Just how much good are we doing? 

The voluntary, community, and social enterprise sector is really diverse, and the thing that unites us is that we are all founded and centred on doing good – whatever our objects.  A huge challenge with this is demonstrating to other sectors (and sometimes ourselves) the value of what we do.  

One measures we can use is our Social Return on Investment (SRoI).  It sounds complicated but the premise is quite simple: your SRoI is how many £s value you create for every £ invested.  This isn’t just for larger organisations either – the amount of value our grassroots organisations generate is considerable, as this case study will show, small can be mighty! 

Demonstrating value at a community level 

We were approached by North Walsham Good Neighbour Scheme to carry out an independent report into the Scheme’s work for work undertaken from 1st January 2025 to 31st December 2025.  They wanted this information to show their volunteers some tangible evidence of the impact they have had, not just the number of tasks they had carried out.   

The Scheme’s General Secretary, Paul, explained: 

“We felt that Good Neighbours is a powerful and cost-effective method for building community capacity, as well as empowering individuals, but we lacked the evidence to prove this impact to others. We felt the project was an unprecedented opportunity to show the impact of what we do in monetary terms.” 

We created the report using an accredited Social Value engine (in fact, it is the UKs only accredited social value engine).  This takes known activities and assigns a recognised, reasonable value (called proxies) to them.  A good example of this would be transport to medical appointments.  The engine uses the NHS figure for the costs of missed medical appointments, so the Scheme can demonstrate how much their volunteers have saved the NHS by assisting Neighbours to make these appointments.  

The Committee identified what activities we could measure.  Sometimes we had to group activities against a proxy.  These are the activities, and how many of them were undertaken in the year, that the return on investment value is based on:  

“What was surprising was the wide range of proxies available to enable us to measure the outcomes of our work, and it was very interesting to consider which proxies were most appropriate to use for our different activities. What was particularly surprising was the vast sum saved by enabling neighbours to get to medical appointments, both at surgeries and hospitals.” – Paul, General Secretary 

The report showed that for their £1,000 funding, The Scheme had a return of investment of £5,339.  That means for every £1 invested they created £5.34 of value in the community.  

What goes into this? 

The engine calculates the value of all of the activities, detracts amounts (which vary by activity) to accommodate how many activities would still have taken place without the Scheme (for example, using our earlier analogy of medical appointment transport, an amount of people who would have hired taxis or found some other way to attend), and other factors like that – ultimately creating a value for the Scheme over the year.  This came to £5,339,385.80 (which sounds phenomenal, we know!).  That value is then divided by the amount of funding received to carry out the activities (£1,000), making the SRoI figure of £5339 or £5.34 for every £1.  

As impressive as this figure is, we believe it is an underestimation.  This is because many of the activities deliver against multiple outcomes but monitoring only records the primary outcome.  For example, the Scheme monitors the number of medical transport journeys the volunteers undertake but had not been recording when volunteers provided signposting or other support tasks alongside this.     

The impact of knowledge 

For CAN, it is useful and insightful to have a conservative estimate of just how much value a community led initiative can have.  Operations Manager, Clare reflected: 

“We advocate for the sector all the time, and everyone recognises that it brings value but how that compares to other sectors is always hard to quantify.  This has given a very real and evidenced measure that can be used.  Above all, the Scheme wanted to recognise the impact their volunteers make, and this gives them a very clear starting point.” 

Armed with this information, the Scheme plan to use this to their best advantage “to enhance our access to grants; to enable our volunteers to see their worth in monetary terms; to publicise the Scheme and the GNS model more generally, as a way of building community resilience.” 

Most importantly, it recognised the value of the volunteers in a new way, providing a different perspective: 

“I thought the information given was very informative as to how the Good Neighbours not only helps our wider community and neighbours in jobs they need a little bit more help with, but also showed the wider efforts - that we helped out further afield in places I have not really thought about such as in the NHS or other charities that help support loneliness and other things. 

Our efforts shown on screen showed how a few peoples efforts made huge difference in people's lives. It was especially interesting to see the facts laid out; such as how much time and money was saved just by doing simple jobs like collecting prescriptions, helping someone to appointments, or helping with a job such as gardening - which may be simple to us but helps someone, and has such a wider impact with in our otherwise unseen world.” 

Christopher, Good Neighbour Scheme Volunteer