What is social impact?

Every social enterprise has to answer this question. ‘So what do you do?’ The answer to this goes beyond achieving a decent profit margin, to effectively demonstrating your social impact. But what exactly does social impact mean? In this video, we will listen to Servane, a social enterprise business consultant, explaining her definition of social impact. Social impact well, it’s a big topic, and if someone comes and talk to me and doesn’t know what it is, I like to help them by thinking of the end of a great story. So when you think of having or making, or contributing to social impact you need to have the end in mind.

So you start always with the end, and after that you need to understand that building social impact involves having a strategy, and being clear about the activities that you want to deliver. And along the way measure and capture that story of change that the people you work for are experiencing. So, to measure social impact you need to actually stop what you’re doing. Because you need to ask yourself ‘how do I know that my product or my activity is actually valuable, if I don’t know its effect on people?’ It’s first having conversations about what they think your product or your activity is doing for them, is probably the first tool to use. Conversation is great.

So the top three clues or indicators that come back from this conversation, focus on these, and continue measuring these indicators.