The sin and the point of trying to measure the unmeasurable — the case against impact evaluation, and what to do anyway

For six days, this series answered the question 'how do you measure it?' — the SROI ratio, the logic model, the Social Impact Bond, the dormant-deposit money trail, the cost evaluation itself imposes. One question, though, has been deliberately set aside until now: should this be measured at all? The values an urban farm or community garden produces — eased isolation, the trust that grows between participants, the relationship that forms simply because two people happened to be there at the same time — might lose something essential the instant they are forced into the shape of an indicator. Today confronts that suspicion directly.

To answer it, today examines two critiques in turn. One concerns the limits built into the act of measuring itself — that values resisting quantification inevitably fall through the cracks of any indicator. The other concerns the danger of measurement being abused — the critique of 'impact washing,' exaggerating or oversimplifying results to win funding. Having faced both squarely, the article sets out why measurement is still worth doing, and closes with a full summary of the seven days.

As day two showed, SROI converts social value into a single ratio by substituting a 'financial proxy' for each outcome. Criticism of that substitution itself comes not just from outside the practice but from scholars who study the method directly. A 2013 paper in Voluntary Sector Review argued SROI is 'reductionist,' and that converting qualitative social outcomes into a monetary value is 'neither possible nor desirable.' Economist Daniel Fujiwara likewise argued, in 2015, that SROI carries both a 'normative problem' — how to aggregate effects across different people into one number — and a 'methodological problem' — how to value an outcome that has no market price to begin with.