With social value carrying a minimum of 10% of the weighting in UK central government bids (soon to increase to 20% for contracts worth £5 million or more), buyers are asking for evidence rather than promises.
Technology and education consultancy Sparta Global has been creating social value since its foundation. What it needed was a way to prove that record to buyers and put it to work in bids. We asked Shrijit Dasgupta, who leads social value at Sparta Global, to explain how the company uses Thrive to turn its outcomes – for example, a government cohort in which 42% of recruits had been out of employment, education or training – into defensible, bid-ready evidence.
Proof has become the price of entry
Sparta Global has never needed convincing that social value matters. Breaking down barriers to entry into the tech sector by giving training opportunities to people from under-represented and under-served backgrounds is the reason the company exists.
Its challenge was different: proving that record to public sector buyers, in a form that wins Sparta Global bids.
Shrijit Dasgupta, who leads social value at Sparta Global, has watched the questions commissioning authorities ask change fast. He said:
“About a year ago, the social value questions were very flat. Tell us how you do this, tell me why you’re good at that. Now it’s more like, how are you going to achieve X, Y and Z goal across the period of this contract? Give me a timeline, give me numbers, give me evidence.”
Sparta Global has an impressive track record. It has provided more than 250 people to the Home Office over last 5 years, and its impact report for one Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) cohort shows that 42% of recruits were not in employment, education or training (NEET) before joining.
This is the story of how those outcomes became evidence that works as hard in a bid as it does in an impact report.
A business built on social value
Sparta Global is a technology and education consultancy founded by CEO David Rai to open the tech sector to people it had left behind. Shrijit explained:
sHIRJIT DASGPUTPA, SPARTA GLOBAL
In practice, he went on, that means hiring people from marginalised communities and disadvantaged socioeconomic backgrounds, training them, and deploying them into consulting roles with major public and private sector clients. The company has been doing this for more than a decade and maintains over 70 grassroots partnerships with charities, local councils and job centres, including organisations such as Migrant Leaders, that feed its talent pipeline. These partners act as Sparta’s eyes and ears on the ground, spotting potential in people who might never have considered a technology career, and the company casts its net deliberately wide.
Sparta Global has held a certified B Corp since 2023, as well as an EcoVadis rating, and is working towards SBTi validation. “Social value is a cornerstone for us in all senses,” says Shrijit. “It’s embedded fundamentally into the DNA of the company and we strive to eliminate the barrier to entry into the tech sector.”
Purpose without proof
Not all companies share Sparta Global’s dedication to spreading opportunities. Shrijit describes a market where social value had too often become “a rubber stamp”: talked about at length, followed through rarely. The push to do better came from inside the business, led by the ED&I and sustainability function with the ambition to “become the social value partner that puts their money where their mouth is.”
Of course, delivery and evidence provide benefits to Sparta Global as well. Conviction is not the same as proof, and buyers have no way to tell the difference from the outside. However embedded your mission, it only counts in a procurement exercise when you can prove it.
What evidence changes
The foundation of Sparta Global’s evidence is data that must be handled with care. Measuring socioeconomic uplift means asking people about their backgrounds: what their parents did when they were 18, whether they were eligible for free school meals, etc. “All things that are deeply personal to people,” said Shrijit. Collection runs through questionnaires managed exclusively by him and the HR team, with individuals sharing only what they are comfortable sharing.
The data that is fed into Thrive is anonymised to ensure privacy, but Shrijit’s team has the complete audit trail to hand.
The platform converts Sparta’s data into monetised social value figures using the metrics of the Impact Evaluation Standard that are aligned to HM Treasury’s Green Book, without demanding specialist skills from the user. “It’s using GCSE arithmetic, which is very intuitive for most people. For people who don’t come from a data background, the learning curve is a lot easier,” Shrijit explained.
Credible metrics and proxies underpinned by clear, complete data are crucial to the authority with which Sparta Global can report on its achievements. As Shrijit outlined:
“That number resonates a lot deeper and is a much stronger perspective from a storytelling lens than just claims. The fact that I have a number attached to it actually tells people that I know what I’m doing.”
The same evidence serves every audience the business answers to.
“It’s always great when you can report transparently to investors, to stakeholders, to customers. I can use all of the Thrive information to create transparent, accessible reports.”
– SHRIJIT dASGUPA
For Shrijit, this is the real relationship between data and narrative: they reinforce each other:
“I can tell you all the lovely stories, but if I can’t back them up, the stories fall flat. And at the same time, if I just go with the data, what is the actual impact? That’s why they have to work together.”
Numbers and stories, working together
The evidence base Sparta Global has built shows how that works in practice. Across its operations Sparta has deployed more than 3000 consultants over the last 10 years.
Behind the totals sit deliberately targeted cohorts. For a recent drive split between DWP and the Home Office, Sparta recruited directly from Blackpool, an area that scores among the lowest in the UK on foundational indicators such as health, education and welfare, and looked specifically for people on jobseeker’s allowance.
The impact reporting captures what changed.
“By evidencing that, we can very directly show how we’re taking people off benefits, how we are reducing the overall expenditure that the government social security system is going to have on these people, and how we’re enabling them with the right skills to move from being a net negative on the government to actually paying in taxes to the system they were using a couple of months ago.”
One person from those cohorts shows what the percentages mean. A Spartan who grew up on a council estate, with no tech background, is now a senior manager at Deloitte after three years at Sparta and two years there. His salary has put his brothers through university. “For him, he said, this is not just life changing. It’s generational,” Shrijit recalled.
The bid dividend
That evidence flows directly into procurement. Shrijit explained that since the Procurement Act in particular, buyer questions have moved from “tell me what it is, to show me how you can do it.”
When Sparta Global bids for a contract, the numbers from its impact reports go into the response: people deployed for that buyer, over how many years, the training hours delivered, the total social value generated and the social return on investment. A bid stops being a set of commitments and instead becomes a track record.
“In general, social value is one of our strongest scoring elements regardless, but Thrive has just made that so much more secure, so much more representational, so much more powerful for us to convey information with.”
sHRIJIT dASGUPTA
Sparta has won a multitude of bids in which its evidenced social value played a part. He puts the underlying logic in his own terms:
The commercial benefit and the mission are not in tension. “You can do well while doing good,” says Shrijit. “The motivator was to be able to enhance the business, to get more people into the tech sector, impact more lives. If Thrive enabled us to do that, enabled us to resonate with the right clients, then it goes hand in hand.”
Prove what you already create
Most technology and professional services firms are closer to Sparta Global’s position than they realise. If your business runs serious DEI, CSR or volunteering programmes, social value is already being created. What is usually missing is the defensible measure of it: the figure a buyer can score, a board can quote and an evaluator can trust.
Sparta Global’s story also keeps moving. The company sees AI literacy and technical skills as the next frontier of social mobility, a theme of its recent Equal Tech Report. The evidence base it has created with Thrive’s support will help Sparta Global to stay at that cutting edge.
Q&A
By measuring and evaluating outcomes achieved rather than listing activities: who was hired, from where, what changed for them, and what that is worth on a recognised measurement framework. Those figures can then be cited in response to social value questions as a demonstrable track record.
Accreditations such as B Corp validate how a business operates. Impact reporting evidences what its activity achieves, outcome by outcome and contract by contract. The two are complementary, and buyers increasingly ask for the second.
Social value carries a minimum weighting of 10% in central government contracts, and Sparta Global’s experience is that buyers now ask for timelines, numbers and evidence rather than just statements of intent.
Start with the data you already hold about the people your programmes reach, collect it with proper consent and care, and put it on a measurement framework that can defend every figure. The story you already tell becomes evidence you can stand behind.