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Social Return on Investment

Social Return on Investment (SROI) is a stakeholder-based framework for measuring and accounting for a broad concept of value, including the social, environmental and economic outcomes an activity creates. Building on the logic of cost-benefit analysis, it identifies the outcomes that matter to stakeholders, assigns them monetary values using financial proxies, adjusts for what would have happened anyway, and expresses the result as a ratio of the present value of impact to the value of the investment. Codified in the SROI Network's guide, it aims to capture the social value that conventional financial accounting ignores.

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Sources

  1. Nicholls, J., Lawlor, E., Neitzert, E., & Goodspeed, T. (2012). A Guide to Social Return on Investment (revised ed.). London: The SROI Network / Cabinet Office. ISBN: 9780956227409

How to cite this page

ScholarGate. (2026, June 22). Social Return on Investment (SROI) Analysis. ScholarGate. https://scholargate.app/en/public-policy/social-return-on-investment

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ScholarGateSocial Return on Investment (Social Return on Investment (SROI) Analysis). Retrieved 2026-06-24 from https://scholargate.app/en/public-policy/social-return-on-investment · Dataset: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20539026