We’ve just passed a milestone eighteen months of operating Cumbria Exchange & we’re excited to have the results from our first review!
This has allowed us to identify the Social Value achieved, which activities offer the most value and prioritise our efforts going forwards into 2020.
Social Value can be defined as activities which positively contribute to the long-term wellbeing and resilience of individuals, communities and society.
The Cumbria Exchange Social Value Report
From the Social Value report we can see that Cumbria Exchange has:
- Achieved a Social Value Add of £198,405 countywide
- Matched requests between 66 community organisations (most of whom have had multiple matches) and 65 businesses (most of whom have supported multiple matches)
- Responded to significant demand from community organisations: 285 requests have been received and promoted.
- Offered the most social value through access to training & professional expertise
So……our priorities for Year 2 :
We’ll continue to focus on getting the word out about Cumbria Exchange – you can help us with this through sharing our social media posts & our e-newsletters. If you don’t have the time to keep checking our website our e-newsletters are the easiest way to keep up with new website content and what’s going on. You can sign up easily here 
We want to increase the number of professionals signed up as “experteers” (skills based volunteers) offering skills/knowledge such as business planning, finance, legal, IT, design, marketing/comms, sales etc.
We’re developing a database which we can use to proactively match individuals with specific community organisations. This is a fantastic way to give back but can also contribute to personal and career development. Get in touch with me if you’d like to offer your skills to some wonderful local charities, social enterprises and other community organisations.
We want to get even more businesses involved – of all types and sizes!
We can talk to you about how your business can be involved and deliver measurable positive social impact in your local community. We use a version of a national framework launched in 2017 which provides a minimum & consistent reporting standard for social value.
Thank You!
Finally we’d just like to say an enormous thank you to everyone who has been involved to date; whether as website contributors – community organisations looking for support and businesses responding to requests and making offers – social media followers & sharers & individuals who have been amazing ambassadors for us.
Cumbria Exchange is only as good as the people who get involved :)