Quantifying the Human Element: Measurable Returns on Social Investment

There are few objective absolute truths in respect to generating meaningful measurements of social endeavors. Despite the insurmountable challenge of measuring how “much” social good a social venture must accomplish to validate its existence, many non-profits today must have collated metrics for donors and investors. In one respect, these relevant bodies’ demand for such information is well within their right. After all anyone committing human or fiscal capital to a cause would eventually need more than just altruistic tendencies to motivate them to continue. In sum, people want know they aren’t wasting or otherwise misspending their time or energy and thus need a means of measuring accountability and performance of the organizations they support.

There is one issue that has resonated with me since reading the class materials and lecture. First and foremost: does everyone really need to measure impact? I am not implying that there are some projects’ social impact that can’t be measured but rather than with some projects the impact shouldn’t necessarily be quantified. There are some norms which easily rally consensus as positives: saving more lives, saving children, preventing social deterioration through education etc. However, the various formulas and functions of determining social impact must include some form of personal utility into their calculations. Calculating social return can be done through a more abstract lens (x lives saved, y revenue in tax dollars created, z new wells build etc.) but is there room for tailoring social impact to the values of constituents? Is there a way to measure the social value created on a count of the contributors themselves? In other words, say a donor is giving to a fund which contributes to research on a rare disease that affects the elderly and said donor finds out 100 patients nationwide are responding well to a new treatment this fund invested in. 100 elderly people out of 330 million doesn’t seem like many, but to this donor the cause matters very deeply. Perhaps they lost their parent to the disease. Thus the social impact goes beyond the dollars and cents of leveraging investment in the lives of the old and sick as opposed to investment in a fund that addresses childhood terminal illnesses but includes also the positive effects on said donor.

I think that because of the finite nature of resources in social enterprise (both human and fiscal) we are overly prone to say venture a is better or more fundable than venture b. Part of the of the glory of giving what you can to social enterprise is because of the autonomy involved in doing something from the heart that makes you feel something. My background is in the for profit sector and I intend to stay there after my Heinz education, but I can guarantee the social ventures I participate in will not just be a matter of maximizing the return on my social investment. I will spend my time on ventures that make me feel something; it’s that social element of brining people together over the causes they care about that makes them so unique and wonderful. Let’s not sell smaller, less grandiose, or less pressing causes completely short because they can’t meet our thresholds of SROI. Extremely intelligent people may all come up with different ways of measuring and valuing SROI and thus I believe we should always leave room for the seldom quantifiable "gut" feeling that comes from doing something you believe in.