Our social return on investment, explained.
Along the journey of our Winchester Creatives mentoring program, we’ve been tracking everyone’s progress to make sure people are getting the best out of it, and to see people’s improvement. We’ve just got the results from the half way point of our mentee progress reports, and we’re over the moon to say that everyone is progressing really well, lots of people have found work and people are showing increased levels of confidence. Before we look at some of the progress that’s been made by our mentee cohort, we’ll explain the process of how we’ve been measuring people’s progress.
Recently you may have seen us proudly proclaiming our £5.65 social return on investment rating. This is actually one of the parts of our campaign that has sparked the most interest, as it’s not widely understood what this actually means. So we thought we’d take the time to break down what our social value is, what it means for our mentees, our wider community, and how we use it as an indicator of how successful the Winchester Creatives programmes are.
What is social value?
Social value is pretty self explanatory actually, it’s a measure of the benefit to society that we create, through the work that we’re all doing. The way we work this out is by using the HACT Social Value Calculator, another pretty self explanatory thing. The HACT Social Value Calculator was initially produced for housing based services, measuring things like reduced anti-social behaviour in shared accomodation, or energy efficiency in homes. However, there are a lot of metrics that are universal that apply to almost all charities and businesses.
So what is social return on investment?
Social return on investment (SROI) is the calculation of impact that’s had on the community, in relation to every £1 donated to the cause. Through this, people and businesses know that for every pound that they invest or donate, we multiply that and create a much greater value to our wider society.
Winchester Creatives create value to society by helping people who are unemployed find work in their chosen field, specifically the creative industry. We provide mentoring, support, paid projects, training and events, which all help towards people’s employability, work place readiness, mental health and general wellbeing.
What measurements do we use?
One of the questions we use provided by the HACT framework is “Have you recently been losing confidence in yourself?” We’re very pleased to show that at the mid point of our mentee program, 73% of students reported good confidence levels, a significant increase from the 25% who reported good confidence levels at our initial baseline assessment.
Additionally to these we have other questions that are focussed more specifically on people’s employment situation. After the halfway point of our first mentee cohort, we’re pleased to say that overall unemployment has gone down by 27%, people working part time in their chosen field has gone up by 22%, and people who have found full time employment in their chosen field has also gone up 22%.
Image for illustration purposes
We are over the moon with these mid way results, and hope that people continue to find work over the coming months. We’re proud of the progress our first mentor cohort has made, and we’re extremely proud that the creative programmes we’ve put in place are benefitting the young people involved. Let’s hope this progress carries on to the end of the first cohort.