Hippo is a full-service digital consultancy that works extensively with central government and its agencies, as well as the private sector. The company has a team of more than 500 specialists, working on scaling digital delivery and transformation.
And when Hippo published its first social value strategy in 2023, it included the ambitious goal of generating £20 million of social value in year one.
A tough ask for sure, but one which was comprehensively demolished: in April 2024, its Social Value Annual Report showed a final figure in excess of £25 million.
Not bad for a first attempt!
Especially when you consider that many in technology have argued that social value in public procurement practice doesn’t play to the sector’s strengths.
Those concerns were eloquently put forward in techUK’s November 2023 report, “Improving Social Value Procurement in Technology”. It’s easy to see that report’s influence on the PPN02 Social Value Model and accompanying guidance.
So what did Hippo do to achieve such success?
We spoke to Head of ESG and Social Value Steve Saunders to find out – and to learn about the role Thrive played in Hippo’s journey.
Thrive Enabled Hippo To Measure And Quantify Its Impact
Working with central government bodies – including the Ministry of Justice, the Department for Work and Pensions, the NHS, the Department for Education, the Home Office, and more – Hippo needs to be very aware of the requirements of the Social Value Model to win business.
But as a company with a strong sense of purpose, Hippo has long been involved in community work, volunteering, training, and other activities that generate social value.
Until 2023, the company had never measured its impact. The report’s results speak for themselves:
- 150 new jobs created – worth £4,887,662
- £20,742.929 spent with local companies and SMEs
- 302 hours spent helping people to develop digital skills (£12,622), 396 hours spent providing environmental awareness and training (£15,314), plus a further 472 hours of other employee volunteering (£15,552)
- Improved wellbeing and mental health, through the creation of an employee assistance programme (£22,750)
- Plus £82,333 in funds raised and pro bono work delivered
Numbers are based on an evaluation using the Impact Evaluation Standard, a widely adopted social value measurement framework used by central government and private sector organisations.
Adopting the Thrive platform alongside their new social value strategy, Hippo was able to capture a true, comprehensive picture of the social value of their work – which included a huge amount of valuable activities not tied to specific projects (eg setting up an internal network of mental health first aiders).
Having easy, consistent access to all the organisation’s data and the Impact Evaluation Standard’s metrics and proxy values, Hippo now uses the Thrive platform to produce better and better bids, and to deliver social value more effectively.
Indeed, having access to the proxy values means that Hippo can look at what a contracting authority is asking for and – if those things will prove challenging for Hippo to deliver – put forward different deliverables of similar or greater value that play to their particular strengths. For example, improving a project workforce’s digital skills overall in place of creating individual apprenticeship places.
Steve explained:
“A lot of our clients are now more mature in social value. The questions they’re asking at the tender stage allow us to differentiate what’s included within the scope of the contract and what is true social value and additionality.”
“So we can set firm commitments around the jobs that we’re going to create, the volunteering our people are going to do, etc, and then measure and track how we deliver against those and report the additionality.”
And as you might expect from a company so deeply-versed in data-driven practices, Hippo is using its findings to improve performance:
“It’s now about maximising that impact. Going back to Thrive, we can see which of our five themes within our social value strategy are having the highest impact and which themes are not.”
Hippo’s Social Value Strategy
When Steve joined Hippo in 2023, he could see a huge amount of socially valuable activity taking place that hadn’t been co-ordinated or measured to maximise its impact.
“Before I joined, there was so much good stuff going on because of the type of the people that work for Hippo, because of the founders, and wanting to do good in the community. There was a lot going on, but it was a little unstructured and needed bringing together.”
His first task was to collect as much data about what had been going on as possible.
Fortunately, Steve already had experience of the Thrive platform and the Impact Evaluation Standard’s metrics from his time at Laing O’Rourke, so he was quickly able to fit that into a framework of proxy values and come up with an approximate calculation of the value of what had been done in the months prior to him joining.
And the data collection process was very revealing. By getting stakeholders together to talk through the Social Value Model, Steve discovered new sources of value and unrecorded activities:
“People would say, ‘well, I did this last year’ and that helped me then find the data in order to then build up that number.”
Knowing that Hippo wanted to maintain and increase its commitment to social value creation, Steve extrapolated from what was already being achieved (plus an extra percentage for what he believed could be improved through co-ordination) to reach the £20 million target. Taking expected annual growth into account, he used that figure to settle on £100 million by 2030.
And understanding how social value is critical to winning public sector business, Steve wanted to ensure that Hippo’s diverse range of activities was aligned with the Social Value Model. So, the strategy was organised under five themes:
- Environmental responsibility
- Sustainable procurement
- Social equity
- Diversity, inclusion and belonging
- Health and wellbeing
How Hippo Engages Its Workforce With Social Value
In earlier times, different Hippo employees (known in-house as The Herd) would coalesce around causes that they supported personally. But Steve wanted to put this on a more formal footing.
Under each of the five themes in Hippo’s strategy, a staff-led committee was set up. Steve thinks this is crucial for communication and getting a diverse, distributed workforce engaged:
“These little networks make it easy for me because I haven’t got a team working under me. I can tap into these communities to help us drive things forward.”
And there’s a virtuous circle in play here too.
“Those communities would fall apart if they weren’t seeing an impact. Being able to report on the metrics, we can say, ‘this is your proportion of the social impact we’ve delivered this year’. That’s really empowering. That gets more people involved.”
And the social value strategy is making Hippo a more attractive employer.
It’s widely argued that DEI and CSR initiatives improve businesses’ ability to attract talent and retain staff.
Hippo can prove it.
“After our careers page, our diversity, inclusion, belonging, and social value pages get the highest traffic on our website. People look at jobs, and the next thing they’re looking at is ‘What’s your diversity strategy? What’s your social value strategy? How do you have an impact?’”
Thrive Helps Steve Maximise His Impact and Efficiency
It’s a common experience for social value professionals: having only a very small team or working alone, multiple demands on your time stretch you very thin.
In his previous work in the construction business, for example, Steve found that he was spending as much as 90% of his time working on bids – leaving previous little to dedicate to anything else.
But by building data in the Thrive platform on earlier bids and projects, Steve is finding that this time-consuming part of his role is only taking up half of his time.
“As time’s gone on, I can reduce my time writing bids because we’ve got a library and suite of answers and commitments that we know work and that have impact.”
Did Steve consider any other social value software tools?
“We did have a look around to see if anything was sort of better set for our sector. But Thrive was the stand-out.”
It’s also made it possible for Steve to keep his finger on the pulse of social value activity, and make adjustments to ensure that targets are met:
“The best part about Thrive is the monthly tracking it allows you to do. We can monitor progress against targets on a rolling basis and produce project reports for our clients with their social value KPIs. It’s made the whole process of reporting at contract and organisation levels a more automated and easier.”
With Hippo’s latest social value report due for release very soon, Steve is definitely feeling the benefit:
“Only last week our COO mentioned our year end carbon reduction plan and our social value annual report. Whereas with the carbon reduction plan I may be waiting three months after the end of March for billing cycles to come to an end, with the social value report – because we’ve tracked everything month by month – on April 1 I can press the button and get all the numbers.”
We can’t wait for you to press that button Steve and see how much social value Hippo created in 2024-2025!
At Thrive we specialise in helping companies track, measure and amplify their social value. If you want to discover how you can measure your social value more effectively and report to stakeholders quickly, don’t hesitate to contact us. We’d love to help you uncover more opportunities to showcase your impact.
Alan Boyce
Senior Researcher More articles by Alan >
