Your organisation is already committed to social value and has some idea of what it is, but making it stick can be difficult. There are a number of things that will help bring this into everyday practice.

• Agree what your social value imperatives are - what kind of value(s) you want to encourage.

• Use your organisation's communication channels to communicate about the kind of social value you want to promote.

• Apply clear and consistent assessments of social value against priorities - you could use the National TOMs (Themes, Outcomes, Measures)

• Build a register of local and social suppliers of goods and services or signpost to an existing one (eg. Supply Change, Owned By Oxford, Social Enterprise UK)
  

• Signpost potential suppliers to local opportunities to add social value (eg, OSEP, Owned by Oxford, OxLEP)

• Invite local/social suppliers to bid for contracts.

• Track the social value being generated.

• Make it easy for suppliers to deliver social value by highlighting where the needs are. Match my Project is a useful tool.

• Establish a social value policy or strategy.

Now you're motoring… You're seeing the social impact being captured and are generating great examples. Where do you go from here?

• Make social value part of a holistic decision making in all organisational contexts - e.g. Doughnut Decision Framework, Social Value Imperatives, Islington Asset Transfer.

• Introduce minimum social value standards/conditions applied to all contracts - e.g. social value imperatives, Oxford Living Wage.

• Strategically horizon scan procurement pipelines - identify gaps and work with local social economy to incubate/support new market entrants.

• Make social value core to contract specification, not just additional.

• Account for hard to measure ‘subjective’ benefits alongside those that are easy to quantify.