Social impact is beginning to experience the same transition environmental reporting went through a decade ago. What was once largely self-reported and accepted at face value is becoming something buyers, boards, auditors and policymakers expect to withstand scrutiny.
That is good news. Environmental reporting did not collapse when expectations rose. It matured. Standards improved, governance strengthened and the quality of data increased. Social impact now appears to be entering the same phase, and organisations that understand where that journey leads will be better prepared for what comes next.
A question you should be able to answer
For a long time, that question was academic. Social impact was self-reported and largely accepted at face value. Nobody checked. Today it feeds procurement decisions, contractual KPIs, ESG disclosures and reports that get quoted in public. Across many sectors, social impact is moving from measurement to proof, and the data underneath it is now expected to hold up under pressure.
This is the territory of what we might call “social washing” or “soc-washing”: publishing impact figures that cannot be substantiated – deliberately or otherwise. It is the social cousin of greenwashing, and it carries the same risk.
The moment a claim is tested and found wanting, the damage is not to a spreadsheet, it is to your credibility. As Benjamin Fellowes, Co-Founder and Director of Product at Thrive, puts it,
Social impact data rarely gets properly tested until it is suddenly under real pressure, an audit, a bid challenge, a board question, and by then any problem is expensive to fix and awkward to explain.
But this is a trend those of us in the sector should welcome, not fear. Rising expectations of social value data are a sign the field is maturing, not failing. And we have a clear guide to what comes next, because another kind of corporate data went through this exact passage just a few years ago.
The road already travelled
Twenty years ago, corporate environmental disclosure looked a lot like social impact does now. Reporting was voluntary and vague. A crowd of competing frameworks each asked for something slightly different, so no two companies’ numbers were truly comparable, and a business could choose the framing that flattered it most.
Then as pressure to report grew, the sheer quantity of environmental disclosure exploded, but its quality did not keep pace.
A study of two decades of global corporate reporting found that disclosure grew several times over while generic boilerplate rose and genuine specificity fell. More and more said less and less.
Crucially, the same research found that companies which adopted a genuinely credible framework and stuck to it improved the quality of what they disclosed, while those just doing the minimum did not. Effort and governance was what made the difference.
But the next phase was one of consolidation. The field moved, unevenly but unmistakably, toward rigour and better governance. Competing initiatives were absorbed into more authoritative ones, independent oversight arrived, and the numbers became something investors and regulators could rely on. Crucially, that consolidation did not mean starting from scratch: organisations carried their historic data across, so they could benchmark forward without losing the results they had already banked. The same will matter for social value, where so much measurement still sits in legacy systems and spreadsheets. A credible standard should let you migrate that history and keep comparing like with like, not force you to abandon years of benchmarks.
Of course, there were political wobbles along the way, and those have not disappeared: the United States has pulled back from a federal climate disclosure rule, and the European Union has narrowed the scope of its sustainability reporting directive. But the direction has held.
The destination was never “more reporting” but rather was reporting readers could trust.
That is the lesson worth carrying across. The value of environmental data did not come from there being lots of it. It came from rigour and governance that made it credible. Social impact is now standing at the earlier stage of that same road.
Where social impact is now: real, but not yet defensible
Look at social impact reporting today and you see the same symptoms environmental disclosure showed before it grew up. This is not just our view. Critics make the point more bluntly than we would.
A recent think-tank report on public procurement, Procure and Simple from Re:State, found that social value commitments in public procurement bids are sometimes simply fabricated, and frequently not followed up.
Unlike cost, where the truth eventually surfaces, impact claims often go untested from the moment they win the work. The same report notes that self-selected metrics tend to favour whatever is easiest to quantify, and that the KPIs agreed at contract signing are often never looked at again.
The burden is real too. Surveys of suppliers, particularly smaller ones, consistently find that most struggle to formulate social value commitments and experience the process as administrative overhead. This the mark of a field without shared definitions or reliable tools – precisely where environmental reporting once sat.
Part of the problem is that there is no official, universally accepted standard for measuring or quantifying social impact.
Some frameworks present themselves as the industry standard, but presenting yourself as one is not the same as being independently recognised as one. The distinction that matters is between a genuinely credible standard, independently governed and transparently sourced, and a commercial product that has adopted the language of a standard.
Making data more rigorous is not the same as narrowing what counts as social impact. There is a fair concern that over-standardised measurement can drift away from the messy, local, human outcomes that reflect real human and community impact. That concern is valid, but it is a separate question from whether numbers can be trusted at all.
“It’s too hard, so drop it” – the wrong lesson
Some take the diagnosis to its most drastic conclusion. The Procure and Simple report argues that because social value data is so hard to verify and so rarely enforced, social value should be removed from procurement evaluation altogether, with the focus returned to price and quality.
The authors’ argument is that if a scoring criterion can be gamed with unverifiable claims and is never checked after award, what is it really achieving?
But we have heard this argument before, almost word for word, and not long ago.
The response that actually worked was not abolition. It was rigour. Standards, governance and verification turned green claims from marketing into data you could act on.
Health and safety was a fight, then carbon was a fight. Social value data quality is next. And as taxpayers, that’s a good thing.
Michelle Cole, Thrive
The direction of travel is already set
If that sounds like wishful thinking, look at where UK policy is already heading. The move toward rigour is not hypothetical, it is underway.
- In public procurement, the PPN 002 version of the Social Value Model introduced Standard Reporting Metrics and a Model Social Value Question, bringing real consistency to how social value is specified, scored and reported
- The Procurement Act 2023 made KPIs mandatory and public for larger contracts, and the shift from “most economically advantageous tender” to “most advantageous tender” gives buyers more room to treat data quality as a genuine signal of delivery
- The government’s response to the Growing British Industry, Jobs and Skills consultation points further toward standard criteria and metrics
Read these as the carrot first and the stick second. The case for better social value data is that it creates value and credibility on its own merits. Regulation is confirming the pre-existing direction of travel.
The useful question is no longer whether social value data will be scrutinised and held to a higher standard. It is whether your data will be ready when it is.
Towards a credible standard: what it might look like
If the destination is credibility rather than sheer volume, it helps to be concrete about what “credible” might actually involve.
We would not claim there is one perfect answer, and social value may be too varied and human ever to reduce to a single universal baseline in the way carbon nearly has. But the environmental journey does suggest the kinds of qualities that tend to earn trust:
- Independent governance, kept separate from any commercial provider that has an incentive to inflate the values
- Transparent, traceable values, drawn from public, authoritative sources rather than proprietary multipliers no one outside can reproduce
- Quality checked at the point of entry, so problems are caught as the data goes in, not discovered later in an ex post facto audit
- Consistency that still leaves room for what is local, enough commonality to compare like with like, without flattening the outcomes that only make sense in a particular place
In the interest of being open: this is the thinking behind the Impact Evaluation Standard, which the Thrive platform is based on. The Impact Evaluation Standard is independently governed, aligned with HM Treasury Green Book principles, and uses proxy values traceable to public sources such as the Office for National Statistics.
We mention it not to claim it is the only possible answer, but because it is a concrete example of what these qualities look like in practice. Whichever framework you favour, the field needs credible, governed measurement, and it is moving that way.
From liability to advantage
Defensible data is not a compliance chore. In fact, it is an advantage, and the organisations that build it now will be the ones that will benefit when scrutiny tightens.
- For suppliers, strong data wins work and survives challenge. The discipline of getting it right at the point of entry costs far less than cleaning it up retrospectively when a bid or an audit depends on it. Good validation is largely about efficiency: when your data is reliable and in one place, your team can get on with delivering social impact rather than acting as glorified administrators. This matters most for the small teams that carry social value in most organisations, stretched across many contracts, suppliers and stakeholders: getting the data right at the point of entry is what turns a credible standard into a capacity multiplier rather than another reporting burden, freeing scarce time from reconciling spreadsheets and chasing returns. And the stronger your data, the more likely you are to win the business buy-in and the board buy-in that let you do more of it
- For buyers, the advantage is just as concrete. Credible, comparable data lets a procurement team weigh two bidders’ social value claims on a genuine like-for-like basis instead of taking polished narratives on trust. It lets a contract manager hold a supplier to a published KPI because the underlying figures are traceable. And it lets a department stand behind its aggregate social value numbers when they are quoted publicly or questioned by a committee
The good news
Social impact is roughly where environmental data was ten years ago and that is good news, because we already know how the story develops.
Environmental disclosure travelled from optional, to scrutinised, to credible, and the data ended up worth having. Social impact can make the same journey, with one advantage the environmental world did not have: it can see pitfalls coming, and choose rigour over volume from the start rather than drowning in words that say less and less.
The organisations that move toward credible, governed data now will be ready.
The rest will be defending numbers they cannot stand behind. The path to that goal is already mapped out.
Want to see what defensible social impact data looks like in practice? Explore the Impact Evaluation Standard, or watch our webinar on defending your social value data.
Questions and answers
Data that is complete, consistent, accurate and traceable back to its source, so it can survive external scrutiny, whether that is a procurement challenge, an audit, an ESG disclosure or a question from your board. In short, data you can stand behind when someone asks where a number came from.
No single mandated standard exists, and given how varied social value is, there may never be one universal baseline in the way there is for carbon. In UK central government procurement terms, PPN 002 introduced Standard Reporting Metrics and a Model Social Value Question, and the policy direction is toward greater consistency. The distinction that matters when judging any framework is whether it is independently governed and transparently sourced or not.
Both began fragmented, voluntary and self-reported. Both suffered from over-claiming, where the volume of reporting outran its quality. And both eventually needed rigour and governance to become trustworthy. Environmental disclosure shows that the answer to weak data is standardisation and verification, not abandonment.
It is the social equivalent of greenwashing: reporting social impact figures that cannot be independently verified or substantiated. It is avoided the same way greenwashing is, through transparent, reproducible values and quality checks applied as the data is entered rather than after the fact.
Alan Boyce
Senior Researcher More articles by Alan >
