Measuring Social Value to Deliver More of It
July 13, 2026Posted by:
Reflections from the SRAG Lunch and Learn with Thrive
Since the Procurement Act 2023 came into force, social value has been a required part of public sector tendering, and Procurement Policy Note 002 sets out how buyers should weight it, often accounting for 10 to 40% of a bid's evaluation. The commitments made in a tender are numbers someone, eventually, will ask to see evidenced.
That was the starting point for our latest Lunch and Learn, held on Tuesday 7 July with Thrive, whose platform helps organisations capture, track and report the social value they deliver. The session was framed around a single idea: measuring social value well is what lets you deliver more of it. What followed was a practical look at why that is harder than it sounds, and what closing the gap actually involves.
Where social value data breaks down
Most organisations delivering social value are not short of activity. Employment support, volunteering, community fundraising, supply chain commitments: the work is happening, visible on the ground and felt by the people it reaches. What falters is what happens next: capturing it, recording it and carrying it through into something a report or a bid can actually use.
Danielle Aberg, Head of Social Sustainability at Thrive, set out four ways social value data is found lacking. Definition drift is what happens when two teams measure the same outcome in two different ways, so the numbers cannot be added together with any confidence. Evidence gaps are figures with no clear record of how they were reached, which hold up until someone asks a direct question about them. Siloed capture is when different parts of an organisation hold different pieces of the same story, none of them able to see the full picture. Metric overload is trying to track everything at once, before the systems exist to support it.
Individually, none of these are dramatic failures. Combined, these small cracks extend to meet each other across a programme of delivery, and the risk of undermining the effort accumulates over time. A genuine piece of work, real and valuable when it happened, can end up invisible in a report because it was not captured consistently at the time. On paper, it looks as though nothing happened at all. In practice, dozens of small interventions took place and made a real difference to real people. The evidence was not there to prove it, and without evidence of what changed and how, repeating the activity is far less likely.
Fixing it at the point of entry
The session's clearest message was about timing. As Danielle put it during the discussion: "Data quality is much, much easier to improve at the point of entry rather than at the point of reporting." Once a figure has gone through several hands, been rounded, reformatted or half-remembered, there is very little that can be done to make it more reliable. The improvement has to happen earlier, at the moment the data is first recorded.
This is the thinking behind Thrive's approach to social value data: building consistency and validation into the point where information first enters a system, rather than trying to reconstruct it retrospectively when a bid deadline or board report is looming. Thrive's Impact Evaluation Standard, and the platform it sits within, are built around exactly that principle, giving organisations a shared, consistent way to define and capture what they are measuring before the numbers ever reach a spreadsheet built for a tender.
For SRAG members, including Laing O'Rourke, who shared their experience of working with Thrive during the session, the relevance is direct. Whether the outcome being tracked is employment, volunteering hours, community investment or supply chain commitments, the same discipline applies. The credibility of a social value figure is decided long before anyone sits down to write the bid response.
Why this matters for current, and future, SRAG members
The organisations doing the most credible social value work are not necessarily the ones doing the most of it. They are the ones who can show their working, who can point to how a figure was built rather than simply stating it. That is the difference between a number you can lean on, and one with hairline cracks that make it liable to collapse under pressure. In a market where social value is scored, cross-checked and expected to hold up months after a contract is won, those are the cracks that decide the outcome.
That is the promise-to-proof gap this session set out to address, and it is one every SRAG member is navigating in some form: in bid responses, in board reporting, and in conversations with commissioners who want to see how a figure was reached, not just the figure itself. Getting the measurement right is not a compliance exercise sitting alongside the delivery. It is what turns delivery into something an organisation can point to with confidence, this year and in every renewal after it.
If you would like to be part of a future Lunch and Learn session, email [email protected].
July 13, 2026Posted by:
