Understand, measure and value your impact on the people and places you work with. Credible, practical and affordable.
“If you want credible evidence of social impact and value, State of Life is an excellent place to start”
Getting Started
Some tools are free-to-use and we’re working on making them all free. In the meantime our training and expertise can help you avoid the common pitfalls.
A simple, free, three step guide to measuring social impact and value
Get a better understanding of social impact and value with our step-by-step guide. We’ve distilled our work to date into three key, interdependent steps to evidence social impact and value. And updated the guide to align with the 2021 Green Book wellbeing guidance. Just don’t be tempted to miss out step 2…
Training your team and Government Economic Services in measurement and evaluation
We have a working principle that if you are claiming social value from having made people’s lives better - at least try to ask them if it actually worked. Our Social Value Sniff Test blog from 2020 stands the test of time.
As a result of our approach we ended up working with Pro Bono Economics on running the Government Economic Services training on how to measure and evaluate wellbeing. We also train our clients to do most of this work so that they only need us for where we add value in analysis, reporting and quality control (it’s a terrible business model to be honest but the right thing to do).
This podcast from Ruth Marvel, the CEO of Duke of Edinburgh Awards, explains the benefits better than we can.
Measure Up - Social value reporting that’s free and transparent.
For over a decade, organisations have struggled with confusing standards, multiple frameworks, unreliable metrics and expensive paywalls to measure social value. The result? Important work that could improve people’s lives gets buried under complexity.
That’s where Measure Up comes in - we’ve teamed up a group of social and environmental experts determined to tackle these challenges in measurement and valuation.
Always accessible. Transparent and reliable. Forever free.
Why MeasureUp?
Robust, defensible estimates of social value: Whether you need a user-friendly entry point or a more defined plan towards complex measurements, MeasureUp offers a credible pathway to capture the difference you’re making.
Open and honest: standards of evidence and full disclosure of numbers for planning, bids, procurement, and more.
Wellbeing focused: Uses the WELLBY measure from the UK Treasury Green Book and prioritises the experience and testimony of people as a fundamental pillar to more meaningful impact
Aligned to standards: Organised in themes that align with key economic, fiscal, and environmental values such as the ONS wellbeing dimensions, the Sustainable Development Goals, the UK government’s social value assessment framework (PPN 6/20) and the Central Government Social Value Model.
No hidden costs: Free to use, with full transparency.
If you need good (not perfect) estimates of your difference in people’s lives, you need this. We hope you like it…and use it!
FREE social value estimators - clubs, groups, churches and other community organisers.
Smart new tools that can help any club or group estimate their social value based on simple inputs of what they do, how many people participate. This is the sort of social value reporting that 10 years ago would cost thousands of pounds made available to grassroots clubs, group and organisations. Available now for Essex Football Association, National Churches Trust, Belong Network and Sporting Assets.
This is not evidence of social value but does enable small groups to access economics of social value that was beyond them for decades. This is part of our mission to democratise social value - up the revolution.
Bust the data collection myth with easy to use technology
We’ve collected survey data from young people at risk of homelessness, offenders doing community service and over 8,000 survey responses in villages in Tanzania, Rwanda and Zimbabwe. We can help you bust the myths on data collection - good data is possible, practical and powerful - don’t listen to those who say it isn’t.
We ensure you measure what you intend to measure and avoid common data pitfalls that can leave you with misleading results (see our FAQs).
We can help you develop an outcomes framework from pre-validated UK data sets as recommended by the 2021 Treasury Guidance on wellbeing using the State of Life Outcomes Bank (see below).
We advise on survey design and tailor the survey for your organisation; we can also do the analysis, translate your results into valuable insights, and create a compelling slide deck or report. See our work for examples.
State Of Life Outcomes bank
The UK has world-leading population data sets and surveys on wellbeing, our trust in others, sense of belonging, loneliness, resilience, confidence, health, anti-social behaviour, physical activity and much more. And it is these measures that Chapter 5 of the 2021 Green Book Wellbeing guidance advises projects to use as “ validated measures...that are consistent with existing measures”.
The State of Life Outcomes bank also has over 200 questions from the UK data sets to enable you to create your own surveys. The big advantage is that you can access ready made baselines and control groups in the national data so you can evidence the difference you really make. Making analysis of impact is faster, more robust, and more affordable.
