Before leaving the FGES at the end of March, Dima Murtada will present her research on the impact assessment of the Realise your Dreams programme, a programme aimed at promoting the return to employment/business creation, on 22 March at 10:30 am at the Maison des chercheurs, in the presence of the RtR partners who financed her post-doc: The application of the return on social investment to measure the impact of the RtR project.
The RtR (Realise Your Dreams) project is an action-research programme, winner of the Ministry of Labour’s call for proposals “100% inclusion.” A consortium of 5 structures (LPI (Learning Planet Institute), Synergie Family, ICL (Institut Catholique de Lille) and Chance) has been set up to implement the project. Its objective is to support people who are far from work on the path to a sustainable professional project with priority for NEETs Not in Education, Employment or Training (not students, employees, trainees) and women. From February 2020 to October 2021, RtR provided support and remobilization to 1,380 people who were dropping out of work (1040 people) and sustainable entrepreneurship (287 people), in three regions: metropolis of Lille, Ile-de-France and Marseille.
To assess the social impact of the RtR project, a SROI (Return on Social Investment) study was carried out to report on the changes brought about in the lives of stakeholders as a result of the activities carried out. The SROI approach explains how change is created, measures social and environmental outcomes and expresses them in monetary terms, in order to calculate a cost/benefit ratio. Thus, a SROI ratio ratio is interpreted as follows: “for one euro invested, the activity generates X euros of social value.”
In the context of the RtR project, the first objective of the social impact assessment was to assess the impact on the project participants (or talents), the contact persons accompanying the participants during the course (or developers) and the main partners (the five members of the consortium and the Local Mission of Lille).
To carry out this study, a qualitative research approach was adopted to gain a thorough understanding of stakeholder views. A total of 90 semi-directive interviews were conducted between October 2020 and July 2021, with an average duration of one hour. 60 interviews were conducted with talent, of which 50 were exploitable (the 10 non-exploitable interviews concerned talent who left the course after less than a week and did not notice any change). 20 interviews were conducted with developers and 10 with representatives of partners.
The interviews were guided by a semi-structured interview protocol with a range of open and closed questions to describe, measure and value the changes observed. In particular, they provided an understanding of the relative importance of the changes (or outcomes), their duration, and the proportion of outcomes that are attributable to third parties or that would have occurred in any event. The interviews were fully transcribed and coded according to thematic coding using the Nvivo 10 qualitative data analysis software.
Analysis of the data shows that the talent involved in RtR has undergone a number of changes as a result of their participation in RtR:
• Self-confidence
• Have social skills and expand their networks
• Improving future employment opportunities
• Motivation and determination
• Acquire entrepreneurial skills
• Having a job
• Improving health and reducing anxiety
• Creation of an entrepreneurial activity
• Choosing a career path
• Organizational skills
• Improvement of living conditions
• Confidence in the realization of their project
• Self-esteem
• Get to know each other better
• Socially responsible behaviour
• Optimism
Several factors have triggered and encouraged the creation of these changes, in particular the support and encouragement of coaches and developers, the exchange with the social worker, the chance coaching path, participation in workshops and RtR activities (such as nature expeditions, speaking exercises, discussion groups, etc.), the integration of young people and young people. training, mutual assistance between talents, meetings with self-entrepreneurs and professionals, etc.
The changes noted by the developers are:
• Improving the skills of the accompaniment
• Self-confidence
• Professional project development and job security
• Improving relational skills
• Improved well-being at work and job satisfaction
• Improving teamwork skills
• To better understand and define your professional expectations
• Balance between private and professional life
• Organizational skills
• Greater emotional resilience
These changes are mainly due to the experience gained in mentoring talent, the scope for autonomy at work and the opportunity to take initiatives, as well as the dynamics of the group and teamwork.
Finally, key partners have experienced the following changes:
• Greater legitimacy and opportunities for new partnerships
• Increase the volume of activity and create new jobs
• Developing and changing working methods
• Gaining efficiency
At the origin of these changes is the contact of these partners with institutions and companies in the ecosystem. The main partners also benefited from feedback from the workshops offered and the Chance coaching programme, which allowed for the evolution of coaching techniques, enriching the content of the workshops and making coaching more suitable and accessible. Once the changes have been mapped, they must be given a monetary value. For changes that correspond to a direct monetary transaction such as a monetary gain or a cost actually avoided, the value of the result is equal to the monetary value of the profit. When the effect does not correspond to a direct monetary transaction, the valuation is based on financial proxies or “financial proxies”. Financial proxies are value estimates that are used as a reference point to determine the relative importance of results, when there is no market price for that result (Fujiwara, 2014). In other words, we are looking for the equivalent amount of money that would have the same effect on the individual’s life as the evaluated change. Valuation based on financial proxies can be based on different methods, the ones chosen in this study are: The “revealed preferences” method, the “value game” method and the contingent valuation method (Cordes, 2017).
Once we have the overall value of the changes for each category of stakeholder, the changes whose source is external to the activity have been neutralized, in order to obtain the social impact for each change.
The present values of the impacts in euros for the three categories of stakeholders taking into account the duration and a discount rate of 2.8% are as follows:
• Skills: 30,623,476.44
• Team members: 1,565,808.654
• Main partners: 3724683,341
Thus, the total social value created by the project amounts to €35,913,968.43
We now calculate the application of the return on social investment ratio.
The value of the contributions or investments made being 9,880,521, the SROI ratio is equal to 35,913,968.43 / 9,880,521 = 3.63
This ratio means that for each euro invested, the project generates a social benefit of 3.63 euros.
This ratio can be sensitive to several variables. Moreover, many SROI studies perform a “sensitivity analysis” to test the variables that can lead to new scenarios.
One of the scenarios to take into account is to take into account only the talents who are the first beneficiaries of the RtR program. The discounted value of the impacts in € for the talents being 30,623,433.81. The ratio will be presented as follows: 30,623,476.44 / 9,880,521 = 3.10.
The application of the return on social investment study conducted as part of this research work enabled us to understand, measure and value the effects generated by the RtR project on its stakeholders.