Sinzer Blog

Europeana, the network for the cultural heritage sector in Europe, believes making cultural heritage digitally available and accessible is important. But why exactly? What is the value of this? Who benefits from it? What changes does it create? Or in other words: what is the impact of Europeana?

Europeana has certain impact goals, such as contributing to creating a shared European identity. Europeana strongly believes in being specific about the changes you aim to create, and in testing whether you are indeed creating these changes. This is the reason Europeana recently engaged Sinzer and embarked on a journey to assess the impact of Europeana Research, and the curated collections Europeana Fashion & Europeana Photography. The aim is that through this assessment, general learnings about the impact of Europeana in general can be drawn as well.

Before impact can be measured, it's crucial to define the outcomes and impact you intend and expect to happen; designing the Theory of Change. During this phase several multi-stakeholder workshops were held for Europeana Fashion, Photography & Research. In these session intended and expected impact was ‘mapped’ by answering questions such as: who experiences change as a result of accessing or providing data? What changes do these groups experience? How can this be influenced by changing the offering or services? Or, to be more concrete: does accessing heritage material through a Europeana service increase people’s knowledge about historic events and different cultures? And does this affect their behaviour towards others or life itself? Does Europeana through Europeana Fashion, Europeana Photography or Europeana Research ‘make life easier’ for researchers and professionals who rely on cultural heritage for their work? And is this important to them?

Once we had identified the activities that would ultimately lead to impact, and some of the steps in between, we turned our attention to how we could evidence this. Taking each stakeholder, we look at what changes we thought most important to measure, and identified what we could ask in a survey to gather data for those measurements. After the sessions, the impact ‘mapping’, including these measures (indicators), were translated into several surveys, which are currently being used to collect data from a variety of stakeholders like Galleries, Libaries, Archives and Musea (or in short: GLAMs), researchers, designers, professionals, and general users. Results are expected to be ready in September.

While Europeana expects that the insights from the reports will help demonstrate the importance of their collective existence and work, it will also provide tangible management information: what can they do differently in order to create more impact? Assessing impact is not seen as a one-off exercise, but rather as the start of an ongoing impact management process that stimulates continuous learning and improvements.

Would you like to help Europeana in this process? Have you visited the thematic collections of  Europeana Fashion, Europeana Photography or Europeana Research?  Take the 10 minute impact survey.

Inclusive Businesses have been part of the ‘development toolkit’ for more than a decade now. The term Inclusive Business (IB) was coined by the World Business Council for Sustainable Development in 2005, which defined IB’s as “a private sector approach to providing goods, services, and livelihoods on a commercially viable basis, either at scale or scalable, to people at the base of the pyramid by making them part of the value chain of companies’ core business as suppliers, distributors, retailers, or customers”.

After the successful launch of Sinzer two years ago, we felt it was time to celebrate our successes as well as share some of our clients’ best practices. We therefore organised our event “Let’s Go Social” which took place the 15^th of September. Around 120 people from a wide range of organisations attended the event to celebrate Sinzer’s 2^nd anniversary with us.

Waar gemeenten en sociale ondernemingen gaan samenwerken om maatschappelijke vraagstukken op te lossen, rijst vaak een aantal vragen: welke impact wordt er gerealiseerd en hoe wordt deze gemeten? Leidt het tot kostenbesparingen voor de gemeente en hoe groot zijn die? Hoe om te gaan met besparingen die worden gerealiseerd binnen een ander domein? En welke investeringen zijn er nodig om dit te bereiken? Een maatschappelijke Business Case (mBC) helpt sociale ondernemingen en gemeenten om de impact in kaart te brengen en antwoord te krijgen op de genoemde vragen. Maar waar moet je op letten bij het maken en gebruiken van zo’n mBC?

Doing business sustainably and fairly is becoming commonplace in the board rooms of many organisations. Social enterprises are at the forefront of this development, by developing sustainable business concepts that place the attainment of social impact over maximisation of financial return. At the same time, governments are facing so-called 'wicked problems' that require new ways of solving problems , such as unemployment, poverty and climate change. In order to bring these public and private entities together, the Social Impact Factory was initiated in 2015: a platform aimed at connecting and inspiring organisations to become more socially involved and to accelerate change towards a society where doing business fairly, sustainably and socially inclusive is the standard. Social impact measurement, the Factory feels, is a vital element in this process.  

Everyone is talking impact nowadays. Organisations can’t get away anymore with just reporting about a few outputs, such as the number of people they have reached or the number of schools they have built. Nowadays, they also need to understand, report about and be accountable for the change (both positive and negative) that is created by their activities. Did the intervention actually make a lasting difference in people’s lives? Since such results generally only occur after a longer period of time, sometimes even years after a programme or intervention was initiated, measuring impact can be challenging. Especially determining to what extent your intervention contributed to the change may be a tough task. How much of the results can you claim? And how do you calculate your impact claim?

De Social Enterprise monitor 2016 laat zien dat het goed gaat met de Social Enterprise sector: de sector groeit, is minder afhankelijk van subsidies en heeft minder moeite dan voorgaande jaren om financiering aan te trekken. Daarnaast geeft 60% van de ondervraagden in de monitor aan dat zij op enige wijze maatschappelijke impact meten, bijna 10% meer dan in 2015. Goed nieuws, want om je onderneming te laten groeien is een goed begrip van je maatschappelijke waardecreatie cruciaal. De uitdaging voor veel van deze sociaal ondernemingen blijft echter: hoe kun je met beperkte middelen maatschappelijke impactmeting zo inzetten dat dit je zowel stuurinformatie oplevert, als informatie om verantwoording af te leggen aan investeerders, potentiele investeerders aan te trekken en klanten aan je te binden. Waar leg je de focus?

Het nieuwe validatiestelsel voor de goede doelensector in Nederland, dat uitgewerkt is door de branchevereniging Goede Doelen Nederland en toezichthouder CBF, is een positief pleidooi voor het meten van maatschappelijke impact. Het onderschrijft namelijk dat het interessanter is om te weten wat er bereikt is met het geld dat gedoneerd wordt, dan hoeveel procent van de giften er precies wordt besteed aan het doel. Immers, je kunt 100% van de verworven middelen aan het doel besteden en totaal geen impact hebben doordat de interventie niet heeft gewerkt. Zowel donateur als eindbeneficiant zullen daar niet blij mee zijn, als ook de goede doelenorganisatie niet.

Sinzer recently announced a formal Data Partnership with the Global Value Exchange (GVE). We are presenting a series of blogs with more detailed information about the data sources GVE uses to extract outcomes, indicators and valuations from. This week we highlight the Global Goals for Sustainable Development (SDGs) from which 17 outcomes and 174 related indicators are extracted and added to the GVE database. As a result of our data partnership with the GVE, these outcomes and indicators can now also be accessed on the Sinzer platform.

On Monday 15 February 2016 the first national Health Impact Bonds conference took place, organized by Society Impact, PGGM, Rabobank, the Dutch Ministry of Health, Wellbeing and Sports, City of Amsterdam, ABN AMRO, EY, Zilveren Kruis (health care insurance) and CbusineZ. The conference highlighted the enormous potential of HIBs for creating impact in the health care sector.