A disclosure worth noting: as a privately owned social value consultancy, we have an obvious stake in this argument. We've tried to make it honestly, but readers should weigh that context.
As the social value industry has grown, so too has the number of ‘off the shelf’ tools, often that come at free or low-cost, that help organisations measure, improve, and report on their impact. These tools can improve access, build baseline understanding, and enable organisations that might otherwise undertake no impact measurement at all to begin engaging with social value. Used carefully, they serve a good purpose. Used carelessly, they come at a cost.
This is not an argument against accessible tools, which play an important role in widening participation in social value practice, but an argument about what is lost when measurement is treated as purely as a desktop calculation, not evaluation.
The Purpose of Social Value
At its heart, social value is about improving opportunities and strengthening communities through changes such as better employment prospects and healthier lives. But it also creates something more than the sum of its parts. Investing in positive outcomes creates a multiplier effect. A stronger community anchors further investment, reduces demand on the state, and builds the social fabric that makes more change possible.
This is why the quality of the practice that facilitates social value matters so much.
The Limits of ‘Off-the-Shelf’ Practice
Experienced practitioners and evaluators, in-house or external, provide expert support. They help organisations understand their stakeholders, measure the change they create, and grow their impact. This expertise is rarely straight forward, and is developed through years of study, practice, and accumulated experience.
Off-the-shelf tools such as templates and online impact calculators, while useful, inherently lack these things. They often carry simplified methodologies, push users towards particular approaches, and signal that highly context specific work can be reduced to a calculation.
The issue is not that these tools exist. A skilled, experienced practitioner can use a free calculator or an open-source framework and produce rigorous, credible work. The distinction is that social value is ultimately a discipline of analysis, evaluation and judgement, whereas tools offer calculations only.
Problem arises when these quick solutions come to replace, rather than complement, expert input, which leads to watered down or ineffective results.
Why Social Value Needs Expert Judgement
Nowhere is this clearer than in social value measurement.
Impact reports are increasingly appearing with limited methodological transparency, sometimes reducing complex assessments to a headline figure with little explanation of how it was derived. Unsurprisingly, this has led to some scepticism about social value claims.
The criticism that adding up all claimed social value would exceed the size of the UK economy has become a familiar one, and while that framing misses something important (these figures represent the worth of an intervention, not money generated), the underlying concern is valid. It’s possible that reports overclaim.
Often this happens not because calculations are incorrect, but because the underlying assumptions have not been sufficiently examined. Considerations such as attribution, double-counting and displacement are fundamental questions which require detailed analysis to answer. People's lives are shaped by multiple organisations, interventions, and circumstances operating simultaneously. Without careful analysis, several organisations may end up claiming credit for the same outcomes. Social value cannot be assessed in a vacuum.
It would be unfair to suggest this problem is confined to organisations using off-the-shelf tools. However, they make it easier for weak methodologies to be replicated at scale. Free tools can support the calculation process, but they cannot remove the need for professional judgement. A tool can produce a figure. Determining whether that figure is credible, meaningful, and useful for decision-making is another matter entirely.
The Cost to Credibility
Potentially damaging is what this does to the sector’s credibility. What is effectively a problem of poor practice becomes perceived as a weakness in the methods overall. Doubt often extends beyond the practitioners or tools responsible, and becomes directed at social value itself.
Yet the greatest risk is not simply to the credibility of social value as a concept. It is that organisations make poorer decisions about where to invest time and resources because the evidence informing those decisions is weaker than it appears. If measurement is intended to improve outcomes, then weak measurement can ultimately undermine them. If confidence in the discipline declines, organisations may be less willing to invest in programmes that create positive social outcomes.
A Lesson From Another Industry
Journalism offers a useful parallel.
Technological change dramatically increased access to information and lowered barriers to publication. These developments brought clear benefits. However, they also made it easier to mistake the production of content for the practice of journalism itself. Investigating a story, verifying evidence and exercising editorial judgement remain key skills to the professions credibility. As information became more abundant, concerns about misinformation and trust also grew.
Social value faces a similar challenge. Measurement tools can make calculation easier and more accessible, but they cannot replace the analysis, evaluation and judgement that underpin credible social value practice. Producing a figure is not the same as understanding whether it is robust, meaningful or useful for decision-making.
The Future of the Profession
Expert social value practice is one of the mechanisms that makes social change possible. The question the sector must ask is: what kind of infrastructure do we want underpinning that work? A landscape of simple outputs that looks credible but lack depth? Or an ecosystem where accessible tools are complemented by the rigour, independence, and accumulated knowledge needed to support meaningful decision-making?
Off-the-shelf tools are part of the ecosystem and should remain so. They lower barriers, build baseline understanding, and provide a starting point for organisations beginning to engage with social value seriously. Used carefully, by people who understand their limits, they have a genuine role.
However, they cannot be its foundation. Social value teaches us that failing to invest in positive outcomes often proves to be a false economy, where things that appear costly in the short term (such as investment in pro-social programmes), have a greater cost from not investing in the long run. The same principle may apply to the infrastructure that supports social value itself.
If social value is to contribute meaningfully to social renewal, accessibility and rigour must advance together, ensuring that better access to tools is matched by the judgement needed to use them well.