Miller Center Fellowship
Document Type
Research Report
Publication Date
12-6-2016
Abstract
In the business world an ROI, or return on investment, measurement is used to track what financial gains investors are getting out of their investments. SROI, on the other hand, is a social return on investment. Social enterprises can report impact in many different formats. One of these formats is an SROI, which connects the financial inputs to the social outcomes by looking at specific investments and reporting social impact in a dollar value.
Although Rangsutra has been making an effort to track their social impact more efficiently and reliably, looking into an SROI would be useful to measure the impact of specific investments. Since financial returns cannot tell the full story of the success of any company, especially not those with social motivations that do not generally have high financial returns, if any at all, SROI attempts to tell the fuller story of what any given company is doing. 1
By choosing specific social outcomes to measure Rangsutra could reasonably attribute to themselves, they can report on them regularly, alongside financial investments, and report their impact in a succinct way to future investors and stakeholders. The Global Social Benefit Fellows’ socioeconomic and baseline assessments created during the summer of 2016 are a good start for tracking income, but the ability to show social return on financial investment is a powerful way to communicate the efficacy of a business model.
Recommended Citation
Matthews, Grace, "Rangsutra: Creating a Social Return on Investment" (2016). Miller Center Fellowship. 78.
https://scholarcommons.scu.edu/gsbf/78
Comments
https://www.millersocent.org/portfolio/rangsutra/