WELLBY & TOOLS

Understand, measure and value your impact on the people and places you work with. Credible, practical and affordable.

Getting Started

Some tools are free-to-use and we’re working on making them all free. In the meantime our training and expertise can help you avoid the common pitfalls.

Where’s WELLBY? - the big picture and WELLBY Guide.

When we started working in wellbeing and economics in 2014 we were looking for a simple guide to measuring social value, but one that was credible and robust. We couldn't find one, so eight years of work led us to creating our own. So here it is - the ‘Where’s WELLBY poster and technical ‘WELLBY value guide’ below (definitely not a value bank) that bring together many of the major things that matter to our lives. You can now see, in one big picture and technical report, how different factors like loneliness, jobs, apprenticeships, physical activity compare to each other in terms of their value to our lives.

And this is all using the new WELLBY measure as recommended by the 2021 HM Treasury Green Book. It couldn’t be more bleeding edge and relevant. What you can see is that:

• Mental health is twice as important as physical health.

• Loneliness is a big problem.

• An apprenticeship is pretty much as good for you as university.

• Free marriage guidance counselling is probably a good idea.

• Suffering from a long term health condition is a big negative

• Getting outdoors, being physically active and volunteering all help with health.

The poster is drawn by the brilliant Simon Ecob, whom you may recognise from his work for Britain’s leading toilet humour magazine, Viz Comic (well worth a pound of anyone’s money - out now £3.90).

This really is 10 years of work and a bit of a dream come true. Now you can get your hands on a PDF or real life printed poster in our shop!

A simple three step guide to measuring social impact and value

Get a better understanding of social impact and value with our step-by-step guide. We’ve distilled our work to date into three key, interdependent steps to evidence social impact and value. And updated the guide to align with the 2021 Green Book wellbeing guidance. Just don’t be tempted to miss out step 2…

This guide can help if you are:

• Setting up a project and want to prioritise areas that have the greatest social impact and value;

• Looking to estimate the potential social value of your proposal;

• Reporting the social value of your project in monetary terms - but only after robustly evidencing that impact with the State of Life / Green Book compliant methodology.

This guide cannot help if you:

• Are seeking to report social value but don’t have any data from those you are claiming to help (and don’t intend to collect any).

• Have broad output figures of things you have done and want to get them pumped up into big sounding and incredible social value figures

Bust the data collection myth with easy to use technology

• We’ve collected survey data from young people at risk of homelessness, offenders doing community service and over 8,000 survey responses in villages in Tanzania, Rwanda and Zimbabwe. We can help you bust the myths on data collection - good data is possible, practical and powerful - don’t listen to those who say it isn’t.

• We ensure you measure what you intend to measure and avoid common data pitfalls that can leave you with misleading results (see our FAQs).

• We can help you develop an outcomes framework from pre-validated UK data sets as recommended by the 2021 Treasury Guidance on wellbeing using the State of Life Outcomes Bank (see below).

• We advise on survey design and tailor the survey for your organisation; we can also do the analysis, translate your results into valuable insights, and create a compelling slide deck or report. See our work for examples.