I’ve noticed an increase in students with social consciousness in the past few years. Some are even choosing their university based on its sustainability credentials. Business education needs to adapt to these changing attitudes, and one way to do this is to teach social value.
Social value, often treated as an add-on in business education, can be complex to define and measure. It may include improved quality of life, a healthier environment, increased happiness, better education, reduced inequalities and other benefits that extend beyond profit.
This raises the need for clearer discussions about the differences between social enterprises and conventional businesses, particularly around how impact is assessed. Unlike outputs, which can be quantified relatively easily in financial terms – for example, the number of students trained by a language school or patients treated by a healthcare organisation – outcomes require a deeper evaluation of lasting change.
Outcomes are broader measures of how things have improved. They include a lower crime rate, healthier people, better education and lower unemployment and can be more difficult to assess objectively. After all, how can businesses discern whether improvements in the above are all down to what they are doing? Other changes in the environment, through government support or contributions from other businesses and charities, might have improved these outcomes, so a thorough knowledge of the stakeholders will be needed to gauge their contribution. But how can we get the message across to students?
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Beyond the ‘triple bottom line’
Measuring social and environmental business performance has advanced considerably since the 1990s, when the “triple bottom line” framework was introduced. A wide range of new models is now available. Including these in teaching is a great way to help students grasp the difference between outputs and outcomes, and to see how social enterprises benefit the community. Examples include:
- Social value international guidance on how to do a social return on investment (SROI)
- Cost-benefit analysis (CBA)
- Impact measurement and management (IMM) analysis
- The social value measurement framework
- The models made available by the Institute for Social Value UK
- My institution’s toolbox.
We also need to equip students with an understanding of the appropriate data to collect to form an accurate view of the outcomes of a product or service. So, rather than just cost data and number of people helped, metrics such as whether crime reduced in the area, whether fewer people need to visit the doctor, and so on, are useful. This data might come from government and council sources or platforms such as Statista and Mintel, which the university library will likely subscribe to. Much government data is free to access and some might come from specialist trade journals addressing crime or medicine. General data on social enterprises can be found at Social Enterprise UK, the British Council, the World Economic Forum and the European Social Enterprise Monitor Report.
Collect success stories
To paint a fuller picture, students can interview experts, service providers and customers. Having “end users” tell their stories can effectively capture how they have benefited from the service or product of a particular social enterprise, offering a deeper understanding of people’s lived experiences. Likert scales are useful for capturing feelings and emotions during this kind of project.
Experiential learning
Live company projects and consultancies, often used in experiential learning in entrepreneurship teaching, help students see the social outcomes of their work in real time.
Extracurricular activities such as multidisciplinary hackathons (collaborative activities that often take place over a weekend) require students to work together, often with the help of mentors and other experts, to solve a specific problem. These can be directed at local challenges, such as poor diet and low recycling rates. Students can quickly see the positive outcomes of their work for themselves, and running these as extracurricular activities allows students to take more risks with their ideas.
By committing to helping our students learn about social value, we can nurture their social conscience, increase their employability and address the “green skills gap”. This means we can also help employers be socially responsible. Most of all, we can equip our students to solve urgent problems that have a big impact on humanity.
Robert A. Phillips is a senior lecturer at the University of Manchester.
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