S&PAProfessional / Summer 2017
IN DEPTH AGENDA A skateboarding group at Ponds Forge International Sports Centre in Sheffield
insufficient. A robust and compelling model for demonstrating Social Return on Investment (SROI) was required. One that measured not just outputs, but outcomes. SIV healthy partnerships manager Rob Womack (right) set to work researching how other providers were reporting SROI. Although he unearthed examples from different sectors, such as the approach some housing organisations took in illustrating how their services improved quality of life, he drew a blank in the field of sport and physical activity. “What I found was quite exciting in lots of ways because it meant there was an opportunity to do something new,” says Womack. “But also, it was almost depressing that our sector wasn’t really doing anything of this kind.” Womack dug around some more, and to his surprise found that the expertise he needed to access was located on SIV’s doorstep. In April 2016, Sheffield Hallam University – home to the Sport Industry Research Centre – published its report, ‘Social Return on Investment in Sport: a participation wide model for England’. On the back of research funded by the Higher Education Investment Fund (HEIF), Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) and Sport England, the report proposed a framework for measuring and understanding the non-market economic, social and environmental value of an activity, intervention, policy or organisation.
What if, Womack wondered, this national framework could be adapted to suit SIV’s needs? He contacted Dr Larissa Davies, reader in sport management at Sheffield Hallam, one of the report’s authors. “SIV wanted to explore the possibility of us doing a similar study with them and on their group of facilities within the city,” says Davies. “This was ground-breaking. To my knowledge, they are the first trust in the UK to use this type of evaluation to try and capture the wider value of the services provided.” There were two aspects to the work Sheffield Hallam undertook with SIV. First, adapting the participation-wide model to work using local data. As a process, this component of the work was “relatively straightforward”, says Davies, although trying to get the local data required had its challenges. The second part was a more bespoke evaluation of a targeted programme – SIV’s GP referrals scheme. “That was a little more complex as we had to gather data from a range of stakeholders,”
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explains Davies. “We still used the SROI framework but the model was quite different.” The upshot of the whole project was a set of eye-catching figures that SIV has been using to demonstrate the significant difference it makes to the