3 benefits of upgrading your social value software – aside from having a better impact

As a local council, the main benefits of investing in a piece of social value software – or upgrading your existing solution – are probably crystal clear. You’ll know what having that fresh oversight of social value data can do for you. How it allows you to make the right procurement decisions for your local area. How it lets you specifically target the areas you need to for the people who depend on your work. 

With it, you can improve the SROI of every action, investment, and have a more meaningful impact on your community. It’s something we’ve covered a lot over the past year. So if you need a refresher, we have plenty of blogs which you can find here, here, and here! 

This is just the tip of the iceberg, though. As great as it is at increasing your social value, there’s a wealth of less direct benefits that you might be overlooking by not investing in the right software. Ones that are just as useful to your council as they are to your communities. So, putting social impact aside, let’s dive a little deeper into a few of the knock-on benefits of upgrading your social value software. 

Benefit #1: Greater staff satisfaction

The more that procurement focuses on social value, the more data we need to capture, organise, and analyse. Staff can easily find themselves drowning in waves of data as the responsibility of bringing all together falls on their shoulders.

Without the right solution, it means hours of manually inputting data, performing calculations, grappling with chaotic spreadsheets, and producing reports. And it’s not as if you can skip these. You need them to boost the value of your projects. It’s a shame then that it’s such a tedious, time-consuming, and repetitive process. That’s one way to completely drain your team’s energy and morale. Especially if managing data wasn’t always part of their job description.

Investing in an all-encompassing social value solution removes a lot of the monotonous, low-impact tasks from your staff’s workload. 

So rather than it being on them to take care of data capture and management, the software does the majority of the heavy lifting. It can’t take over everything – someone will still need to input the data into the system – but you can at least spread out that burden and make it a much less intense job.

Taking that off your staff’s shoulders means they have one less responsibility that they didn’t like. And they have their time back to focus on the parts of their job they’re best at. All in all, it should lead to a happier team who are free of the stress but still have that fulfilling feeling that they’re making a difference.

Benefit #2: A simpler relationship with suppliers

That’s your staff; but what about your suppliers? Unlike your team, you can’t directly control what they do. So when you need them to play their part in monitoring your social impact, you need it to be simple. Once you award a contract, you’re going to need them to consistently feedback on their progress and submit their data.

Usually, this means a lot of back and forth, chasing suppliers to share the latest data. Or checking in often to ensure everything is on track.

Depending on the supplier, this might be easier said than done. To some, it’ll be a minor annoyance that gets pushed down their list of priorities. To others, it might be like you’re nagging them. Instead of constantly badgering them, or waiting until the end of the project and finding out they’ve not been keeping track of anything, you can use your social value software to make it easier – on both of you.

What you specifically want is a centralised approach that makes it easy to collaborate. That way, they can submit their data to the same place you do, and the platform collates this into an actionable insight. It should be made for constant updating, so that way nothing goes amiss. This can promote greater collaboration between you and your suppliers, and keep you in touch without you having to bug them.

Benefit #3: More time

We mentioned it earlier on, but tracking social value eats into your time. And that’s what the right social value software can give you: your time back. A lot less goes into the manual processes and can go towards the rest of what your council does. It can put everything from bid comparisons to generating monthly reports on autopilot.

Making time to engage with local beneficiaries, hosting meet-the-buyer events to widen your supply chain, finding ways to tighten other aspects of the procurement process. These are all tasks that will benefit your council and local community in the long-run. But they’re often overshadowed by the daily responsibilities of managing social value data from bids and ongoing projects.

By streamlining your social value process, you ensure your staff have the time to focus on these key issues.

The goal of social value software is to allow councils like yours to generate even more of an impact. But that’s not where it stops. Simplifying your social value process will bring a wide range of benefits, from daily operational improvements to better staff wellbeing. And there’s even more than what we’ve covered here today. The sky really is the limit!

Impact is an intelligent platform that puts the social value side of procurement on autopilot. With decentralised data capture, automated conversions, and ongoing contract management, it becomes simple to make social value a priority. To find out more, schedule a demo or get in touch with the team on 0161 532 4752.