Frequently Asked Questions

Small-to-medium social enterprises and enterprising community organisations frequently report that they lack the funding, resources, skills and time to measure their social impacts. At the same time, research shows the importance of impact measurement to social enterprises, who are under increasing pressure to communicate their social impacts to customers, funders, policymakers, investors, and beneficiaries.

Owing to this, SEIL started as a research project in 2018 by the Centre for Social Impact, aiming to better understand and improve the capacity for socially focused organisations with the impact measurement process. Three years down the line, this research has produced the SEIL Platform for social enterprises to measure and track their impacts.

Read more about the SEIL journey or check out our SEIL Platform and other evaluation resources.


The SEIL Platform is an application or a system that captures primary evaluative data of a social enterprise and enables the social enterprise to analyse, visually track, and display key outcome metrics and data points to monitor the social impact of its activities.

The SEIL Platform provides each participating organisation with the opportunity to customise outcome metrics to meet their internal, donor and government and other stakeholder needs.


An indicators bank or an indicators library is a repository or a menu of outcome indicators that can be used to measure the impact of social enterprises by domain. The outcome indicators are provided to enable a social enterprise to pick and choose outcomes that measure the expected changes in their activities.

Because outcome indicators measure the changes that occur over time, the wording provided in the indicators can be varied based on your timeframe.


SEIL is modelled explicitly for small-to-medium social enterprises. Social enterprises are organisations that exist to fulfil a social purpose consistent with public or community benefit, trade to fulfil their mission and reinvest a substantial proportion of their profit or surplus in the realisation of their mission. They include not for profit and for profit forms, and cooperative and mutual enterprises (Barraket, Collyer, O’Connor & Anderson, 2010).

Reference:
Barraket, J., Collyer, N., O’Connor, M., & Anderson, H. (2010). Finding Australia’s social enterprise sector: Final report. Brisbane: Queensland University of Technology
Retrieved from http://sewfonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/Social-Traders-Australia-Mapping.pdf.


Yes, you can sign up if you identify yourself as a social enterprise.


SEIL forms the central component of a research project aiming to help social enterprises report effectively on their business and social performance. The research involves comparing users’ data on their evaluation process approach and organisation structure, and social impact outcomes achieved concerning the social purpose of their enterprise.

This includes exploring how the reported data compares across different social enterprises, as well as examining how reported data for a single social enterprise might change over time (i.e. a year-by-year comparison of business and social performance).

This research will be used to inform the development of publishable research outputs, including but not limited to peer-reviewed journal publications and public presentations of findings and their implications for creating social enterprise tools and developing social enterprise businesses.

Publications and reports produced as a result of using SEIL data will either be made available for download through a link on the SEIL website, or further details provided where a publisher requires pay-for-access.


Register to be a part of the SEIL project by filling out our online registration form and we will contact you directly.


Still have more questions?

You can get in touch via our Contact Page or
contact us directly via email at seil@swin.edu.au.

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