Celebrating 13 years of impact as a social enterprise accreditation authority

Lucy Findlay at launch of the Social Enterprise Mark in 2010

It’s hard to believe that today marks 13 years since we launched the Social Enterprise Mark. We are now officially a teenager!

After a challenging few years, where we have, amongst other things, faced capacity issues, we are excited to move into this new phase of growth to further develop the business, including updating our systems and expanding our assessment capacity in order  to help us reach out to more businesses globally, helping them drive their ethical and sustainable business practice and standards.

Consistently for the last 13 years, we have been committed to raising the standards of, as well as building the capabilities of, social enterprises as competitive, sustainable businesses dedicated to maximising social impact, and also broadening the reach, awareness, understanding and adoption of the social enterprise business model.

Even with the immense challenges thrown at us all over the past few years, we have been delighted to see our international network of accredited social enterprises continue to grow, as more and more organisations seek to prove their social enterprise credentials. In 2021/22, the total number of organisations holding one of our accreditations increased by 10%.

With a larger network comes increased opportunities to create impact, and to mark our anniversary, we are excited to share our 2021/22 impact report, which summarises the impact we created during 2021/22 in our role as an advocate for the social enterprise sector.

In creating this report, we used data from our 2022 stakeholder survey, which consulted our Mark holders and wider stakeholders on the development of our accreditation services, to ensure our services continue to address the evolving needs of the growing social enterprise sector.

As a customer-focused organisation, we were delighted to see increases in key indicators of customer satisfaction, including 100% of Mark holder respondents agreeing that our social enterprise accreditations “prove their commitment to contributing towards the creation of a stronger and fairer economy” and “help them communicate the significance of being an accredited social enterprise to our employees, partners and other stakeholders”.

It was also pleasing to see that over 95% of respondents agreed we play an important role as an advocate and representative for the social enterprise sector. As this is one of our core values, it is really important to us that we are living up to this (and our other values).

A key area we focused on in the last year was our networking function – we have successfully developed several networks to better support our diverse community of Mark holders and supporters, including an international women’s leadership network and our growing HEI network, as well as connecting and expanding our Ambassadors,. We were excited to establish a new partnership with Cambio House for Change to host not one, but two national conferences, which focused on how social enterprise can be better embedded into higher education.

We also further developed our existing partnership with Social Impact Ireland to accredit and raise the visibility of new and existing social enterprises in Ireland. Attending the official launch of the Social Enterprise Mark Ireland in Dublin in November was one of my highlights of 2022. As I mentioned in my previous blog, it was great to meet the first cohort of eight inspirational social enterprises that have been supported by Social Impact Ireland to achieve the Social Enterprise Mark.

We see 2023 as a key transitional year as we strengthen our Board, team, systems and processes to better equip us to reach the next phase in our journey, growing our gravitas, ethics, values and maturity.