Beyond Creativity: How the Creative Sector Proves its Social Value
What is social impact? What does measuring the social impact of the creative sector mean? How can you determine social value? We’ll answer these questions in this article.
Times Square, New York
Treating social impact as important as economic Impact
It’s become common to think about the economic impact that the creative sector makes. From international institutions like UNESCO or the Asian Development Bank to cities and states like the Delaware Arts Alliance or Cardiff, stakeholders seeking to drive economic development and access to arts around the world have investigated economic impacts such as direct or indirect spending, employment numbers, and gross value added to local economies.
Economic data is essential, especially in contexts where actors involved in the creative sector need to demonstrate their value to policy makers, investors, and economic development agencies. But economic data only tells one side of the story, because the creative activity, both industrial and otherwise, has both an economic and a social impact.
The rise in social impact
In recent years social impact has become a hot topic. The United Nations launched its 17 sustainable development goals, or SDGs, in 2015. These are having a major influence on how both the public and private sector are thinking about social impact and sustainability.
There are also initiatives such as the B Certification, awarded by the B Corporation to companies who are deemed to be mature when it comes to their social and environmental impact. The UK Government also has its very own Social Value Model to quantify social impact.
Many industries, including across the creative sector, are wanting to investigate their social impact, gauge their social value, and identify ways to improve both. In the past years, Sound Diplomacy has worked with clients like Young Voices, the largest children’s choir in the world, or the globally renowned ABBA Voyage to measure their social impact alongside their economic impact. Through this work, Sound Diplomacy has provided them with the data and insights to explain their value to audiences and institutions alike, understand their operations better and plan for a greater positive impact, and advocate for more support to expand their operations.
What is social impact?
Social impact measurements describe some of the consequences that planned interventions such as policy or strategic programs have upon a community or society. These can be intended or unintended. The International Association for Impact Assessment says that the goal of social impact assessments is “to ensure that development maximizes its benefits and minimizes its costs.” It should not be seen as a simple box ticking exercise. Rather, measuring social impact is an opportunity to address issues and improve.
There is no universal foundation for measuring or comparing social impact programs. It depends what an organization’s goals are, what they want to find out, and what they are able to measure.
These are the sorts of questions a social impact assessment can answer:
Is an event accessible and inclusive?
Is a public arts project representative of the community it’s based in?
Is an arts education program improving wellbeing?
Is this organization working proactively to mitigate its environmental impact or the waste it produces?
It’s important to remember that the most relevant, practical, and effective social impact measurement is intentional, so it is designed for the applicable context and situation.
Yuri Suzuki, Sonic Bloom in
London, UK, 2021
History of social impact
Social impact emerged in the 1970s as an offshoot of the then new imperative to track the environmental impact of particular policies and programs. Economic and population factors were also taken into account. Initially, social impact measurements were anticipatory, meaning that they endeavored to be predictive. Today, many contemporary social impact assessments review rather than predict. They attempt to study what has actually taken place following the introduction of a policy or program. When we look at how social impact is discussed generally, we see that there is a positive association ascribed to social impact.
Creativity makes a social impact
Organizations within the cultural economy, especially those in the more traditional arts and creative education segments, often pride themselves on making a positive impact on society. For example, the arts and creativity are said to intrinsically, amongst other things:
Training deaf people as museum guides Museo Val Verzasca PATI 2023
Strengthen communities
Improve educational attainment
Spur innovation
Preserve traditions and cultural memory
Arts educators, developers building cultural infrastructure, cultural policy makers, professionals within the heritage sector, and many others are often asked to demonstrate their worth to grant making organizations, public funding bodies, and the general public. But how can they measure qualitative aspects? This is where social impact measurements come in.
Measuring social impact
The OECD explains that there are two common types of practice for measuring social impact:
The end result of an intervention
Comparing the outcome of an intervention to the alternative
It is also imperative to contextualize social impact work. This context should include an organization's theory of change and social mission, so that any measurement is aligned with or can be compared to the overarching mission of the intervention and those enacting it.
In addition, it is preferable that there is community and/or stakeholder awareness of measurements and input from these actors about which measurements will be most relevant.
Sgt. 1st Class Thomas Babbit (right), rouses students during a performance for children at Evergreen Elementary on Joint Base Lewis-McChord, Washington
Organization’s can make an impact through internal measures
Given some of the complexities of measuring the impact of interventions in the real world, a recent development has been to measure what institutions are doing internally. This includes activities related to gender pay parity, diversity and inclusion policies and actions, charitable donations and cooperative business models, etc. Again, what an organization decides to measure depends on what their goals are and what data it has access to.
Collecting social impact data
One of the big barriers to successful social impact assessments is the availability of data. Data could be qualitative and quantitative, collected through surveys, or economic and census data. The best scenario will be where data is consistently collected over a long period of time. This will make it easier to both track changes and impacts on a particular place over a certain period of time, and to make comparative studies between places or activities.
Social impact and the creative sector
The intersection between social impact and the creative industries is relatively recent. While the creative economy has significantly grown in popularity since the late 1990s, policy makers and economic influencers are still developing a thorough understanding of it. For the most part, work around the creative economy has been focused on economic impact.
The turn towards social impact in the context of the creative economy can be seen as an attempt to mitigate the over-rationalization and instrumentalisation of the benefits of creativity and the arts. Social impact is a way to expand the conversation between purely financial or monetary considerations.
How to value social impact
Whether the social impact of an organization is measured internally, externally or both, one crucial question is how to value the impact being measured.
Social value has been described as a sort of “currency” that organizations and governments can use to demonstrate additional benefits a program or activity brings. Valuing impact in monetary terms can be one of the most effective ways to demonstrate the social impact of a project or organization.
Across themes such as skills and employment, or regional business growth, relative proxy monetary units can be applied to the number of people under 25 hired, for example, or percentage of contractors based in the local area.
Valuing social impact in monetary terms also makes it relatively simple to include social impact alongside economic impact measurements. This is the approach Sound Diplomacy is taking. Our mission is to arm our clients with the data and story they need to prove to the world the positive impacts they are making on their communities.
Make social impact have an impact
Throughout all efforts to measure social impact and determine social value, Goodhart’s Law is worth bearing in mind: “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” In other words, social impact measurements should always be contextualized. The goals and aspirations of an organization or policy should always be reviewed from first principles: the mission statement and values of an organization and its outputs. Furthermore, social impact measurements should be revised to ensure they are relevant to changing insights and knowledge, and not just be a box ticking exercise.
It is worth noting that within the creative economy, a certain amount of advocacy work will always involve the discursive arguments for creativity’s worth. Given that not everything is quantifiable, this is not a problem. The concept of the creative economy has become popular because it has allowed policy makers and advocates to raise awareness of the quantifiable impact that the performing arts, live music sector, publishing, etc. have upon a place. This has proved useful in contexts where people have not seen it as the government's or business’s job to support the arts and creativity, either through policy, programs or funding.
Social impact is expanding the conversation, and creating evidence for the importance of creativity, the arts, and their associated industries and sectors. A credible, context-specific social impact measurement can become part of the toolkit for those within the creative industries to advocate for their sector, the value of their program or organization, and the value of the arts more broadly.