EY delivers outcomes measurement and valuation as part of its Climate Change and Sustainability Services.
Through our work here in Aotearoa New Zealand, EY and EY Tahi – a member firm that works to accelerate Māori success – understand that involving stakeholders is especially important when it comes to developing, implementing and assessing the performance of programmes targeting outcomes for Māori.
We believe that involving stakeholders leads to the right design and implementation of social programmes, and also enables real evaluation of the effectiveness of those programmes.
Māori have a broad and integrated sense of wellbeing that needs to be understood when identifying the outcomes a programme has delivered. Beyond the social, economic and environmental benefits, evaluators need to build relationships with Māori to develop a strong understanding of the cultural and spiritual elements of Māori life, as well as the priority Māori place on collective benefits for their whānau, hapū and iwi (family and tribal/kinship groups) over individual gains.
Like many other indigenous groups around the world, Māori have been extensively studied and the results filtered through a foreign lens and paradigm. While social value measurement methodologies represent a strong departure from that imperialistic approach, to really deliver the benefit of social impact evaluation, evaluators need to be aware of this historical context and its impact on the willingness of Māori participants to engage with the programme and its evaluation. There could be a degree of suspicion associated with any line of evaluation questioning, requiring time to build relationships and trust before insights are given.
Involving and empowering Māori whānau and communities to lead the design, creation and development of programmes that target them, as well as the evaluation of those programmes, is our preferred approach.
Speaking more broadly, involving stakeholders in this way also helps with achieving the other principles of social value – it helps with identifying the outcomes that matter most to the specific set of participants, being able to spot any unintended outcomes, and understanding the value that was generated.
Through engaging stakeholders in carefully designed qualitative research as part of programme evaluation, EY has identified the following benefits of stakeholder engagement for programme investors, deliverers, users and evaluators¹:
Benefits of involving stakeholders in evaluating impact:
¹From ‘Why the social can’t be taken out of Social Impact measurement’ in the 9th edition of Let’s Talk: Sustainability, EY Oceania’s quarterly publication of the latest in sustainability insights and points of view. Available at http://www.ey.com/au/sustainability