The Social Value Trap: How Portals and Calculators Miss the Point
Social value is meant to make public spending meaningful. The idea is simple; if you’re working with public money, you should improve the community while you’re at it. But the way we measure that improvement has started to distort what it means.
The rise of monetised social value frameworks, calculators, and portals has turned something human into something transactional. What was meant to build connection now builds compliance.
As I said during my talk at The Institute for Social Value Forum, “If you monetise social value, you get exactly what you’ve paid for, and not an ounce more.”
The illusion of precision
On paper, social value calculators look brilliant. They promise objectivity and a way to translate community benefit into pounds and pence. One hour of volunteering equals £14. A job created equals £33,000. A community event equals £2,500 in social return.
The trouble is, life doesn’t fit into a spreadsheet.
When businesses start chasing the biggest “return”, they inevitably pick the highest-scoring activities, not the most meaningful ones. A contractor might spend a day painting a school fence instead of funding a year-long employability programme because the former is cheaper, simpler, and still ticks the same box.
It’s rational behaviour inside a flawed system. We’ve rewarded the wrong thing.
The gaming of good intentions
“Humans are problem-solving machines,” I said in my forum talk, “so if the system rewards a certain type of number, that’s the number winning bidders go for.”
That’s the quiet failure of current frameworks: they incentivise optimisation, not authenticity. They make it easier to look socially valuable than to be socially valuable.
A portal might tell a contractor exactly how to score the most points per pound. But it can’t tell them what matters most in their community. It can’t tell them that the local food bank needs a new fridge, not 20 volunteers for one day. It can’t see that the small mental health charity down the road is drowning in admin while corporate teams keep asking to “help out for an afternoon”.
Social value shouldn’t be gamified. It should be guided.
The real cost of convenience
Calculators exist for a reason. Councils are underfunded. Officers are overstretched. They need a simple way to report, compare, and audit. In that sense, portals solve an administrative problem.
But they create a cultural one.
When success is measured by data entry rather than real change, social value becomes about evidence, not impact. Time that could be spent building relationships gets lost in spreadsheets and portal uploads. Charities are asked for proof instead of partnership. Businesses deliver for compliance instead of conscience.
What starts as efficiency becomes distance.
A better measure
We don’t need to scrap measurement, we just need to measure differently.
Real social value should be tracked through stories, case studies, and lived outcomes. Councils should look at how communities feel about projects, not just what numbers appear in the portal.
Imagine a system that tracks continuity, how long a partnership lasts, how many people are supported six months later, how the charity’s capacity has grown because of the collaboration. Those metrics take more effort, but they tell the truth.
The most meaningful social value isn’t a figure on a dashboard. It’s a local resident getting a job, a young person gaining confidence, or a charity finally having the time to plan its future.
Portals were meant to make social value easier. In practice, they’ve made it shallower.
It’s time to stop scoring it and start shaping it, to bring decision-making back to people, not calculators.
In Part 4, we’ll explore what genuine, balanced partnerships look like, and how to move from one-off “helicopter” projects to long-term collaboration that actually lasts.
