This blog is the third in a series that highlights collaborative projects in Canada that have sought to make sense of impact measurement for social enterprises and other community-based organizations, and to advance new tools and common methods.
Mission. Model. Measure. is a new web guide developed through the Social Enterprise Ecosystem (S4ES) project, which is a partnership between the Canadian Community Economic Development Network, the Chantier de l'économie sociale, Buy Social Canada, Social Enterprise Institute and Social Value Lab. This partnership, which is funded primarily through the federal government, connects training, marketing, and impact measurement resources for social enterprises anywhere in Canada.
The site is directed to those who work in social enterprises. They can visit the site and take an impact practice self-assessment. This results in a report that sets out where their social enterprise is right now and what they could work on, benchmarking their practice relative to other social enterprise. The website also provides considerable guidance and tools, with a very extensive collection of impact practice resources that is well organized and easy to search.
The guidance section provides useful instruction on the topic of impact measurement organized in 10 topics and 50 sub-topics. Most of the guidance refers website users to a fee-based web training package ($999) offered through the Social Enterprise Institute. The program instructor is Jonathan Coburn, founding director of Social Value Lab, one of the partners of S4ES. The course is also informed by the Common Foundations set out in the Common Approach.