Measuring Social Impact

As housing providers move from an era of top-down regulation and directed investment towards greater autonomy and diversity of approach, defining social purpose and evidencing the extent to which they are achieving impact is becoming increasingly important.

Housing providers have also increasingly engaged in ‘non-core’ activity and community investment in recent years, and now need to measure and evaluate the impact of these ‘non-core’ activities - including their impact on core business objectives.

At the beginning of 2012, HACT worked closely with the Third Sector Research Centre (TSRC) at the University of Birmingham to map what housing providers are already doing to measuresocial impact and how this informs decisions. We produced a research report based on the level of social impact measurement currently that identified wide vairations in approaches used and concerns about cost.

This report led to further work supported by Legal & General Property and Plus Dane Group to establish robust methodologies and metrics for more effectively evidencing the social impact of housing providers. This work produced the report 'The Social Impact of housing providers' which was written by Senior Economist at LSE, Daniel Fujiwara.

HACT are launching work with One Housing Group and a group of housing providers in the north west (Brigantes Group) to build a social impact reporting framework building on outputs from Daniel Fujiwara's cutting-edge social value research.  

More details to be confirmed on this exciting work soon.

If you would like to become directly involved in this project, please email us.