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I saw some practical examples of something similar to SRoI recently at a lecture at the Natural History Museum - in the field of environmental science. Below is my blog post from the NCVO website about it:

I was lucky enough last night to attend the Natural History Museum's Annual Science Lecture 2009. It was given by Pavan Sukhdev, an economist with the United Nations Environment Programme, and took place in the museum's magnificent Central Hall - complete with bronze diplodocus.

His team are in the process of reporting on "TEEB" (The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity). These reports aim to show that saving the world's environment, whether its tropical forests, coral reefs or fish stocks, is not just a moral imperative, or an aesthetic one, but is also vital to the world's economy.

A hard sell from both sides - with ecologists insisting that you can't put a value on nature and free-marketeers questioning the place for nature in economics -but Pavan put forward a convincing case of the real and measurable value of protecting biodiversity across the world.

In one of many examples he explained how setting up ocean reserves where fishing was prohibited actually led to an increase in the number and size of fish caught in the area. The reserve becomes a breeding ground for fish who would normally be caught young, and their offspring are then caught elsewhere without the same loss in sustainability.

Discussing the lecture in the pub afterwards, my friends and I were thinking that similar ideas could be used to measure the contribution of civil society to the economy. We spend a lot of time measuring the finances of the sector - what does it spend? how does it make money? what are its assets? what is its contribution to GDP? - while the value it has for society is thought of as unmeasurable or in some way above monetary value.

But perhaps in the same way that the value of nature can be found - without degrading its "priceless" qualities - it is possible to measure the wider value of civil society to society and the economy. In many ways we're doing this already - whether through our QMF project, or through work to measure the success and results of charitable activities (see NCVO's work in this area, or NPC's). But as in other fields - this work will only become more important as a new economy takes shape.

Trevor - I'm a research officer at NCVO and have had some experience with the indices of multiple deprivation, so may be able to help with your question.

The indices of deprivation are made by combining statistics across seven areas ("domains") including income, crime, employment. These domains are weighted to produce a combined score.

The statistics used are sourced from ONS and are national statistics - so based on large scale surveys of the population and administrative data. This makes it possible for the data to remain accurate even at quite small scales - ONS includes data to the level of "Lower Super Output Areas (LSOA)" which have populations of around 1,500. It's worth remembering that the data is generally from 2005 - the latest available.

ONS has some guidance on how they might be used.

You could think about combining these indices with the the rural statistics produced by DEFRA.

Hope this is some help.

Our quarterly charity forecast survey looks at the outlook of charity leaders for the next three months.

You can see some coverage of last month’s results on our delicious page.

Now into its second year, we’re always looking for more participants, so if you’d like to take the survey and add your voice to our panel, then visit www.ncvo-vol.org.uk/takethesurvey to take the survey.

Earlier this month, NCVO released the results of the third quarterly Charity Forecast survey . This survey looks at the opinions of charity leaders – chief executives and trustees – on a variety of topics, particularly looking at finances, staffing, campaigning and other issues in their own organisations and their opinions on wider issues such as the state of the sector and its relationship with government.
For me, the most striking finding is the difference between charity leaders’ confidence in their own organisations future – in general they are positive, even in these tough times – and their confidence in the economy of the sector – they believe the sector is in for a tough time ahead. Although this difference has narrowed in the latest survey, there is still a large gap between the two.
So what is going on here? Are these charity leaders right to be so confident in their own futures but not about the sector? Well an important point to make is that this phenomenon is not unique to charities. Populus has recently run a zeitgeist poll which attempts to gauge the nation’s mood across a variety of indices, including optimism, prosperity, society and well being.
These findings show a similar pattern to the Charity Forecast survey. When asked about their optimism for the future of themselves and their own family respondents, were generally positive, giving an average response of 6-7 on the optimism index (10=positive, 0=negative). But the index for Britain in the future has an index of 4. Similar findings can be found in many polls, for example those that find people are worried about the state of the NHS but that people who use the NHS are satisfied with their own care.
I can think of two possible explanations to explain this, but there are probably many more:

• The respondents are overly pessimistic about the wider sector, and the true picture is shown by their confidence in their own organisations. Research shows that even in a recession, the majority of firms in the private sector carry on almost as normal – if this holds true for charities then leader’s confidence in their own organisations isn’t misplaced.
• Or the respondents are right about the problems in the wider sector, but the results for their own organisations are too optimistic. Either the charity leaders surveyed are wrong about their own organisations future or the survey sample doesn’t reflect the population – perhaps if you’re a Chief Executive of a charity struggling in a recession it’s less likely that you would want to complete a survey.
  As is often the case with this type of question, I think the real answer is a complex mixture of both. We’ll be tracking these trends throughout the recession and the eventual recovery so we should be able to tease out the answers over time.

The UK Civil Society Almanac – which has recently been published – might add some insight to this driver.

We looked at social enterprise activity in Civil Society, by looking at trading activity conducted by a wide range of organisations.

As well as social enterprises such as co-operatives, community interest companies, etc, we also included social enterprise activity conducted by charities and universities (amongst others).

This produced a total for social enterprise activity of £77 billion, over two-thirds of the total income of Civil Society.

More information on the Almanac can be found at www.ncvo-vol.org.uk/almanac including a free guide to how we produced the social enterprise activity figures.

Of course, general charities are just the tip of the iceberg. Lots of other organisational forms make up the sector, including:

• Registered non-general charities
• Co-operatives
• Trade Unions
• Housing associations
• Faith groups

(Estimates of the size of these groups vary wildly!)