Measuring the impact of social enterprises

The economic crisis and present government's strategy on spending cuts have put pressure on public bodies to do ‘more with less’. With their pursuit of a balance between social and economic objectives, social enterprises have the potential to minimise costs for public sector service delivery and fulfil a number of other policy priorities. The coalition government suggests identifying the best social enterprises and then rolling out their innovative services across the country. However, nowhere is the social, environmental and health value created by social enterprises captured systematically and there is not a level playing field that enables comparison across different types of social enterprises. In this article, the State of Social Enterprise Survey 2009—one of the the largest surveys on social enterprises ever conducted in the UK—is used to discuss the extent of the uptake of impact measurement tools. Results from the survey show a poor use of these tools in the social enterprise sector overall, altho...