ECT Charity’s award-winning Social Value Toolkit, made possible thanks to a donation from the Monday Charitable Trust, enables community transport organisations across the UK to demonstrate the value of their work – from battling isolation and loneliness, to providing access to health and social care services.
As local councils are reducing their budgets and community services are increasingly being cut, it is essential that community transport organisations are able to measure the social value they provide in a quantifiable way.
The “social value” of an organisation’s activities is the estimated monetary value of their social impact.
We examined existing social value methodologies, and realised that no tool existed that could accommodate the uniqueness of community transport and the crucial impact it delivers. So, we created this sector-specific Toolkit specifically to help community transport organisations measure their social value using information already collected on booking management systems and HR records (e.g. number of trips, volunteer time).
Read Measuring the true value of community transport – featuring ECT Charity’s approach to social value, published on LocalGov, the UK's largest dedicated local government news website.
Using the Toolkit ECT Charity can show that our community transport services created £1.66m in social value during 2018/19.
Measuring social value in this way enables community transport organisations to:
Bill Freeman, CEO of the Community Transport Association, agrees with the importance of measuring social value, and says: “Showing the difference you make can help your success and sustainability as a community transport provider. Focussing on the wider economic benefits or ‘social value’ derived from your services and activities is a great way of doing this. By giving commissioners a fuller account of the social value you create they can weigh-up the benefits of investing in your organisation as a means of preventing earlier and costlier social care and public health interventions.”
The Toolkit is accessible to all community transport organisations operating with a charitable purpose, which deliver community transport services. It is composed of:
In August 2019, the passenger transport consultancy TAS Partnership undertook an impartial assessment of our Toolkit alongside other social valuation approaches that might be adopted by a community transport operator. Amongst other things, their report highlighted that our Toolkit “is very cost-effective” and “does not require any specialist knowledge or extraneous time and energy to manipulate, making it very user-friendly to the busiest CT operator”. You can read their full report here.
For further information, please contact socialvalue@ectcharity.co.uk
You can read our flyer here.
