Social Value Trust
Pioneering Modern Analytics of People, Their Communities, and Economies since 2002
Social Value Trust
In our interconnected world, there is an urgent need for an objective, data-driven framework to measure the impact of actions and decisions on society — a concept known as social value. As businesses and organizations increasingly recognize the limitations of traditional macro-economic measures like GDP, Social Value Trust, a brand of CANCEA’s suite of tailored social value evaluation tools and analysis, steps in to bridge the gap between individual well-being and broader societal aspirations.
CANCEA has been at the forefront of socio-economic analysis for over 20 years, shaping policies and impacting lives through its cutting-edge microeconomic and demographic modelling, using agent-based modelling and digital twinning of communities. Recognizing the challenges posed by evaluating social value, CANCEA introduced Social Value Trust, the only socio-economic microeconomic simulation platform of its kind in North America, to provide a reliable and scalable solution to social value. The result is a social value simulation platform that is the only one of its kind in the world.
What We Do
At Social Value Trust, we assist businesses and organizations to measure and integrate social value into their strategic decision-making, fostering a fairer and more sustainable society in line with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Through our research, consultancy, and innovative technology, we help our clients determine the real-world impact of their work and the value it brings to people and communities.
The Social Value Trust offers a range of social value evaluation products that cover many industry verticals including:
- Social value of buildings, residential, industrial and commercial
- Social value of infrastructure that takes into account supply chains, levels of investment, employment, and the long term systemic impacts that is the purpose of infrastructure projects
- Social value of health care policies across health care continuums of care
- Social value of charities and community programs
- Government policies that include labour force, health, economic development and social government programs
The Organizations We Help Transform
As a research, strategy, and socio-economic technology company, we help our clients, including governments, private sector organizations, and charities, make informed decisions based on comprehensive data and advanced technology. Our large-scale simulation capacity empowers clients to make sound business decisions, develop strategic plans, and build compelling business cases.
Our Cutting-Edge Services & Tools
We help our clients measure and communicate the social value generated by their programs, investments, and their organization as a whole. Our services span from social value consultancy to a suite of tools designed to enable robust social value measurements. By applying the highest levels of scientific rigour to our research, we inform and shape policy that changes lives.
Our Services
Our team consists of specialists across a wide range of methodologies, ready to meet your needs:
- Evaluate Social Impact in Monetary Terms: Our proprietary models help you quantify the social value of your initiatives, offering a clear understanding of your social return on investment.
- Communicate Your Impact Effectively: We provide guidance on showcasing your social value in ways that resonate with your stakeholders, enhancing transparency and trust.
- Know the Social Value Generated Across Your Project Portfolio: We offer tools and methodologies for assessing and comparing the social value generated by different projects, helping you allocate resources effectively.
- Enhance stakeholder Engagement by Showcasing Impact: We help you demonstrate the social value of your organization’s work to your stakeholders, including employees, fostering a sense of purpose and engagement.
Strategic Business Advice
We work with you to understand your social value, translate it into actionable strategies, and communicate them effectively to your stakeholders. Our team of experts assesses your strategy, values, and frameworks, benchmarks your performance, and helps you better understand and engage with stakeholders and communities.
Impact Reporting
Our expertise in econometrics, statistics, and data science enables us to apply unrivalled scientific rigour to our research, evidencing the impact of your business or organization on communities, interventions, projects, and programmes. With robust and reliable empirical evidence, you can make more informed business and investment decisions.
Social Value Measurement and Evaluation
We are pioneers in quantifying a wide range of impacts, distilling them into a single measure of social value. We go beyond traditional economic metrics, considering impacts on communities and their people across hundreds of different factors thereby providing robust and accurate evaluations of the social value generated.
Wellbeing Analysis
We help you understand what wellbeing is, how to measure it, and how to assess the potential impact of future projects. This enables you to make a positive and sustainable impact on society.
Advantages of Our Social Value Approach
Context dependent
The generation of social value is highly contextual. The arrangement of resources and policies can create different social value outcomes. Our approach acknowledges these unique contexts and incorporates them into the analysis. This is crucial for:
- Product and Service Development: By inserting social value measures into your product and services design processes, you can maximize your social value impacts. The design of the form and function of real assets and financial products drive some measures of social value in ways you’ve likely yet to anticipate.
- Value Optimization Methods: Our tools can help you find solutions that maximize both financial and social returns, ensuring that your actions have a significant positive impact on society while remaining economically viable.
- Communications and Marketing Narratives: Our tools can help you find solutions that maximize both financial and social returns, ensuring that your actions have a significant positive impact on society while remaining economically viable.
- Forecasting and Net Present Value Analysis: Our approach to social value forecasting requires individual longitudinal modelling to ensure the changing circumstances of people (time and space) are taken into account.
- Managing Reputational Risk: While organizations pursue social value metrics to bolster their market relevance and to entice customers and investors, there is a significant reputational risk if they get it wrong. We avoid common pitfalls, such as modelling people as groups and averages instead of as individuals with unique circumstances, double counting, and person substitution errors. Our approach respects the individuality of each person and their unique set of circumstances.
Reported in monetary terms
Our robust methodology converts the various units behind social value metrics appropriately into financial terms to allow for comparisons, optimizations, forecasts, and social value-based compensation packages. The advantages of this approach include:
- Cost-Benefit and Rates of Return Analysis: Analysis can be performed utilizing traditional methods and net present values, allowing you to easily compare and evaluate the impact of different decisions.
- Forecasting, Planning, and Scenario Testing: Our approach enables the ability to forecast, plan, and scenario test social value impacts and their optimizations, allowing you to make informed decisions about the future.
- Investment Comparisons: Comparisons between competing investments and policies are made simpler, enabling the use of investment optimization to maximize both financial and social returns.
- Social Value Reporting: We provide the ability to build a social value balance sheet and annual net social impact statements for an organization’s reporting needs, facilitating transparency and communication with stakeholders.
- Incentivizing Social Value Creation: Our methods provide a reliable and robust means of measuring social value over time, which can be used to support the compensation packages of your investment, product, and services decision-makers.
- Supporting the NPV of Future Social Values: Our methodology is tailored to align with individual preference structures, allowing you to effectively calculate the net present value (NPV) of future social values.
Our social value approach offers a comprehensive and practical solution to measuring and integrating social value into your strategic decision-making. With our context-dependent and monetary reporting methods, you can confidently make decisions that foster a more sustainable and fair society.
We provide the following independent services to those organizations that are serious about their social value endeavours:
- Social value contribution and impact statements and reports at the organizational, investment and project level.
- Social value of infrastructure, housing and urban planning in support of policy advocacy.
Partnerships that allow us to support an organization’s internal social value initiatives, such as:
- Social value product and service design.
- Investment optimization analysis.
- Business case analysis for potential investors.
- Social value financial statements and related human resource decisions such as social value performance-based compensation packages.
Context dependent
The generation of social value is highly contextual. The arrangement of resources and policies can create different social value outcomes. This is important if you want to use the calculus of social value for:
- Product and service development: Insert social value measures into your product and services design processes to maximize social value impacts. The design of the form and function of real assets and financial products drive some measures of social value in ways you’ve likely yet to anticipate.
- Value optimization methods: that find solutions that maximize both financial and social returns.
- Communications and marketing narratives: The ability to trace and attribute sources of social value supports your communications and marketing efforts as they design high-impact, person-centric narratives that differentiate you and increase your relevance in a competitive market.
- Forecasting and net present value analysis: Social value forecasting requires individual longitudinal modelling to ensure the changing circumstances of people (time and space) are taken into account.
- Managing reputational risk: While organizations pursue social value metrics to bolster their market relevance and to entice customers and investors, there is a significant reputational risk if they get it wrong. Examples of erroneous results include:
- People are modelled as groups and averages, rather than as individuals modelled independently for their unique set of circumstances.
- The stock and flow of individual people are not respected which gives rise to double counting and person substitution errors.
- Analysts try to net present value social value metrics using the usual discounting methods in finance and economics (term structure of interest rates) instead of using a person’s unique preference structure.
Reported in monetary terms
Our robust methodology converts the various units behind social value metrics appropriately into financial terms to allow for comparisons, optimizations, forecasts, and social value-based compensation packages, such as:- Cost-benefit and rates of return analysis can be performed utilizing traditional methods and net present values.
- Ability to forecast, plan and scenario test social value impacts and their optimizations.
- Comparisons between competing investments and policies so as to be able to use ‘investment optimization forms and functions’ in order to maximize both financial and social returns.
- The ability to build a social value balance sheet and annual net social impact statements for an organization’s reporting needs.
- A reliable and robust means of measuring social value in time to support the compensation packages of your investment, product and services decision-makers.
- Supporting the NPV of future social values in combination with individual preference structures.
More than 400
Leading companies and government institutions
Why
CANCEA?
Hyper-detailed information accompanies our insights, predictions, and forecasts. Hyper-detailed trend and causation analysis is determined by data with little reliance upon assumptions.
The sheer richness of our data and simulation capabilities, both in terms of who, what, when, where, and the relationships between them, drive an ability to answer many more questions.
As a strictly data-driven firm, we are necessarily apolitical. The consistency of our hyper-detailed local data can be summed and independently verified against official projections by government statistical agencies, central banks, and the OECD.
Our dedication to a one-model systems approach with hyper-trend and causal analysis keeps assumptions to a minimum. Any assumptions are shared openly so you and others can use our results with confidence.
