Three times in one afternoon, I was told I was evil.
Not in those words every time. Once it was “isn’t that a bit cynical.” Once it was “some of us are here to change the world, not turn it into pound signs.” And once, more honestly, it came straight from the panel: how can people ethically stay in this work if there are people like you in it.
All of this at a conference about doing good.
I had said the thing you are not supposed to say out loud at a social value event. That the fastest way to get a business doing social value is to show them it wins them work. Not because it is right. Because it pays.
I understand the flinch. I felt it too, once. But I have come to think the flinch is the reason social value keeps preaching to a room that already believes, and never reaches the room that does not.
My degree, years ago, was mostly about cults. Journalism and politics on paper, but the coursework I actually cared about was how movements capture people. The story is always the same. Join us. We are the good ones. If you do not love what we love, you are wrong.
Sit in enough social value rooms and you will hear the same music. Warm, certain, slightly closed. Lovely people, talking mostly to each other, in a language built to make the unconverted feel like the enemy.
You do not convert anyone by calling them a sinner.
Translation is the reason
So I do the translation instead. A managing director running a twenty million pound business is not a bad person for thinking about money. Thinking about money is the job. So I do not ask him to feel differently. I give him the maths.
You can hire a business development manager for forty thousand a year, who will get on the phone and chase work, and maybe bring in a couple of hundred grand. Or you can take social value seriously, lift your bid scores by seven or eight per cent, and on the contracts I see that is the difference between losing and winning millions. Same money. Very different return.
Then I show him it is real. A video company came to me having lost two bids and scored zero on social value. Their first question, from a four million pound business, was “what actually is social value.” We embedded it properly the next time. We trained their charity partner on the reporting before the work, not after. We told the true stories they already had. They scored full marks and won the contract by three points, with the social value section doing the winning. Now they ring me before every bid. They are talking about hiring someone in-house, which will put me out of a job. Good.
I don’t care why they do good
I genuinely do not care why they started. If a hard-nosed business does brilliant social value because it makes them richer, the charity still gets paid, the apprentice still gets the apprenticeship, the community still gets the thing that changes it. I will be evil in my goodness all day long if the result is nice people being paid by people who would never otherwise have paid them.
There was a teacher on a community development course I took, years back, who put it better than I can. Put your own mask on first. A business that cannot feed itself, its staff and its shareholders cannot feed anyone else either. Commerce is not the opposite of good. For most organisations it is the oxygen that lets them afford to be good at all.
So no, I am not trying to turn believers into cynics. It is the other way round. It is far easier to teach a brilliant, people-first practitioner a small, useful dose of commercial thinking than it is to take a 1980s double glazing salesman who lives for the kill and teach him to love the world and become a real boy.
That small dose is the whole of my job. I will leave the extraordinary social value work to the people who are extraordinary at it. Mine is the unglamorous bit. Walking into the rooms that do not believe, and converting them in the only language they trust, so that ten years from now there is ten or twenty times more of the good being done.
