Sinzer Blog

Currently there are $7 trillion in assets held by the wealthiest 1,000 people in the world. An increasing number of “High Net Worth Individuals” (HNWI) are giving a way (parts) of their fortune to philanthropy. This trend was boosted by The Giving Pledge, an initiative from Bill Gates and Warren Buffet in which 137 HNWI have already commited to give more than half of their wealth to philanthropy or charitable causes during their lifetime or in their will. A good example is the Saudi Arabian billionaire Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, who has recently announced to give away his entire $32 billion fortune to philanthropy!

Although many organizations are trying to capture social value behind their desk, we believe that “value is in the eye of the stakeholder, like beauty is in the eye of the beholder”. This statement underlines the importance of involving your stakeholders before and during your social impact measurement.

Foundations receive a lot of requests for their funding. But how can they decide which project will be the most effective? How can they learn from current projects in order to make better-informed investing decisions, and improve the impact of the foundation as a whole? Measuring outputs alone, like the number of participants or workshops, or the total amount of volunteer work, only scratches the surface of the total impact of a program or project. This does not provide enough information to determine whether a project is effective or not. Has the target group been reached by the project? Have their circumstances really been changed? Only by giving a voice to those people whose lives the project aims to change, we can determine whether the right investment choices have been made.

Many organisations today are aiming to create change in the lives of people. Corporations wish to do good with their CSR strategies, institutional investors are applying new investments techniques to create an impact to society and high net worth individuals are giving away increasing amounts of their money to change the world. But how can you be sure you are really making a difference? The urge to find an answer to this question has never been greater.

 The full concept of value is not captured when we talk about financial capital alone. Value is a much broader concept including human, intellectual and natural capital.

Up until now, organizations have mostly been accountable for the financial capital they create or destroy. With the growing notion of a wider definition of value however, the “old” way of looking at value no longer suffices. Many organizations are currently working on a new vision of value: social value. At Sinzer we create solutions to measure, report and communicate about social value. And since our pay off is “Value what matters” we would like to share our vision of value with you.