We have specialists in a whole range of methodologies - including wellbeing valuation, distributional analysis, equity weighting, stated and revealed preference valuation approaches, econometrics and statistics, ethics, and behavioural science. We can deploy combinations of these methodologies to meet your needs across a range of services.
We know that whether you are working on a business case approval, want to frame your approach to corporate social responsibility, or develop an end-to-end framework for social value measurement, you want a trusted pair of hands. We regularly work with clients to achieve a range of organisational outcomes, helping you to understand your social value and translating this to social value statements and strategies you can share with stakeholders. Through our expertise in business ethics and policy, we provide the tools and processes needed to assess your strategy, values and frameworks, to benchmark your performance, and to improve how you understand and engage with stakeholders and communities.
Causal inference - estimating cause and effect relationships - is critical to policy evaluation and social impact analysis. As leaders in econometrics, statistics and data science, the scientific rigour we apply to our statistical research is unrivalled. Our excellence in this area has seen us advise OECD governments on their approach to understanding and measuring impact. We can deploy these same approaches for you, helping you understand and evidence the impact your business or organisation is having – the interventions, projects and programmes you deliver and the positive effect they have on people and communities. Using robust and reliable empirical evidence, you can then ensure you are making better, more informed business and investment decisions. Whether you want to understand the impact of a single project or intervention, develop an impact report for a particular client, or if you’re looking for an annual report across all lines of business, we will create a bespoke approach for you.
We are pioneers in valuing the wide range of impacts that policies, projects and investments have, distilling these to a single measurement of social value. We go beyond the traditional economic metrics to understand impacts on a wide range of outcomes such as the environment, health, crime, employment, heritage and culture, sports, design and education. All the methods and approaches we cover are HM Treasury Green Book compliant. Our team has co-authored valuation guidelines for the UK Government (the HM Treasury Green Book) and for the OECD. Our expertise has led us to develop and apply best practice valuation techniques, such as wellbeing valuation and stated preference methods, across a range of areas. By combining this data with our cutting-edge approaches to measurement, we can generate values for a wide array of interventions. This might mean generating a handful of values to help understand the impact of an employment initiative on a local area. It could be creating a whole suite of values to use across a major, multi-year regeneration or development programme. It could also involve understanding the environmental impact of a particular intervention through air quality, or even capturing the welfare benefits associated with arts and cultural institutions through the design of a bespoke valuation survey.
Simetrica-Jacobs have played an integral part in the development of wellbeing methodologies for appraisal in the UK with our research taking an important role in the Green Book Supplementary Guidance on Wellbeing (2021). We help you understand what wellbeing is, how to measure it, and how to assess the potential impact of future projects. Only then can you ensure you’re making a positive and sustainable impact on society. Our techniques for measuring wellbeing have been used at local and national level to help organisations like yours create effective strategies for improving wellbeing.
To have robust evidence to inform your decisions, you need effective and robust surveys. You may already have ideas about what you want to know, specific requirements from an external funder, or you may be starting from a blank page. Our team has published academically on all aspects of survey design. We can help you refine existing approaches or develop a whole new survey from scratch, applying our research and rigour to any challenge you face.
We provide training in ethics, social value measurement and impact evaluation. We will create a programme that works for you and for your organisation. This might be a half day masterclass to introduce your team to social value measurement, or a programme of workshops over several weeks to train and upskill your team, building the capacity and skills required to ensure social value measurement is fully embedded across your business. We work with teams of all sizes, and across organisations – from Boards to delivery teams. We can also provide in-depth training for your teams to help fully implement and operationalise our range of Tools for social value measurement. Whatever your training needs, you can be assured that when you undertake training with us, you’re working with the best. Our team not only train the UK Government and the Governments of New Zealand, Japan, Australia and Canada, but lecture at the London School of Economics and the University of Cambridge.
Think you might like to combine a few of our services into a programme of work? No problem – we’ll work with you to create a package of support that aligns directly with your needs.
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