Caroline Gumble on social value

Caroline Gumble CIOB

Measuring CIOB’s social value

Being part of CIOB is about belonging to an organisation that does good things. And now CIOB has measured its social value for the first time. Caroline Gumble explains

This month’s column comes not

long after my return from our successful Members’ Forum event in Sydney. It was our first visit to Oceania and I was pleased to spend time with members face to face, understanding their priorities and learning from their insights and experience.

Of course, we also shared details of our plans and activities and one of the items I was particularly proud to put out to delegates and hubs is our recently completed social value report.

CIOB made a commitment in 2021 to research our own social value and publish a report to establish a ‘baseline’ for where we are now and where we could aspire to go. That decision was made because it is equally as important for us, especially in light of our public interest remit, to understand and measure our social value, as it is for other organisations in this sector.

Many of you will be familiar with the idea of social value and may even work alongside social value and corporate social responsibility colleagues in your organisation. With CIOB also working alongside many of those organisations, we can now showcase the extent of value that we add to society and understand more about how to grow this aspect of our work and support others in doing the same.

In our first ever report on CIOB’s social value, which has been

Being part of CIOB is about being part of an organisation that has a positive social impact We can now showcase the extent of value that we add to society and understand more about how to grow this aspect of our work and support others

produced by an external agency specialising in this kind of reporting within the built environment, we reveal that for every £1 invested in CIOB services, £2.84 of social value is generated. The agency which undertook the work tells us that this is a conservative valuation, likely to grow as other areas of CIOB’s work are examined and factored into future reports.

What pleases me most about this report is that it reinforces that belonging to CIOB, either as a member or as a colleague, is about being part of an organisation that does good things and has a positive impact and does deliver in terms of the public interest.

It feels fitting that we are able to publish this early in the New Year – watch this space for a link to the full report in January – as it is something positive and purposedriven, helping to set us up for a future in which I hope we can deliver more on public interest, social value and support for this important industry. ●

Caroline Gumble is CEO of CIOB.