Forecast the social value of any program impacting community wellbeing — grounded in Australia's Measuring What Matters (2023) and WEGo nation policy. All values in AUD.
This SROI forecast tool is designed for anyone planning a program that impacts community wellbeing in Australia. It translates the outcomes your program creates into a financial value — not to reduce people to numbers, but to make the invisible visible to funders, governments, and communities.
Social Return on Investment (SROI) is an outcomes-based framework that assigns financial value to non-market outcomes — improved mental health, community connection, ecological repair, cultural continuity — that traditional cost-benefit analysis misses entirely.
Where conventional analysis counts what is spent, SROI asks what is genuinely created: dignity, belonging, ecological repair, and cultural continuity. This aligns directly with Australia's Measuring What Matters (ABS, 2023) and the policy frameworks of all six WEGo member nations.
A ratio of 5:1 means that for every A$1 invested in the program, A$5 of social value is created across the community. Community-based services in Australia typically return A$3–A$14 per A$1 invested depending on the domain (Productivity Commission, 2023).
A unit is one measurable instance of a meaningful outcome being experienced by one person (or one completed action, for environmental domains). You define the units — this tool provides the plain-language question and examples to guide you.
Each domain has a pre-set proxy value in AUD — the estimated financial value of one unit of that outcome. These are derived from:
Proxy values are intentionally conservative. They represent the lower bound of social value — the floor, not the ceiling. Cultural & Spiritual Life and Future Generations carry the highest proxies because they represent outcomes most invisible to conventional economics, and most consequential to Indigenous-led and community-first organisations.
Predicts the social value a program is expected to create — used for funding applications, grant proposals, and investment planning. Based on your planned reach and evidence-based proxy values.
Conducted after the program has run, using actual outcome data. Evaluative SROI validates the forecast, builds funder confidence, and generates evidence for continuous learning — the 'L' in MEL.
SROI aligns with the Wellbeing Economy Alliance's core goal: shifting decision-making from short-term financial gain toward long-term societal and ecological wellbeing. Australia's Measuring What Matters framework is the beginning of this shift at national policy level. Tools like this one make it possible at program and community level — giving frontline organisations the evidence language to compete for funding on their own terms.