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.
Measure Up - Social value reporting done right.
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 evidence: 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 evidence of your difference in people’s lives, you need this. We hope you like it…and use it!
A simple 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…
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, 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.
