Social and environmental management

Measuring what matters so that you can be sure you're creating social value and managing your environmental impacts

To help you measure the social and environmental impact of your organisation’s activities we offer the following services. These can be used to track and report your impact and as part of the planning process to help you shape and prioritise your activities. These services can be provided alongside our financial management offering or as stand-alone services.

Environmental management

An environmental management system helps you measure and in turn control your environmental impact. Whether you want help identifying what to track internally, or need to demonstrate your environmental management processes more formally to win contracts or receive grant funding, we can help.

We can support you:

• Identify key impacts and risk factors
• Design policies and processes to manage your environmental impact
• Use resources more efficiently
• Reduce costs
• Comply with legislation
• Create environmental impact reporting
• Identify low impact suppliers and products
• Write an environmental policy to promote your green credentials to customers

We are also able to help businesses complete the Steps to Environmental Management Scheme (STEM), a self-certifying scheme developed by Kent County Council.

STEM has been specifically developed to be appropriate for smaller businesses who may find other standards too extensive for their needs. However it has also been designed as a way to prepare your organisation for attaining more formal standards such as BS 8555 or ISO 14001 if these are required.

The scheme is open to businesses based anywhere in the UK but it is currently free for businesses in the South East. You can find out more about STEM on the Kent County Council website.

Social impact measurement

If you’re a three-thinking organisation you’ll be wanting to ensure that your activities are creating social value. Measuring the impact that your organisation has on people and the wider society is of course difficult. However it is important to have a way of prioritising your activities and tracking your progress to ensure that you are achieving your social objectives, and where necessary to demonstrate your impact to funders and other stakeholders.

We can help you identify the best way to measure the social outcomes that are most important to your organisation, and support you in planning, tracking and reporting them.

We can also conduct Social Return on Investment (SROI) evaluations. SROI was developed by the New Economics Foundation to provide a consistent methodology and framework for measuring value in its broadest sense, incorporating social, environmental and economic costs and benefits. For more information on SROI please see the SROI Network website.