What do you think of when you hear the term social value?
For many people, it will immediately bring to mind procurement frameworks and tender questions. It’s about ‘added value’ alongside a contract: how many volunteering hours you’ll deliver, how much money you’ll raise for charity, how many workshops you’ll run. It’s often accounted for in outputs, monetised through a desktop calculator, and packaged into a report.
But the more important questions are rarely asked: what difference is this actually making, and could the time, money and effort spent be used to better effect?
Volunteering and fundraising are, of course, useful. However, the RealWorth view is that we should think bigger: that at its core, social value is a tool for social renewal: a way of rethinking how our actions, projects and spaces contribute to society to fundamentally make it a better place for everyone to live – a point that is often overlooked in procurement requirements or annual reports.
A Challenging Social and Economic Context
This distinction matters because of the challenging political, social and economic context we’re operating in.
Economically, wealth is increasingly concentrated, with a long-term privatisation agenda meaning vast sums are extracted from the economy rather than circulating within it. The impacts of Brexit continue to constrain growth, and often polarised rhetoric around immigration risks undermining one of the key drivers of national prosperity.
Socially, the atmosphere is equally strained. We live in a time of increasing division, where positive or progressive action is often dismissed as ‘woke’, and where many people feel disconnected from the country they live in, whether due to housing, inequality, isolation, or a lack of opportunity and belonging.
In response, parts of the business world, which play a significant role in national wellbeing, have rightly recognised that the business-as-usual approach of not considering and responding to their employees, suppliers and the communities they interact with is increasingly inadequate and short-sighted. ‘Social value’ emerged as a development from corporate social responsibility, offering a more structured and measurable way to understand organisational impact on society. This is progress, but it is also where the problem begins.
In practice, social value is often narrowly applied, used to quantify and evaluate CSR-style activities rather than to examine the broader social implications of the projects and programmes that organisations implement.
The Limits of Just Using ‘Added Value’
Too often, social impact considerations are treated as something separate from a projects core purpose. It becomes a series of added activities: charity days, one-off community events, co-design workshops, or volunteering initiatives that sit neatly alongside the ‘real’ business of delivering products, services, or developments.
In reality, we should be asking about the inherent value of an organisation, a project, a policy or a programme. What does it contribute to the world simply by doing what it does, day in and day out?
If social value is entirely disconnected from an organisation’s outputs, then its ability to create meaningful change is stifled. You can run excellent events and still produce outcomes that actively undermine social wellbeing.
Housing is a good example. A developer could host a handful of well-intentioned community workshops or charity initiatives, but if the resulting development fails to provide genuinely affordable homes, lacks social infrastructure, and offers no meaningful community assets, it will miss the opportunity of creating social integration and renewal. This could result in residents who feel isolated, reliant on cars, and disconnected from shops, services, and one another. These individuals will experience suboptimal benefits, regardless of how impressive the social value report appears.
The same logic applies across sectors. A ‘third space’ operator, for example, might emphasise community and connection, but if their spaces are inaccessible, unaffordable, or designed primarily for short-term consumption rather than long-term belonging, then the social value they create is limited.
Reframing Social Value as Social Renewal
This is where a different understanding of social value becomes essential.
Social value should be about improving the social outcomes that a policy, project, or programme fundamentally contributes to the world. It should be about aligning purpose, operations, and impact so that people are brought together, feel safe, can have conversations about mutual interests, find new opportunities for hobbies or work, develop their own knowledge and skills, or just be happy.
Through this lens, social value becomes a tool for renewal. It is a way of repairing social fabric, strengthening communities, and contributing to a fairer and more resilient society. That requires honesty, an appreciation of negative outcomes, and a willingness to change, not just to measure.
Beyond Numbers and Headlines
Maximising social impact as a tool for renewal cannot be done by a desktop calculator alone. Quantification remains vital but works best alongside proper evaluation and recommendations. Headline figures may look impressive, but they rarely tell the full story of who benefits, who doesn’t, and the causal mechanisms as to why.
Proper social value evaluation brings together multiple perspectives:
an understanding of place, need and social context
stakeholder voices and lived experience
robust social value metrics
Used together, these tools can help identify where projects and programmes are genuinely creating value and where they are falling short. More importantly, they can highlight practical areas for improvement, allowing those who deliver them to evolve their models, products, and services in ways that genuinely benefit society.
The Role of Social Value Advice
This is the real benefit of social value consulting: to help organisations think differently about their role in the world; to challenge assumptions; to connect impact back to purpose; and to support long-term change.
If social value is treated as a tool for proper evaluation, reflection and improvement, rather than simply a reporting exercise, it has the potential to contribute to social renewal by reshaping activities that operate within our daily lives.