We are Impact Arts, a national community arts organisation which uses the arts as way to create positive, lasting change in people’s lives. The Fab Pad in North Ayrshire is one of our projects. It offers arts, design and practical skills training to homeless people, to help them turn their house into a home and supports them to take up education, training and employment.
We wanted to be able to demonstrate how effective the project was. We used the Social Return on Investment method (SROI), because it would help us measure impact and express that impact in financial terms. We would then be able to compare this with the investment made in the project.
This study was part of the Social Economy Scotland (SES) programme. SES was a Development Partnership funded by the European Community’s EQUAL initiative.
What were the issues?
• Homeless people are likely to have poorer physical and mental health, problems with alcohol and drugs, poor family relationships and find it difficult to access training and employment.
• When people with chaotic lifestyles take on a new tenancy, they need support to help make sure they do not loose their home.
• Fab pad was new to North Ayrshire. Our funders thought they were taking a risk in supporting it for three years. They were not sure that an arts project would make the necessary difference to young people’s lives. That is helping support them as tenants and get them into jobs and education.
• We needed a way to show our funders that they were getting value for money. And to demonstrate the connection between the arts and tackling social problems.
What we did
We got things started by working with a researcher funded through the Equal programme and with Cunninghame Housing Association (CHA), our main partner in North Ayrshire.
We spoke to our different stakeholders, to understand what outcomes they were expecting us to deliver. We used a workshop and questionnaires with Fab Pad participants to find out what benefits they were getting from the project. Participants also did collages that showed how they felt about themselves and Fab Pad.
All this information was used to develop an ‘impact map’ for Fab Pad. This lists all the benefits that each stakeholder reported, and shows how these benefits can be valued in financial terms. An example would be how young people had stopped becoming homeless, against an estimate of how many times they would have been homeless if we hadn’t been providing the service. Each time someone becomes homeless, the Council has to provide temporary accommodation, and we could calculate the cost that the Council did not have to meet because of our work.
We were able to find and value a number of different benefits that helped the Council and other public bodies, and saved public money. For example, we were able to show how young people used their time differently. To see friends more often, reunite themselves with their families, go to the gym and volunteer in the community. We put a financial value on these changes by valuing people’s time. We also collected information on how many people we had helped during the project, how many of our young people were getting jobs and going back to college.
The researcher was then able to take this evidence of outcomes in our young people, and calculate a financial value for each one. She created spreadsheets which showed how the value of different benefits was calculated, and how it compared with our funders’ investment in Fab Pad. She was able to estimate the social returns for each of our main funders, which showed how worthwhile their investment in Fab Pad had been.
Our outcomes
• We now have a way to demonstrate the difference Fab Pad is making in the ways that were important to funders.
• The report measured 16 different indicators of social value that Fab Pad was creating with its participants.
• It showed that funders were getting value for money from their investment in the project. And in some cases, that they may be directly saving money on their services as a result of our work with young people.
• The funders have now invested more money in the Fab Pad project in North Ayrshire for the next three years.
• We have gained a better understanding ourselves of the value of our work, and it has helped us think through our cost effectiveness as an organisation, and where we can focus our development in order to create the most social value.
• The final SROI report showed how the programme was transforming people's lives. The study showed positive impacts on homelessness, crime, mental and physical health, reduced drug taking, more constructive use of time, improved relationships with children, family and friends, reduced debt and improved employability.
• The study showed that every £1 invested in the project had returned £8.38 in social value.
One great thing – working together
The project was successful because it was collaboration between Impact Arts, Cunninghame Housing Association, the researcher and the staff working in Fab Pad. SROI must be based on actual data from the project, and producing a worthwhile report relied on Impact Arts staff and others going out of their way to speak in depth to participants on the project.
Lessons learnt
• In the past, we have collected a lot of information on our work which was not always useful to demonstrate the impact of our work.
• The SROI method provided a clear direction and way to collect relevant information on the impact of our work. It helped us focus on outcomes rather than statistics and outputs.
• An independent researcher, who understands SROI, is necessary to lead on the work, especially the first time it is used.
• To do the SROI analysis you have to spend time with the researcher to develop ways of collecting information on the change in people.
• Staff had to be given the time to do this work, rather than expecting them to do it as an extra to other work.
• Having an independent researcher to produce the report makes the results more convincing to funders.
We intend to use the North Ayrshire Fab Pad project to show case SROI.
Impact Arts now wants to use the SROI method to compare different Fab Pad projects, and to adopt it to evaluate new projects. We are learning how to do the SROI analysis on one of our new projects with young people in Glasgow, and we are building our capacity to do the SROI work ourselves
