In conversation with Constança Aragão Morais

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Its aim is to create bridges so that people can access information, come together and participate in improving their well-being, now and in the future, through social innovation and a new ecological awareness. Constança Aragão Morais heads up the Children and Youth area at Ashoka in Portugal. At other times of the day, she is also a social impact consultant and trainer.

In this role, he has collaborated on several occasions with the Social Impact Community – an initiative promoted by 4Change, in partnership with other promoters, and dedicated to promoting a new culture of impact in social economy entities. She is currently leading the internal training sessions for the mentors of the IS_beta program.

First of all, what does it mean to be a social impact consultant? Do you think this figure is already recognized in Portugal?

For me, being a social impact consultant means promoting impact-oriented action, reflection and intuition. In other words, I feel that my mission is to call all the stakeholders in a project or organization to tune in to what really matters and to give them the tools to move forward on a virtuous path of positive and multiplying impact. I don’t know if this figure is more or less recognized in Portugal than elsewhere in the world. I can see that finding a guiding star is an increasing necessity, both for people and organizations, in an increasingly complex, diffuse and changing reality. On the other hand, the sector has evolved and funders themselves demand proof of the social return on their investment. As a result, there is a growing demand for impact assessment in the social field and an increasing benefit to be derived from this practice.

At the moment, you’re collaborating with the Social Impact Community to help train the mentors of the IS_beta training program, but this isn’t the first time you’ve been involved in the activities of this initiative. Can you describe what your first experience was like and what you’ve learned this time?

I joined this journey as a mentor in the 2016 edition. It has been a very rich experience that has given me a better understanding of how social impact assessment and management can serve organizations. It became clear to me right away that, in this practice, rather than thinking about “right” and “wrong”, what makes sense is to talk about “more useful” and “less useful”. The important thing, rather than being good at applying an evaluation methodology or having brilliant figures to present, is the process of involving stakeholders, creating a common understanding of impact and creating tools and procedures that allow us to make decisions geared towards our ultimate purpose as people and organizations.

What are the main challenges you’re facing now? Are there any differences from the past?

In fact, each year the process is easier and more fluid. After the concern with technical rigour, there is room to focus on the really important details and the lessons to be learned from the whole process to really make a difference to the organizations, the people who work there and the beneficiaries. Every year it also seems that the organizations taking part are more willing and able to integrate the concepts and practices of social impact assessment into their realities, which is also due to the evolution of the sector itself and general knowledge on the subject.

Until now, the IS_beta program had focused on a specific evaluation methodology: SROI analysis. However, this year it was decided to test a new methodology. Can you tell me more about this decision?

SROI has brought very important aspects of social impact assessment to the table, such as the importance of questioning the efficiency of impact creation in relation to the resources invested. The methodology also presents solutions for taking into account the value of changes for stakeholders and their duration when considering their impact (thus going beyond the limited concept of distance traveled, which only tells us the amount of change).

However, the fact that the unit of measurement used to try to express all these factors is money ends up creating a lot of noise and bias, especially when financial approximations are used to value social change. This technique assumes that the market price or willingness to pay for a product/service reflects its value to those people, and in fact there are many other factors that influence these two indicators (e.g. state subsidies, cost of production or people’s own purchasing power), which are difficult to take out of the equation. Determining the duration of changes in a specific number of years is also far-fetched – how can I, without a rigorous scientific study using control groups, justify that the impact of a change lasts exactly 3 years, and not 4 or 5?

As such, I believe that SROI is flawed by an excessive search for precision in relation to something as intangible as social impact. This excessiveness ends up compromising what should be its primary purpose, which is to increase understanding of what really happens as a result of an intervention, and in some cases ends up distancing us from the truth of our stakeholders.

It’s typical to want to look for absolute truths, bulletproof methodologies and magical, comforting numbers like the “social return on investment”. What happens is that we often cling to apparent simplistic certainties that only distance us from a holistic understanding of reality, which is always complex. Sometimes, accepting the relative and infinitely intricate quality of reality is the first step towards gaining greater and deeper intelligence about it.

It was based on this observation that this year we adapted the methodology and replaced the financial approximations and duration with indices of importance and durability, reported by the stakeholders and therefore completely subjective. The impact index obtained, unlike the SROI ratio, is only intended to be relative, i.e. it is only useful in comparative analyses between changes or projects. This index only reflects the stakeholders’ judgment of the impact they feel as a result of the project. In this way, participating organizations are invited to look at the figures obtained in the impact assessment as mere summarizers of the different perspectives of the various stakeholders (the beauty of numbers as a means of communication is that we can calculate averages and thus converge a multiplicity of realities into a single universally understood symbol).

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