NEW RESEARCH | How small businesses can demonstrate the benefits of nature-based interventions

For small businesses offering nature-based interventions (NBI), legitimacy is a challenge. But a tool like Social Return on Investment (SROI) is useful for demonstrating the benefits of interventions, according to recent research.

Small companies developing nature-based interventions – such as animal-assisted therapies or visits to forests and fields – often face the challenge of convincing the municipalities and regions that will pay for the services of the value they deliver. According to Professor Jeaneth Johansson, SROI can be a useful tool. She is one of the researchers in the research project “Tur i Skogen – entreprenörers naturbaserade och sociala innovationer” at Luleå University of Technology.

It is important to use well-known and proven measures that health and social care providers are used to. This creates a common language that health care funders understand. But this is not enough.

– Traditional metrics are key for customers to understand the value delivered, but they do not provide the full picture. That is why complementary metrics are needed, such as SROI. And the metrics should also be tailored to the NBI services that companies offer. This will create a more coherent picture of the benefits of the services, says Jeaneth Johansson.

Short projects a challenge for legitimacy

One challenge for the small businesses that offer NBI services is that the services are currently provided in project form. This often means short projects without follow-up over time. This makes it difficult to demonstrate the long-term economic and social return on the investment made in individuals participating in nature-based interventions.

– A major challenge is that projects are often short-term. Companies still need to create legitimacy for their NBI services, and SROI is a good tool for this.

– For companies to get long-term funding through health and social care budgets, as well as greater impact, they need to demonstrate the monetary and softer values they create. And in the latter case, SROI can help quantify it, says Jeaneth Johansson.

Use SROI in the right way

While SROI can be a powerful tool, she raises a warning finger.

– In SROI, you often combine the values into one final figure. In the case of NBI services, we have seen that this does not work so well, says Jeaneth Johansson.

Instead, companies should report on soft values separately, and develop new values for different audiences at different levels.

– This is necessary because different stakeholders need to understand the underlying values. Just getting a “final figure” is not good. To understand the whole, the different stakeholders need the values that are most relevant to them. The values must also be comparable to be meaningful.

– We are currently working on developing different case descriptions to identify and describe different values that can be used in an SROI analysis. By the fall, we expect to be able to disseminate those results, says Jeaneth Johansson.

Contact: jeaneth.johansson@ltu.se

The article is published in collaboration with the research project “Tur i skogen – entreprenörers naturbaserade och sociala innovationer” at Luleå University of Technology.