NewRiver REIT knew its shopping centres created real social value in their communities. What it lacked was a way to measure that impact with the same discipline it brings to its financial and environmental reporting. Here is how the retail REIT built a defensible social impact evidence base across its portfolio, without losing the local stories that bring the numbers to life.
For a retail REIT with assets that sit at the heart of local high streets and town centres, social impact and commercial performance are not separate conversations.
That is the starting point for NewRiver REIT. A Real Estate Investment Trust, or REIT, is a listed company that owns and manages income-producing property on behalf of its shareholders. NewRiver is a specialist retail REIT: its portfolio of shopping centres and retail parks is built around essential goods, services, employment and leisure. These are the places people rely on, and that reliance is exactly what makes them resilient.
Working with Thrive, NewRiver has replaced fragmented, anecdotal reporting with a single method for capturing and evidencing its social impact across the portfolio, one it can take to investors and benchmarks such as GRESB with confidence. This is how it got there.
Rhiannon Jones is ESG Strategy Lead at NewRiver, responsible for how the business measures and reports its environmental and social performance. She came to the role having worked with social value measurement hands-on before, and she is clear that for a business like NewRiver, social value is not a separate concern but part of how it thinks about the relevance and resilience of its assets.
“If our assets are useful, inclusive, locally relevant and therefore well-relied upon in their communities, they are more valuable places for occupiers and ultimately investors.”
– Rhiannon Jones, ESG Strategy Lead, NewRiver REIT
The conviction was always there. What NewRiver wanted was a way to prove it.
New River REIT’s challenge: strong stories, harder to evidence
Like many real estate businesses, NewRiver REIT was already generating a great deal of good community activity. Charity partnerships, community events, volunteering, local employment, occupier engagement, donations and clever use of space were all happening across the portfolio, much of it led by centre teams who know their communities. Alongside that, the business reported at corporate level through its ESG programme.
The result was a strong narrative picture. But a narrative picture only gets you so far.
The difficulty was not the activity. It was turning that activity into evidence that would stand up in front of investors. Three pressures sat behind that, and they will be familiar to anyone doing this job in real estate.
In Rhiannon’s words: “Narrative case studies only get you so far … the strain was really around consistency, comparability and confidence in outcomes.”
The first was fragmented capture. Activity arrived from many centres in different formats, strong on stories and weak on structure, while corporate ESG reporting sat in a separate stream from what was happening on the ground. The people best placed to record it were site teams with full day jobs and no ESG background, so anything that felt like heavy admin was never going to stick.
The second was weak investor-facing evidence. Financial and environmental performance is reported with method and structure. Social impact was still being told in anecdote, and investors tend to discount what they cannot compare or verify. Without a common framework, NewRiver REIT could not easily compare one centre with another, or track its own performance year on year.
The third was the risk of overclaiming. The more you fold into a social value figure, the bigger it looks and the less it can be trusted. Bolt on supply chain spend or the activity of your occupiers and the number inflates, but you can no longer say cleanly that the impact was yours.
What NewRiver REIT needed
That earlier hands-on experience shaped what Rhiannon was looking for. Above all, it had to be practical.
“It can’t just be theoretically robust,” she says. “The tools have to work for the people that report into them, people who all have day jobs.”
That set the brief. NewRiver needed structure and rigour without an unmanageable admin burden. It needed a methodology that made sense for operational real estate rather than a procurement exercise. It needed to capture very different types of activity, work at every level from a single centre to the whole business, and stay flexible enough to support the disclosures a listed company actually makes. A backward-looking tool that produced a single static snapshot, dependent on data the team could not easily reach, was not going to answer that.
The heart of it: measuring only what NewRiver REIT drives
The choice that shapes NewRiver’s approach is also the one that takes the most discipline. NewRiver has decided to measure only the social value it drives itself.
That means deliberately setting a boundary. Supply chain and procurement value, where NewRiver does not drive the social value delivered , is treated as business as usual rather than additional impact, so it sits outside the social value figure. The same logic applies to occupiers. NewRiver REIT does not claim the community activity of its tenants, because it cannot say with confidence that the activity happened because of the asset rather than something the occupier would have done anyway, somewhere else.
This is the principle of additionality: counting only the impact that would not have happened without you. Different organisations draw this line in different places, and there is no single right answer. For NewRiver, a tighter boundary is a deliberate reporting choice, because it wants a credible figure it can stand behind.
The trade-off is real. Measuring this way produces a smaller headline figure than a broader definition would. NewRiver accepts that, because the comparison that matters to the business is against itself and over time. A figure you can stand behind is worth more than one you cannot.
For an investor-facing audience, this is the whole point. Additionality is what lets NewRiver say its social impact is genuinely its own.
What Thrive did for NewRiver REIT
NewRiver REIT chose Thrive to turn that intent into a working system. What made it the right fit, Rhiannon says, was the combination of the platform and the team behind it.
On the platform side, Thrive gave NewRiver a single framework for capturing activity across the portfolio and reading it at every level, from an individual centre to the business as a whole. Instead of stories arriving in scattered formats, centre teams record activity through simple forms. These are designed to be completed by people who are not ESG specialists.
One of the first things NewRiver did was build Thrive’s local needs analysis into each centre’s Environmental and Social Plan. This is the guiding document that translates the business’ ESG ambitions into action at each asset. That put local need data directly in front of centre teams, showing them where current activity and local need do not line up. A mismatch is a prompt to be smarter and more targeted.
Find out more about Thrive’s Local Needs Analysis
Thrive also gave NewRiver metrics built for real estate. The platform captures space donations, valuing the event space, meeting rooms and longer-term space that a landlord provides. These factors carry real value that had simply never been counted before. It captures food donations through NewRiver’s Trussell partnership. And activity tags record which organisation and cause each initiative supports, so NewRiver can see across the whole portfolio how much of its impact is directed at a given issue, such as addressing barriers to equality or protecting the environment.
Alongside the platform sits expert guidance for the moments that call for interpretation and judgement. As Rhiannon explains, “you need help interpreting what should be counted, how to avoid overclaiming, and how to turn the data into insight rather than just a dashboard.” That is why every Thrive customer works with our in-house Social Sustainability team, who deliver bespoke consultancy alongside the platform. For NewRiver REIT, that has meant hands-on challenge and practical guidance. The goal is to improve the quality of what the business captures rather than just the quantity. Credible reporting depends on being honest about what the numbers do and do not say, Rhiannon insists.
The outcomes New River REIT achieved
NewRiver can now do something it could not do before. It can evidence its social impact consistently across a diverse portfolio and read that impact at whatever level it needs. From a single centre up to the whole business, NewRiver REIT can set it alongside the financial and environmental data it already reports. That matters because the audience for this is not a procurement panel. It is investors and benchmarks such as GRESB and EPRA, which increasingly want to understand how real estate assets contribute to people and places, and which reward a clear, consistent method over a good story.
The shift Rhiannon describes is from “we do a lot of good things across our centres” to “we have a consistent method for capturing, categorising and reporting that activity across our portfolio.” Social impact is no longer incidental. It is being actively measured, managed and reviewed.
Measurement has also started to shape decisions rather than just record them. With local needs data built into every Environmental and Social Plan, the questions get sharper. Which assets are doing a lot but not capturing it? Which locations have high local need but fewer recorded initiatives? Where could one centre learn from another? This is less a single lightbulb moment than a steady improvement in the questions NewRiver is able to ask.
Proof on the ground: Boscombe
A clear picture of the approach working is at NewRiver’s Sovereign Centre in Boscombe.
There, the centre manager took NewRiver REIT’s corporate ambitions around community health, waste management, biodiversity and greening, and turned them into something specific. Working with a local partner, the centre set up vertical micro-greens farm in unused veranda space beneath its glass roof. Waste from the centre’s food retailers is composted to feed the growing. The produce is distributed free to the local community.
It is a neat loop of environmental and social value that grew out of one person’s drive and local knowledge. Thrive captures its contribution by valuing the donated space, giving the initiative a place in the portfolio’s evidence base. The number records the scale. The story explains why it matters. That combination is the point.
Where this goes next for NewRiver REIT
NewRiver is one full reporting year into measuring this way, so this is a baseline. The value is in what it makes possible from here.
Across the sector, Rhiannon expects social impact measurement to become more standardised. Real estate social impact measurement is still at an early stage compared with environmental reporting, with different methodologies and levels of maturity. That will change. Investors will move from asking whether landlords do community work to asking how they know it is relevant and how they measure it. “Good” will come to mean a clear methodology and an honest account of its limitations.
That is a balance NewRiver is deliberately trying to maintain. A monetised figure brings discipline and accountability, and lets social impact sit in the same conversations as financial and environmental data. But a pound figure on its own can ring hollow. As Rhiannon puts it: “we need the number to bring rigour, comparability and credibility, but we need the narrative to explain why it actually matters.” In real estate especially, where the assets are physical places in real communities, the human story is not decoration. It is the evidence.
For NewRiver, the real value is structure. The community focus was always there in the business. What has changed is the ability to evidence it more consistently, understand it more intelligently, and communicate it more confidently. NewRiver’s centres were community assets by nature long before any of this. Now the business can prove it.
Q&A
You move from fragmented, story-led capture to a single framework that records activity at each asset, things like community initiatives, volunteering, charitable and food donations, use of space, and local employment, and lets you read it at every level from one centre to the whole portfolio. The aim is a common method that lets you compare centres, track progress over time, and take the evidence to investors and benchmarks.
Additionality is impact that happens because of your own decisions and action, over and above what would have happened anyway. Organisations draw this boundary in different places. NewRiver chose a tighter one. It measures only what it drives and sets aside things like supply chain spend and occupier activity it cannot cleanly attribute to itself, because it wanted a figure it could defend. That usually produces a smaller number, but for them a more credible one as they do not directly drive the social value delivered by their suppliers and occupiers.
A consistent, categorised evidence base lets social impact sit alongside financial and environmental data. It gives a stronger foundation for investor conversations and annual reporting, and supports benchmark-facing disclosure.
Yes, and it is essential, because the people best placed to record activity are site teams with full day jobs. Simple input forms, metrics designed for real estate, and expert support to interpret and improve the data are what make measurement something teams actually keep up rather than a year-end scramble.
Mary-Louise Fellowes
Marketing and Analytics More articles by Mary-Lou >
