Community Investment

Many organisations grapple with community investment decisions: 

• How can we be sure the programs we invest in reflect our organisational or business and social objectives?
• How do we account for current and future risks? 
• How do we design and implement strategies which will offer the greatest opportunity to create social value and mutual benefit?

Pulling together the data and hard evidence around whether our community investments are achieving agreed targets and objectives creates the challenge of deciding what metrics and evaluation criteria to use to quantify the return on our investments. 

The availability of robust information on the outcomes of your community investments enables your organisation to ask important questions around opportunities for immediate improvement - How can we do this better?  To ensure your community investment program continues to generate mutual value it is also important to ask - Are we equipped with the knowledge and processes to ensure continuous improvement and ongoing sustainability? 

At Net Balance we can help you tackle these challenges in the following ways:

Community Investment Strategy:  We provide expert guidance on design, implementation and measurement. This includes:

• developing the strategy and objectives in line with your core business strategy and in the context of your vision, mission and values
• embedding metrics and evaluation frameworks 
• optimising benefits through multi-stakeholder engagement, best practice assessment, and materiality analyses 
• assistance in the planning and development of a program or initiative, including the development of an evaluation framework

CI Implementation: Providing expert support for the implementation of your community investment strategy including:

• the development of monitoring and data collection systems 
• internal communication and promotion
• review of existing community partnerships and a provide a process for selecting new partners

Measuring Impact: A comprehensive impact analysis utilising principles of Social Return on Investment (SROI) to identify and quantify social outcomes - this approach typically centres on robust stakeholder engagement and proxy valuation techniques. Net Balance also offers Guided Impact Assessment for organisations that want to build capacity to do their own SROI analysis.

Communication and Reporting: Accurate and ethical communication of outcomes associated with community investment is a vital part of any program. Net Balance can assist with the identification of stakeholders and developing a communications plan to suit. Advice and assistance with milestone reviews for individual programs and final reporting on community investment.