The Social Enterprise Exchange 2012

The Social Enterprise Exchange 2012 (27th March 2012) was the world’s biggest social enterprise (SE) event. Attended by over 1,150 delegates and 150 business exhibitors, presentations were given by leading social enterprise, political and business leaders including Scotland’s First Minister Alex Salmond.

The First Minister announced an annual programme to support global SEs, to be headquartered in Scotland. He said “this is a world first and a strong message of support for the Third Sector from Scottish Ministers”. “Scotland is already the global headquarters for the Homeless World Cup and the International Network of Street Papers. The provision of a grant to encourage other enterprises to come to Scotland is a demonstration of our strong support for the work that international SEs carry out, both in Scotland and around the world.”

Laurie Russell of SE Scotland also pointed out that: “Attracting global SEs to set up their headquarters in Scotland clearly shows that The Scottish Government means business and will be a huge boost to our international reputation.”

The presentations not only gave speakers the chance to say what they feel SE is but also what it is not: SEUK chief executive, Peter Holbrook opened the conference by saying “Bringing a pure profit model to work with the most vulnerable people does not make sense” while another speaker SEUK Chair Claire Dove contrasted the SE approach with that of the private sector Back-to-Work programme provider A4E. She said “If I had £8.6 million, what would I do? How many jobs would I create? That’s what the CEO took home. It’s absolutely scandalous.“

The programme was particularly packed and finding the balance between plenary, workshop and visiting exhibitors was a real challenge.

Exhibitors came from all walks of SE life and notably included networks and co-operations, support agencies, private SE firms and big financial institutions including banks and accountancy firms (to many to name here) promoting their SE related products and services. The Santander Bank Social Enterprise Exchange award winners 2012 were “Accounting for International Development”, a young London-based social enterprise that was set up in 2009 to provide charities and their NGO partners overseas with a specialist pro-bono volunteer accountant programme.

I attended a workshop called ‘Social Impact in Practice: making measurement meaningful’. SE faces big challenges around impact measurement (working out if, and explaining how and to what extent, our activities are socially useful).  The best-known method of impact measurement, Social Return on Investment (SROI) is widely regarded as being very boring and time consuming

Richard Kennedy, explained the SROI report process starting with open-ended stakeholder questions before identifying more focused, closed questions needed to collect meaningful data. SEs need to be clear about their ‘Theory of Change‘ so that could investigate whether or not they were being successful.

Kevin Robbie gave details of his SROI experience in Australia and explained that it was important to agree on a set of principles for impact measurement so as to understand what the processes were meant to achieve.

Concluding the workshop Edward Finch highlighted the need for impact reporting to be based on principles, and proportionate to the size and needs of the organisation, the SE movement was on a journey from ‘social impact assessment’ to ‘social impact planning’.

Roger Evans
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