Most people may be aware that to my knowledge I’m the only freelance
consultant globally to openly and annually publish a social impact report on myself. And
while it attracts widespread interest and applause every time I do, I always
struggle to make sense of how well the framework I’ve developed is ‘fit for
purpose’ (there is no reporting standard for sole traders), and how far I
should take pride in my ‘results’ (no other freelance consultants’ generate impact
reports to hold mine against).
While I’ve started to make some firm plans for addressing
the bench-marking of results question from next year, I took the opportunity to
take the Social Value Self Assessment Tool to see how well I’ve actually thought
through my framework, measures, and overall approach - https://socialvalueselfassessmenttool.org
Like all ‘multiple choice quizzes’ there’s some assumptions
and bias in the questions which I recognise – it assumes that you’re incorporated
with staff (I’m not), that you have ongoing contact with a core group of
customers (I very rarely do), and that you have a small number of activities
you offer support through (I have lots…). However, it’s a useful starting point
and echoes some of what I already suspected: that I’m highly transparent, but
struggle to engage stakeholders over the long-term and so have access to wider
data sets to help identify how far my contributions contributed to the final generated
impacts clients tell me about:
So – an overall ‘score’ of 56% may not seem great. But the
tool allows you to benchmark your overall result against a number of others by
sector, turnover, and type of activity.
Bench-marking my result against these others in this way suddenly
shows that actually 56% means I’m still showing leading practice in how I’m
going about reporting my social impacts:
- Similar aged businesses to mine = 30%
- Private businesses in general = 31%
- Other businesses with a similar turnover to me = 34%
- Other businesses offering enterprise support = 21%
- All UK based organisations = 33%
So – all in all, still room for improvement (which stops me
getting complacent), but potentially ‘top of the class’?
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