ABSTRACT
Social investment and impact measurement have emerged, grown and reached adolescence hand in hand with each other over a similar time period in the UK. An understanding of the blend of social and financial returns expected from social investment requires a quantification of both. But, despite seemingly interlinked intentions of social investment and impact measurement, developments in both fields have sometimes occurred in parallel rather than together. A social investor will want to know the impact of their investment and be in a position to understand or evaluate any financial trade-off that might have been taken. While impact practice among social investors is evolving, significant challenges remain in embedding effective measurement across social investment market as a whole. In Social return on investment, social, environmental and economic outcomes are assigned monetary values. Challenges to this arise when organisations are unclear about the difference they make, or if the monetary value of the difference is not relevant or difficult to ascertain.
