My youngest son is 12. He’s a committed footballer and trains with an academy squad. Over the past few months, training has taken place in cold rain, hail, and mud. Attendance has dropped. Even when players turn up, some do the bare minimum—shivering, avoiding drills, cutting corners.
Eventually, the young coach stopped the session and addressed the group plainly:
If you don’t want to do this properly, stay home. Being a footballer isn’t about wearing a new kit on astro turf in the sunshine and imagining yourself in the Premier League. If you want to play in front of thousands one day, you have to love the work—the rain, the mud, the repetition, the discomfort. No shortcuts.
This attitude warmed my heart and soul. Because the same conversation is still happening—uncomfortably often—in social value.
When optics replace impact
Somehow, the impact of social value delivery has been pushed to the margins. What dominates instead are optics, tidy proxy numbers, and stories that feel good but change very little.
We talk about investment, but not proportionality. We talk about activity, but not outcomes. We brag about KPIs, without proportionality evaluation and asking whether any real value was actually created.
Take this example.
A leadership team of ten spends a day volunteering at a soup kitchen. It is celebrated widely—internal comms, LinkedIn posts, glossy photos. The combined daily salary cost of that group and someone planning and coordinating this activity is easily £10,000–£20,000.
Social impact? Minimal.
The charity already has trained volunteers or paid staff – they are not counting on one day worth of volunteers to run their kitchen. What it lacks is strategic support. The same group could have delivered transformational value by:
- Acting as trustees
- Providing professional advice
- Supporting financial planning, digital transformation, or service design
Instead, we celebrate presence over contribution. Some even argue to count the feel-good benefits for the volunteers! We have seen also proxy values for this!
The comfort of box-ticking.
Then there’s the desire for one universal social value KPI tool that converts everything into proxy values and pie charts. Self-claimed. No validation or verification. No understanding of whether the multiplier enhanced impact exceeded the investment.
Tick the box. Move on.
This is not impact management. It is impact theatre. Impact evaluation principles require always evidence of delivery and information on beneficiaries, and some kind of data on the outcomes if any social return of investment is being claimed.
Donations without direction.
Despite long-term, high-value contracts in public sector procurement, instant ad-hoc donations still dominate the narrative. Small sums, surplus materials, one-off gestures—easy to approve, impossible to challenge due to the charitable nature of the contributions.
Nobody argues against donating £500 of construction surplus to a charity. But when these gestures replace strategic partnerships, long-term planning, and alignment with organisational strengths, we should be honest about what society loses as a result.
We should not celebrate what didn’t happen. What did the VCSEs miss out in this scenario? Is this what Social Value Act and related procurement policies are for?
Volunteering without ownership
Another familiar request: a volunteering platform that “runs itself”.
Open opportunities. No ownership. No management. Employees sign up if they feel like it.
It only requires using common sense to realise that these opportunities cannot be meaningful, if it does not matter whether there takers of not. The primary outcome of these activities is how the volunteer feels after attending, not the benefit delivered to the VCSE, beneficiaries and society. Again, it is important to consider the monetary and qualitative value of the volunteer time, and make an honest evaluation whether the delivered value exceeds the investment.
Let’s talk ratios, not stories
Put your organisation’s contract turnover next to its social value delivery and look at the ratio.
Not hours inflated into days. Not surplus materials counted at retail value. Not carefully framed anecdotes.
Real investment vs. Real outcomes.
Recently, a housing organisation with £500 million+ turnover, similar sum invested into new houses, celebrated its annual social value achievements delivered by their hundreds of suppliers:
- 500 hours of volunteering
- £200,000 in donations and surplus
Every contribution matters, but with social value weighted at 10% in procurement, this represents per-mil level investment, not transformation.
The truth about social value:
- Social value is hard work — by design
- Delivering real social value is not easy. Nor should it be.
It requires:
- Strategic thinking, deliberately harnessing corporate strengths to design initiatives that matter
- Long-term commitment, building scalable partnerships rather than one-off activity
- Skills-based contribution, alongside non-skilled volunteering delivered at scale where it creates genuine value
- Proper coordination, including partnership management and informed resource allocation decisions
- Clear evidence of outcomes, not just spend or activity
Social value is not fluffy. It is not cosmetic. And it is not defined by heart-warming donation stories that a VCSE could just as easily secure by stopping a stranger on the street or knocking on the door of a local SME.
It is about social value for money.
And that brings us back to the pitch, in the rain.
Do you want the kit and the photos—or do you want to do the work?
Because only one of those makes you a real footballer.
Written by Tiia Sammallahti, CEO, whatimpact.com
