The Sector

A Sinzer Case: Europeana Foundation: The Social Impact of (digital) Cultural Heritage

Europeana Foundation is the institute for digital cultural heritage in Europe.

Sinzer initially helped Europeana with a small-scale impact assessment for 3 of their digital collections. This process commenced with drawing out a Theory of Change in several multi-stakeholder workshops, by answering questions like: who experiences change as a result of accessing or sharing information? What changes do stakeholders experience? How can these changes be influenced by tweaking activities, products and services? Once the Theory of Change was developed, data was collected to test exactly how much change was created for whom by sending surveys to various stakeholder groups.

Besides gaining insights for their own organization, Europeana got increasingly motivated to share the gained impact expertise and theory with others in the sector. Hence, as a second deliverable the ‘Impact Playbook’ has been developed: a guide meant for (digital) culture and cultural heritage organizations, like galleries, libraries, museums and archives, with theory as well as practical step-by-step instruction and tools to help these organizations better understand, manage, and demonstrate the social impact they create – which is becoming increasingly important in a time where funding for such organizations is under pressure.

Currently the firm is collaborating with Europeana to create a ‘Playbook part II’, which focuses on using elements of ‘economic’ impact assessment in context of (digital) culture and cultural heritage.

The Sector

The Sector Inc. partners with Sinzer

The Sector is growing its capacities as a social innovation and resource development consultancy, specializing in aligning priorities of cross-sector teams, to unlock new capital and resources.

The Sector scales organizations that will change the world and with the Sinzer tool for impact management they add a technology-based robust solution to their tool box. The Sector uses several methods in their services such as collective impact-framed business planning, relationship brokering, deal structuring, social finance and impact investing, and they have added serious bench strength to issues of monitoring and evaluation.

Together with Sinzer, the Sector designs, facilitates, and manage toward continuous improvement, collaborations that allow local, municipal and regional governments to partner with civil society, corporations, impact investors, and high impact not-for-profit organizations, in Ontario and around the globe.

What is Social Return on Investment?

So, up until now we have learned that Social Return on Investment (SROI) is a framework for measuring and accounting for this much broader concept of value. SROI measures change in ways that are relevant to the people or organizations that experience or contribute to social value.

This shows how change is being created by measuring social, environmental and economic outcomes and uses monetary values to represent them. This enables a ratio of benefits to costs to be calculated. For example, a ratio of 3:1 indicates that an investment of € 1,- delivers € 3,- of social value.

SROI is all about value. And not so much about money. Money is simply a common unit and is as such a useful and widely accepted way of communicating value. But in the same way that a business plan contains much more information than (future) financial expenses of a business, an SROI analysis is much more than just a number. It is a story about change, on which you can base decisions that includes case studies and qualitative, quantitative and financial information.

There are two types of SROI:

1. Evaluative, which is conducted retrospectively and based on actual outcomes that have already taken place.

2. Forecast, which predicts how much social value will be created if the activities meet their intended outcomes.

Forecast SROIs are especially useful in the planning stages of an activity. They can help show how an investment can maximize impact and are also useful for identifying what should be measured once the project is up and running. A forecasted SROI can be followed with an evaluative SROI to verify the accuracy of the predictions.

A lack of good outcomes data is one of the main challenges when doing an SROI for the first time. You will need data on outcomes to enable an evaluative SROI to be carried out, and a forecast SROI will provide the basis for a framework to capture outcomes. It is often preferable to start using SROI by forecasting what the social value may be, rather than evaluating what it was, as this ensures that you have the right data collection systems in place to perform a full analysis in the future.

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The Sector

Sinzer’s Beginners Guide To Social Return On Investment

Learning more about Social Return on Investment will give you a better understanding of how to measure your impact and be accountable to your stakeholders. To start off this guide and understand the concept of Social Return on Investment, it is important to give a brief explanation of what is meant by ‘impact measurement’ and what we mean when we talk about ‘value’.

 

What is impact measurement?

Impact measurement has broad applications and while there is a focus on investors and government requirements, service providers have also called for their needs and those of their beneficiaries to be reflected in measurement We feel, therefore, that the social and environmental performance needs to be measured with the same level of robustness as financial performance – which is very common in all different kinds of businesses. Measuring financial performance can offer important insight, but did you know there are also many benefits of measuring your impact?

There are three main benefits of good impact measurement:

1. The ability to generate value for all stakeholders. This impact goes beyond a simplistic focus on the needs of a potential investor and instead drives at ensuring value creation for investors, investees and beneficiaries.

2. The potential mobilization of greater capital into areas of positive social impact creation.

3. Increased transparency and accountability for delivering on the intended area of impact. Reading this brief explanation only, you can understand that every day our actions and activities create and destroy value – they all change the world around us.