Impact in Financial, Social, and Environmental Need for a System-Wide Success

In The For-Profit World, You Monitor Progress With Sales Revenue—How Do You Keep Track Of Progress In A Social Enterprise?
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Introduction
Social enterprises are groups or businesses that catalyse social change, and typically vary by their institution, socioeconomic, and cultural environments. Social entrepreneurs are by definition people who attack social issues and problems causes by shortcomings in an existing market and go ahead to create a systematic and sustainable change. They establish business with the sole goal of creating a combination of social, financial, and environmental values. They are best described as hybrid organizations because of their “blended value.” While operating their businesses social enterprises seek to maintain a unique view of their role within their social and environmental systems. As such, they differ with For-Profit enterprises as they goals are not purely financial. Their success while being measured by profit also depends largely on their impact on, and commitment and responsibility to the community they serve. There are many was to keep track of the progress in a social enterprise.
Keeping Track of Progress in a Social Enterprise (SE)
The success of for-profit businesses is measured through an economic lens which does not include the social impacts. Return on investment (ROI) measures for example the progress through metrics such as profit margin, revenue, customer satisfaction, and staff turnover factored in. SEs on the other hand are not easily measurable and use of Social Return on Investment (SROI) works best (Battiliana, Lee, Walker, and Dorsey, 2012). SROI is ideal because it blends all qualitative and quantitative measures in order to come up with an appealing measurement that attracts not only investors but also the co...