SROI analysis for the Consortium COOB in Tuscany

Title Social impact assessment through the calculation of the SROI index of the job placement activities of the Consortium COOB

Duration April 2020 – December 2020

Location Tuscany

Partner LabCom

Funding Consorzio COOB

 

Context

The COOB Consortium is a network of 35 social enterprises made up of cooperatives type B which aims to foster the opportunity of job inclusion and placement for disadvantaged people.

COOB is a network of territorial realities that work daily for the well-being of the communities in which they develop actions, create value by offering professional services, opportunities for growth and training to people who live with forms of disadvantage and who, thanks to work, can regain dignity and a social role.

To assess the social performance of its activities, the Consortium decided to measure the SROI index of its cooperatives. The SROI index, is a useful too that can be interpreted as an efficiency index: it measures the ability of an organization to transform the resources invested into shares capable of generating a social return.

General Objective

Measuring the SROI index, Social Return on Investment, allows companies and/or organizations to measure the impact of their investments in terms of social performance. The SROI methodology, together with the Theory of Change, allows to build a story of social change generated through a qualitative and quantitative path.

 

Our contribution

To calculate the SROI index of the Consortium, the Social Economy Unit developed a specific framework for measuring the social impact that could be easily employed for the different realities of the Consortium. This framework has been elaborated to respect and enhance the specificities of each cooperative.

The SROI methodology is based on the identification of the activities of an organization through the application of an input-output-outcome-impact model and the extensive involvement of the main stakeholders. The involvement of stakeholders is essential to avoid self-referential decision processes, as well as the duplication of the same measurement for different categories of stakeholders and the incorrect (or subjective) attribution of indicators and outcomes.

During the stakeholder engagement process, the Social Economy Unit used the results of the process initiated by the university spin-off Labcom which conducted an analysis of the psychological profile of the outcomes of job placements. Subsequently, cooperatives and disadvantaged workers were asked to answer a questionnaire to measure the effects and investigate the actual attribution of work activities.

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