey we'll be talking about what is social return on investment traditionally we
will be looking at the history of social return investments and then we'll look into some of the
benefits and challenges with the social return on investments
we'll also be talking about systematic process or how we can improve that process in a continuous
basis on a continuous data-driven approach that can help you maximize return like no other
approach altogether and we'll give you some examples how you can use that in various
different scenarios from due diligence process to regular data collection process all the way to
managing the verification or portfolio of maturity altogether so let's jump in so let's look at the
history of social return on investments the social return of investment was started first in 1990 by
REDF fund essentially it's uh it's a short form but for robert's enterprise development funds and
that was they developed the first sroi tool before they were investing into various different um work
that they've been funding altogether and that work took on essentially the that work was started by
social value international and social event value international now is a very larger body
of the program where has practitioners network in many different countries all together
and this program has obviously developed very systematic principles frameworks
and analysis approach on how to build the sroi analysis based on uh sroi principles all together
so what is social return investments and how does it work first it's a it's a principle
and framework for measuring and accounting for the social value so we'll talk about how that
works it's designed to incorporate any social environmental and economic cost and benefit
analysis it's really about trade-offs it's cost versus benefit and so as a result it really is
a ratio of benefits to the cost essentially it's about driving outcome of the community or value
rather than actual dollar amount altogether and so if you look at the whole traditional approach
of sroi the foundation of sroi is starting with the sroi principles and methodology
and there are seven most important principles and that principle is really foundational elements
number one involves stakeholders it's all about stakeholders if you don't bring and
integrate the voice of stakeholders in the process you are not really managing the impact altogether
understand what is really changing that's the next most important thing which is really what
is the outcome that you are creating in the community together what is the value
what the things that matter essentially it's about other
when you are creating impact when you're introducing product or services
is that something that the the poor people in or the community that you're working do they really
matter to them do they really want that is the most important priority or is there something
that you want to offer to them it's a prior one that's really matters most
including what is material in the process so essentially when you look at the whole
process there are many different aspects of mapping of different impact altogether
however it's important to focus on the most important outcome that is matters most altogether
and take that process of key outcome and take it forward do not over claim needless to say
many organizations when you look at their impact reports they have full of million people they
serve benefited and really that's really it often times hyperbole or overclaim altogether
it's also a common term that's used something is called impact washing or sdg washing as well so
the the point of reporting and managing is really to maximizing the return of the community that you
are really creating altogether not really boasting something that doesn't really belong to your
impact altogether be transparent it's very important that you really share your best
practices your processes your how you came to analyze those things in a systematic manner
altogether and finally verify the results verify verify verify it's really about making sure
that there is a process of auditing of various different aspects of it done and so if you look
at from bottom up on the right hand side first you define the scope and the key of the stakeholders
map the outcomes value to the outcomes and enabling the impact establishing impact finally
the last step is to define calculating sroi and based on that you do the reporting process
that's a normal process of social return investments that said there are benefits
of sroi here and there are challenges of that benefits obviously are the number are easier to
understand and communicate that's needless to say sroi ratio equal to 3 is a 3 is higher than two
of course it is higher however really it's all about the society context altogether
secondly for the investors financial terms it resonates well for them they can see that all
this is has a higher number than others altogether maybe it's likely to create more impact altogether
allows the comparison between the projects benchmarking i have different outcomes and
stakeholders and geographics there are many projects and programs they do these things we
believe that they're a better approach altogether so here are the challenges
one is defining the financial proxy can be expensive so in order to design the sroi
financial proxy is important so for example if volunteers are part of the process then you define
the number of volunteers hours multiplied by number the dollar they would have really
spent on that or basically with their salaries essentially and that would become a financial
proxy now that's an easy example in reality designing financial proxy can be much more
complicated much more context specific different countries specific and also this there's a lot
of subjectivity in the process especially the processes with proxies are not well understood
you have to hire the researchers to come up with the process and analysis altogether does not take
context into the consideration needless to say things that you do things in a certain country and
uk it's going to be very different in wisconsin versus the india altogether and so there's a
little qualitative room for the feedback half in time it's more about understanding larger
numbers in comparison game but really oftentimes any anybody who's working on a social program they
know that qualitative feedback sometimes often has a much more higher value because there's
a lot more understanding of the impact comes out and by listening to the stakeholders all together
and long term timeline to see the results and evaluation process so is there any better approach
i think there is there is a new way so that's what we are here to talk about so first is what we call
a continuous evidence based approach and the way it works is that we so it's a very comprehensive
approach but it's really designed to be very focused and so it really focuses on key outcome
that you want to track all together and based on that you enroll engage stakeholders and then you
really bring out the interventions based on what you learn and so if you look at these examples
you could be running these processes for various different areas from due diligence process to
impact maturity to stakeholder data collection process altogether or continuous tracking part
of it so there are many different use cases of this approach all together and in our
sopact channel we talk about many different ways different how we are achieving this
social uh continuous data part of it all together so in case of for example due diligence so i'm a
fund manager and i want to see how each of these organizations are really going to be delivering
on before you want to invest into that and the challenges for them obviously is that most of
the investments tend to be a bit more different different impact themes and so how do you really
standardize the process and all that so the first question is to define the impact questions define
create a collect right baseline and make sure that questions are actually aligned towards five
dimensions of impact if you're not heard of the five dimensions impact it's a foundation way to
understand and communicate the impact it really comes out to be who what how much contribution
risk and we have many other videos that you can go into and learn about five dimensions of impact
all together and based on that apply the certain kind of scoring to see that it really provides it
takes away some subjective into the process from evaluating your fund uh altogether the next often
times asset managers or social impact accelerators they can also use this approach to measure the
maturity often times we always say that the best way that asset managers should be are accelerating
measuring is not really by aggregating what their investments are doing or the investees are doing
but it's about what are they doing for them what how are they really bringing and making
them more mature from financial perspective from the the business perspective and from the impact
management and management perspective and so the main thing is to define those kind of target
initial baseline from their own university collect the results and repeat that process regularly and
really look at the target to see how things are improving altogether
so we have developed very systematic process for funders perspective where we can help them
maximize the impact through starting to improving the growing to scaling based on four different
criteria's impact metrics data impact management capacity and portfolio uh company stakeholders all
together and so ultimately the idea is to end up in the lower right corner so that you are really
generating maximizing the social return on investments all together same way we have a
similar classification for enterprises so that they can become most uh a leading platform a
leading enterprise who is maximizing impact and in that sense everybody is really looking to
funding around that kind of initiatives which can scale impact in a much bigger way altogether so
in nutshell you could use this approach very heavily before we are building a product during
the product also you can be continuously collect the data from the stakeholders
ultimately it's about building a capacity within your team and building a transparency and building
a transparency will automatically bring you higher level of impact capital altogether
so in a nutshell empower the companies if you are a fund manager make sure that the
companies themselves has a good impact management management knowledge make sure there is a live
dashboard and continuously tracking the results and you can we can make your evidence-based
decisions on a regular basis and not like a end-of-the-year basis all together so i hope this
segment was useful for maximizing the impact we have many more videos coming up and hopefully it
will be useful so if you like this approach altogether please subscribe our channel and
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