Social Return of Investment analysis: an Explanatory Video
September 2024
Understanding VARCITIES’ social return on investment
Our partner EURAC has made a video explanation of the Social Return on Investment methodology we applied to our seven pilots!
As part of our project, a socio-economic research process called Social Return on Investment (SROI) was conducted in our seven Pilot Sites. The SROI is a forecast analysis of the social impact that can be generated by the intervention in the first year following the project completion.
The SROI framework is a methodology applied to design and evaluate activities or projects that promote social change through the participation of local actors. It examines the outputs of the project, i.e., the expected tangible and measurable products while also focusing on the outcomes, i.e., the changes experienced by the beneficiaries, with the aim of calculating the social value created by a specific intervention.
Intense stakeholder engagement, combined with a review of the available SROI literature and secondary data, maje it possible to identify the most relevant and significant changes that can be generated by VARCITIES and to hypothesize the number of subjects who will experience these benefits. The study then calculates the social value of these changes through a process of approximation to financial values (proxies), which allowed attributing monetary values to outcomes for which there is no defined market price. Finally, the obtained social value is refined through discount rates provided by the SROI that account for what would have happened regardless of the intervention or thanks to other external realities and factors present on the territory.