Here at Bean, we spend our time evaluating how interventions, funding and activities make a difference. Mostly that’s evaluating the extent and depth of difference to how communities, organisations and people feel and behave. Every industry falls back on jargon, and wow, straddling the research and social sustainability worlds over the last 30 years, I seem to be in two industries with more than most.
Mixed methods approach anyone? Statistical significance? Summative evaluation? Causality? Theory of Change? SROI? CBA? SDGs? Epidemiological Modelling? PPN 06/20? You get the idea.
But, across all those words and jargon, there is one word that fires me up most and makes me want to campaign to ban its usage in all reports. At Bean, we stopped using it a couple of years ago, but after reading through piles of social value, SROI and impact reports recently, I was bowled over by its still extensive use. One report used it so much that I completely forgot who they were referring to and had to look up the organisation in question. It’s become a go-to, catch-all summary for people, communities, and organisations an intervention is intending to engage.
Please, people, let’s ban the ‘beneficiary’ word in evaluation and impact assessment!
It is lazy, it misrepresents impact, and it only tells us half the story.
Strictly speaking (and those who know me know I love a definition), it is defined as a person who derives advantage from something. Great for financial products, but to be a beneficiary of a savings pot or pension is very different from a person who experiences a social intervention and feels and does something different as a result. Overall, it’s too simplistic for social change.
Any true assessment evaluates intended and unintended, positive, and negative takeaways. And beneficiaries can be communities, they can be organisations, or they can be people. People lie at the heart of all those. People not beneficiaries. And the latter really stops us from understanding the who – Who are these people? What worked best for whom and why? Who among those is it working for better? What are their characteristics that dictates a more effective intervention? Why? It also implies a one-way benefit. Working with charities and funders, we are deeply aware of the underlying funding power dynamics that are at play and spend a lot of time making sure that evaluation approaches are equitable and really understood by all. And we know so many organisations that invest time and effort to address that and develop true mutually beneficial partnerships. But why, then, after all that effort, do we fall back on lazy terminology in research and reporting?
So what should we use in its place? End user? (please no) Stakeholder? (too catch-all) Participant? (shows an active element of taking part, but I’m not sure it’s very human).
Personally, I like ‘People’. People, older people, people in the local community in which we operate, young people aged 16-18 not in employment, education or training, or displaced people. And if we’re talking about social value, that’s where the real value really is.
After all, people are at the heart of our communities, organisations and social change.
For people.
It keeps us grounded on what this is all about.
I’d love to hear your thoughts. What word would you like to see in the banned use box?
#BantheWordBeneficiary
