Earlier this week at Birmingham and Solihull Social Value Conference, we heard from Carol Glenn, Social Value Programme Manager at Solihull Metropolitan Borough Council about the council’s learnings getting Social Value delivered.

The story so far

At Solihull Council, we’ve got Social Value embedded in our procurement processes quite well. And that’s the easy part, really.

The harder part is actually getting Social Value actually delivered.

Like Birmingham City Council, we’ve tried various different ways of matching suppliers to the borough’s needs.

We’ve chosen the ad-hoc approach, where someone comes to meet me or has a request, I speak to a few suppliers, it’s all on a 1 to 1 basis and I don’t know what skills the suppliers have got who can do that work for us. So the magic only happens by accident. 

We tried sending a spreadsheet out to all of our suppliers with a list of requests. It’s a very dry way of sending out those requests. And who can be bothered to read a spreadsheet? It doesn’t show the passion that the organisations have for the requests that they’ve got coming out. 

We’ve also tried matching events. And this has a little bit more success: where we put suppliers and community groups in a room together, lock the door, and tell them they can’t leave till they’ve made a connection with somebody. It’s really not that draconian, but you get the idea of what we’re trying to do. 

All of those approaches have differing success rates and effectiveness. But all have one thing in common. They’re very time consuming and quite inefficient.

The impact of Match My Project

So what Match My Project offers is the chance to take the burden off us. Remember, it’s the contractor’s responsibility to deliver their Social Value commitments. The council is just there to support the suppliers in understanding what the needs of the borough are – and maybe making some connections.

Match My Project is easy to use. It’s easy to see what projects are available.

The community groups are putting their own projects on there, so it reflects the passion that they’ve got.

The council approves all of the registrations and the projects that go on there. So you can be sure that all of the projects meet our local priorities.

Match My Project also allows suppliers to post what they’ve committed to on their Social Value, so it works both ways. 

At Solihull we will continue our Social Value events, but the projects on Match My Project will help us focus these events to more specific areas of interest.

And the platform also isn’t just restricted to our contracted suppliers. We’re launching a Corporate Social Responsibility initiative called Step Up For Solihull, so Match My Project won’t just be around Social Value. It’ll be Corporate Social Responsibility as well, so you don’t have to be contracted with the council to put offers on there or to match with the requests that are on there.

And finally, Match My Project will help with continuous improvement. There’s the Leaderboard – and every company wants to be at the top of a leaderboard, don’t they? It fills us with the confidence that the Social Value that is being delivered is actually being delivered in the right way. If people are giving good feedback, that’s good Social Value, it’s being delivered well.

How it works in practice

As I mentioned earlier, Social Value is embedded in Solihull Council’s procurements. And if you’ve tendered with us before, you’ll know that we use Social Value Portal for our large tenders. So we ask our bidders to make commitments against the national Themes, Outcomes and Measures.

And once we award a contract, those commitments are then contractualised. They form part of the contract just like any other KPI. Match My Project in Solihull will give bidders the chance to see, when they register, the needs of Solihull. And they can base their commitments around what they’ve seen on the portal.

Now, as you know, public sector procurement can take an age. So we’re not expecting them to say ‘we will do this, this and this project’, but it will give you an idea of what community groups are on there and what types of projects are on there as well. Some authorities may ask for suppliers to do at least one Match My Project project, per year, depending on the contract value. 

Because our focus is on Corporate Social Responsibility, as well as Social Value, we won’t be stipulating a number of projects. We’ll be asking people to sign up to it as soon as we’ve got them hooked in and awarded them a contract. So it’s in your best interests and our best interests that as many people as possible register on the platform.

Measuring and validating Social Value

I mentioned that Solihull Council uses the TOMs to measure our Social Value that is delivered through our contracts. And if you don’t know what they are, they’re basically a list of things that a supplier can do to deliver Social Value. Examples include employing local people, employing people with vulnerabilities, upskilling students and, doing CV workshops, volunteering days donations. All of that sort of thing is covered by the TOMs. 

They are also exactly the type of projects that you can put on Match My Project. And when you deliver on a project on Match My Project, we can map it to the TOMs, which can contribute to your Social Value delivery figures.

Finally, Match My Project can be used as evidence of delivery. Accountability is basically what my job is – to make sure that the Social Value that’s committed is actually being delivered. And by using the TOMs, we validate the data that comes in.

And we need to check that what you say you’ve done, you’ve actually done. We need to know that you’ve visited that school or you’ve done that litter pick or you’ve done a project with that charity. And if that is showing completed on Match My Project, then that evidence is there for all to see.

Community organisations and businesses working in Solihull can sign up at https://matchmyproject.org/solihull