TLDR. No, and not because your data is weak. Ratios are not comparable between organizations, and every standards body that has studied the question says so, including the UK government. When five teams were handed one identical case study, they produced ratios ranging from $1.16 to $6.60. If you want to compare yourself to a peer, compare households furnished, tonnes diverted and items delivered. Those hold up. The ratio does not.
You have a number. Somewhere in a peer’s annual report there is a bigger one, and you want to know whether that means they run a better furniture bank than you do.
It does not mean that. It probably does not mean anything about them at all, and the reason is worth ten minutes of your time, because it will also change how you present your own figure.
How the ratio actually gets built
A social return on investment ratio is a division. Total monetized social value on top, total inputs on the bottom.
The inputs are close to factual. Your operating expenses, the value of the donations you receipted, the replacement cost of volunteer labour.
The top of the fraction is where the judgment lives. Somebody decided which outcomes to count, how to know whether they happened, what dollar figure stands in for each one, how much of the change would have occurred anyway, how much other organizations contributed, and how fast the effect fades.
Every one of those six decisions is a choice, and a defensible analyst could make each of them differently. Multiply six sets of defensible choices together and you do not get one number. You get a range.
What happened when five teams got the same case
In 2014, Kate Cooney and Kristen Lynch-Cerullo published an exercise in the Nonprofit Policy Forum. Five teams of MBA students at the Yale School of Management were given an identical case study of a single workforce development organization and asked to run an SROI analysis.
They produced $3.69, $6.07, $1.39 and $1.16. The fifth team split its analysis by client group and reported $6.60 for one group, $6.30 for another and $0.04 for a third.
Same organization. Same data. Same instructions. Ratios spread across two orders of magnitude.
The authors’ own summary of the method is the sentence to remember: the SROI figure “connotes a precision that masks the fragility of its calculation.”
It is not just inexperience
The obvious objection is that these were students. The literature closes that door.
In 2021, Jacob Ruff published a study in Qualitative Research in Accounting and Management examining what happens when different impact measurement tools are applied to the same organization. The tools used were theory of change, social return on investment and a dashboard. Six reports drawn from the same underlying data reached different conclusions about the organization’s impact, and the differences tracked the tool rather than the data.
A 2024 paper in the Journal of Business Ethics summarizing that work puts the direction plainly. Applying theory of change produced a highly favourable assessment of the same organization. Applying SROI produced an assessment that ranged from neutral to highly unfavourable.
The method you pick determines the answer you get, before anyone touches your data.
The government version
In July 2025, the UK Department for Culture, Media and Sport published a rapid evidence assessment of valuation methods for civil society, reviewing 56 studies. Twenty-three of them used SROI.
Its finding on comparison is one sentence: “SROI is more stakeholder-driven, making cross-project comparisons challenging.”
New Philanthropy Capital reached the same conclusion fifteen years earlier and stated it more bluntly. NPC reported that it had never encountered an SROI analysis accurate enough to support comparison between charities.
One program, three ratios
If you want the clearest single example of what this means in practice, look outside furniture reuse.
Pathways to Education is a Canadian program that has been analysed repeatedly. Boston Consulting Group valued it at 24:1. Charity Intelligence Canada arrived at roughly 3:1. The Government of Canada arrived at roughly 1.4:1.
One program. Three credible analysts. A seventeen-fold spread between the highest and lowest published figure.
The limits, including ours
This applies to Furniture Bank Toronto, and it disqualifies our own numbers from the comparison you might want to make.
Our published ratios read $11.77 in 2017, $12.11 in 2019, $5.76 in 2023, $6.49 in 2024 and $6.38 in 2025. The number fell by roughly half between 2019 and 2023.
Nothing about the operation halved in that period. The methodology tightened. A ratio that moves that much while the work stays broadly the same is telling you about the method, not about the charity. We have not published the specific methodological changes between those two analyses, and we would rather say so than let the drop be read as a decline in performance.
One more limit worth naming, because it gets misread constantly. Charity Intelligence Canada’s profile of Furniture Bank reports our 2023 figures, and its own disclaimer says the results it highlights “may not be a complete representation of Furniture Bank’s results and impact.” That is a restatement of what we told them. It is not an independent validation of our method, and we would rather say so than let a reader assume otherwise.
So what can you compare
Absolute outputs, with the definitions attached. These are countable, auditable and mean the same thing in Winnipeg as they do in Atlanta, provided you write down what you counted.
- Households furnished in a twelve-month period
- Individuals in those households, counted separately from households
- Items delivered
- Tonnes of furniture diverted
- Referrals received, and from how many partner agencies
- Volunteer hours contributed
Compare those against a peer and you are having a real conversation. Compare ratios and you are comparing two analysts’ judgment calls while believing you are comparing two charities.
Where comparison genuinely works for SROI is against yourself, over time, using the same method each year. That is the use case the Johnson Center for Philanthropy endorses, and it is the reason a ratio is worth producing at all.
The detailed version, for those who want to understand exactly how this works
There is a mechanical reason the ratio misleads that has nothing to do with proxy selection, and it catches funders more than practitioners.
A ratio is value divided by inputs. Two organizations delivering identical value per household will produce different ratios if their budgets differ, because the denominator moves. A larger organization carrying warehouse leases, fleet costs and a finance function has a bigger denominator than a volunteer-run operation working out of a donated bay.
The volunteer-run operation will post the higher ratio. It is not doing better work. It has fewer costs on the bottom of the fraction, and some of those costs are the things that make service reliable.
This is why ratio comparison quietly penalizes exactly the organizations that have invested in capacity, and why the honest reading of a low ratio at a well-run charity is often the opposite of the obvious one.
What we still do not know
Nobody has published a shared method that would make furniture bank ratios comparable. Building one would take a group of organizations agreeing on scope, proxy set, adjustment assumptions and time horizon before any of them ran a number.
That has not been attempted in this sector. It is the most useful unfunded project we are aware of, and we would rather say that than imply the problem is solved.
One next step
If you have produced a forecast ratio and a funder has asked how you compare to a peer, send them this page and offer them your output figures instead. If you want to run your own forecast, the calculator is here: SROI Forecast Calculator.
References
- Cooney, K. and Lynch-Cerullo, K. (2014). Nonprofit Policy Forum 5(2): 367 to 393. doi.org/10.1515/npf-2014-0017
- Department for Culture, Media and Sport (11 July 2025). “Rapid evidence assessment of valuation methods for civil society.” gov.uk
- Ruff, J. (2021). “How impact measurement devices act,” Qualitative Research in Accounting and Management 18(3): 332 to 360. Emerald
- Heady, L. and Keen, S. (September 2010). “SROI for funders,” New Philanthropy Capital.
- Thomson, G. (3 January 2024). “Dare to Compare: The charity sector’s new problem,” Charity Intelligence Canada. charityintelligence.ca
- Charity Intelligence Canada. Furniture Bank profile. charityintelligence.ca
- Furniture Bank. Impact measurement. furniturebank.org
- Furniture Bank. SiMPACT SROI study. furniturebank.org
