Social impacts can be among the most positive outcomes of event hosting – but are also some of the hardest to measure.
Simple enjoyment or having a fun day out can be a basic positive social impact for local people attending an event. A wider change in people’s behaviour, attitudes, health, wellbeing or career prospects in the longer-term can be a more powerful benefit again. But across this impact spectrum, the social effects of event hosting are still more often observed anecdotally than measured formally in a structured way.
Assessing social impact is about more than capturing the feelgood factor. Every organiser has a far wider range of incentives to understand and tell the story of how their event affects the people it touches.
On one level, this is important in demonstrating an event’s ability to achieve the objectives of its funders and sponsors, particularly those in the public sector. On another, it can add to its future value by documenting a track record of effective support for a broad range of public policy objectives and strengthening a central pillar of potential sponsors’ environmental, social and governance (ESG) agendas.
The more complex of these social impacts do not happen by chance and must be wired in to an event’s planning from day one, with clear objectives and processes for achieving them. Developing a theory of change – a written, evidence-based explanation of how a specific set of actions will deliver a specific desired result – is a useful way of approaching this, both as a roadmap for delivery and a basis for subsequent evaluation of results. Although many social impacts can only be evidenced through subjective or perception-based indicators, logic models can provide a valuable framework for evaluation through their ability to capture an intervention’s inputs, outputs, outcomes and context, and analyse the relationship between them.
This section of the eventIMPACTS toolkit focuses on four broad areas of social impact:
- Community
- Equality, diversity and inclusion
- Volunteering and skills
- Health and wellbeing
Events can drive social change in other areas too, but this list covers a wide range of impacts and provides a useful framework for measurement, based on indicators recommended by the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD) and the Association of Summer Olympic International Federations (ASOIF) that contribute to the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
Events can also influence the reputation of a place through the media coverage that they generate and from the experiences and perceptions of non-local attendees. Measures of reputational change are considered under the Media section.