This is a San Francisco-based philanthropic fund which makes long-term grants available to organizations that run businesses for social benefit.
While SROI builds upon the logic of cost-benefit analysis, it is different in that it is explicitly designed to inform the practical decision-making of enterprise managers and investors focused on optimizing their social and environmental impacts.
In 2002, the Hewlett Foundation's Blended Value Project was brought forward by a group of practitioners from the US, Canada, UK and Netherlands who had been implementing SROI analyses together to draft an update to the methodology.
[3] A larger group met again in 2006 to do another revision which was published in 2006 in the book Social Return on Investment: a Guide to SROI.
This resulted in another formal revision to the method, produced by a consortium led by Social Value UK, published in the 2009 Guide to SROI, since updated in 2012.
[6] The third principle, 'Value the things that matter', includes the use of financial proxies and monetisation of value, and is unique to the SROI approach.
Be responsive (introduced in 2021)[19] The translation of extra-financial value into monetary terms is considered an important part of SROI analysis by some practitioners, and problematic when it is made a universal requirement by others.
Proponents of SROI argue that using monetary proxies (market prices or other monetary proxies) for social, economic and environmental value offers several practical benefits: Despite these benefits, on the down side there is concern that monetization lets a user of SROI analysis "off the hook" by too easily allowing comparison of the end number at the expense of understanding the actual method by which it was arrived at: thus a working paper by Arvidson et al (2010) "aims to encourage greater rigour and attention to how SROI principles are applied".
For example, the Participatory Social Return on Investment (PSROI) framework builds on the economic principles of SROI and CBA and integrates them with the theoretical and methodological foundations of participatory action research (PAR), critical systems thinking, and Resilience Theory and strength-based approaches such as appreciative inquiry and asset-based community development to create a framework for the planning and costing of adaptation to climate change in agricultural systems.