Measuring social impact for creative businesses

Social impact measurement is becoming increasingly important for businesses that want to attract grants or social investment.

Social impact framework

If you own — or are a part of — a business that delivers social impact, you may be able to attract grants or social investment to help your business grow. However, the competition to raise these funds is increasing. Where, once, investors looked for reasons to fund a business, now many are looking at reasons not to fund them. So, if you say you have social impact, but can’t provide evidence of it, they are likely to use that as a reason not to fund you.

Think of it from an investors point of view: with increasing demands on their money, they want to know that they are making the right decisions and spending their resources well. So, targeting their funds at businesses that can demonstrate impact will reassure them that they are meeting their own objectives. They can then report publicly on the difference their collective investments have made.

Therefore, having a social impact framework will demonstrate to funders that you are making / can make a difference with their money.

A social impact framework is a way of describing the difference your organisation is making. The measures are usually clear and tangible. They will often be in quantitative and qualitative in their measure.

The key thing is that your framework must be yours: it must measure what you have set out to do.

Therefore, if you are an organisation that is set up to give disadvantaged young people the opportunity to learn broadcasting skills — the impact you must measure is based on this objective.

It is important not to make your framework simple and usable. Otherwise, you and your colleagues may find it too time consuming to collect and analyse data. Which would defeat the object of the exercise.

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Measuring social impact for creative businesses