Got social purpose? Prove it!

What is social purpose?

Defining your organisation's social purpose is the first step on your journey to measuring your social impact. 

For most of history, organisations were founded upon one of two business models: a commercial enterprise to maximise financial returns, or a not-for-profit or charity to maximise social and environmental returns. However, over time, the way companies and not-for-profit's do business has  transformed.

With growing social awareness among consumers, a greater sense of accountability among businesses and tighter government regulations, a newer continuum of business models has emerged. These models include everything from social enterprises to social purpose businesses.

A social purpose business uses entrepreneurial principles to organise, mobilise and manage a for-profit business that has a social mission at its core and the goals of creating both economic and social value. 

However, whether you are a corporate business with a CSR mission or charity with trading activities, measuring and demonstrating your organisation's social impact is not easy and that is where BrightSparks can help... 


Our Services 

We are members of Social Impact UK and have relationships with many universities and research experts that have the necessary expertise to take your impact or research project from inception to completion. Our services include:

Social Audit

Social auditing is a way of helping you prove, improve and account for the difference you are making. Starting with that in mind, it helps you to plan and manage your organisation as well as demonstrate what you have achieved.

Through social accounting and audit you will understand the impact your organisation has on people, the planet and the way you use resources. It will also help you manage your organisation and improve your effectiveness.

Social accounting and audit can be used by any organisation, whether voluntary, public or private sector, and of any size or scale. It is ideal for assessing the impact of your CSR programmes as well as justifying your work to funders and stakeholders. 


Research / evaluation Co-ordination

BrightSparks supports organisations that want to undertake evaluations or longitudinal investigations of their services. This work goes beyond social auditing and examines services using academic standard quantitative and qualitative research methods to understand the holistic changes that your services have resulted in. 

We work with a range of different academic institutions that quality assure our research methods and provide oversight of our data collection and analysis approaches to ensure that the findings of our research / evaluations are truly impartial and accurate. 

We have worked with many organisations from private and not-for-profit backgrounds, where independent evaluations of service provision have been a requirement of the funding they have received from investors and grant funders. Some examples of this can be found below.


Check out our recent projects