As a social enterprise and charity, The Women’s Organisation seeks to understand our impact on the people we work with, the environment we work in and the way we use resources – our social impact.
We do this by using the SAN social accounting and audit process to consider our social impact and how we create social value, so that we can accurately and impartially assess our performance and impact on the people, organisations and communities that we work with.
Measuring Social Impact and Value
Social accounting and audit allows us as an organisation to build on our monitoring, documentation and reporting systems to develop a process whereby we can account fully for our social, environmental and economic impacts, report on our performance and action-plan to continuously improve what we do. By following this approach, we seek to understand our social impact on those that we work with whilst building accountability and engaging with our key stakeholders. In this way we can prove the value of our work and improve our performance and impact.
Social Value
Since the Public Services (Social Value) Act 2012 we have continued to demonstrate how public funds have enabled us to achieve “additional benefit to the community from a commissioning/procurement process over and above the direct purchasing of goods, services and outcomes”.
The Act requires consideration of Social Value in the spending of public funds enabling and facilitating public sector organisations who are committed to achieving greatest public benefit and maximum social impact whilst rewarding creativity, innovation, best value and quality in service delivery, the opportunity to factor these qualities in the procurement process. The Act also reinforces those duties, already upon local authorities to achieve best value by considering social, economic and environmental value.