TLDR. Sometimes, if you label it. A forecast projects what an existing set of valuations predicts your outputs are worth. An evaluative study measures what your own stakeholders reported. Both are legitimate; only one is evidence about your organization. Put the label in the same sentence as the number, and most funders will take it. Present a forecast as measured outcomes and you will eventually be caught, because the follow-up question is always which clients you asked.
The difference, in one paragraph each
A forecast SROI takes your output counts, applies financial proxies and adjustment assumptions borrowed from somebody else’s completed study, and returns an estimated ratio. Nobody surveyed your clients. The model assumes the same pattern of change happened at your organization as happened at the organization the proxies came from.
An evaluative SROI starts with your stakeholders. You ask your clients, donors and agency partners what changed, how much, how long it lasted, how much of it was down to you and how much would have happened anyway. Then you value those reported changes. It takes months, costs money, and produces a defensible claim about your organization specifically.
The forecast tells you what a model predicts. The evaluative study tells you what people said. Every difficulty in this area comes from confusing the two.
Why forecasts exist at all
Not as a shortcut invented by tool builders. New Philanthropy Capital observed the trend years ago and named its cause directly: forecast SROIs are becoming more common as a result of the lack of outcomes data.
The sector does not have the outcome data. Small charities cannot fund the collection of it, funders keep asking for monetized impact anyway, and forecasting is what filled the gap.
That makes a forecast an honest response to a real constraint. It does not make it evidence.
What a forecast cannot do
Four things, and they are worth knowing before a funder finds them for you.
It cannot tell you what your clients experienced. It applies another organization’s measured pattern to your counts.
It cannot survive an audit. There is no primary data underneath it about your beneficiaries.
It cannot be compared to another organization’s ratio, forecast or evaluative. Ratios are not comparable between organizations, and a forecast inherits that limitation along with everything else.
It cannot substitute for outcome reporting. If a funder has asked what changed for the people you served, a forecast does not answer the question they asked.
The sentence to use
Do not paraphrase this. Fill it in and paste it.
[Organization] forecasts $X of social value for every $1 invested in [year]. This is a forecast estimate produced with the Furniture Bank Network SROI Forecast Calculator, using outcome valuations from Furniture Bank Toronto’s most recent published SROI analysis and following Social Value International principles. It is not an evaluative SROI study of [organization].
Four lines. It costs you nothing, and it is the difference between a funder treating you as careful and a funder treating you as promotional.
If a funder reads that and still wants the number, you are fine. If they read it and say they need measured outcomes, they have told you something useful and you have not damaged the relationship finding out.
The limits, including ours
The calculator on this site produces a forecast. It uses Furniture Bank Toronto’s proxies, applied to counts you enter, and it does not know anything about your clients.
We think that is worth having. It is also the weaker of the two methods, and it exists because the stronger one is out of reach for most organizations in this sector, including some of the ones we support.
There is a further limit on the proxies themselves that applies to every forecasting tool, not only this one. Financial proxies come from libraries, and the largest of those libraries carries a self-disclaimer worth reading in full: the Global Value Exchange states that its data “is freely available for use; however, it has not undergone any quality assurance processes.”
Our proxies come from our own studies rather than from that database. The general point stands anyway. Somebody chose every dollar figure inside any social value calculation, and a tool that will not tell you who made those choices is asking for trust it has not earned. If you are using this calculator and need to see the proxy set behind it, ask us and we will send it.
What to do when a funder pushes back
Three responses, depending on what they actually asked for.
If they want to understand your model, the forecast is the right artifact. Send it with the methodology and the label.
If they want evidence of outcomes, send output counts and any survey data you hold, and say plainly that you have not run an evaluative study. A clear no is worth more than a dressed-up forecast.
If they are requiring monetized impact as a condition of funding, ask whether they will fund the study. Some will. The request is reasonable, and asking it moves the cost of their evidence standard onto their budget rather than yours.
The detailed version, for those who want to understand exactly how this works
An evaluative SROI runs through six formal stages, and knowing them tells you exactly what a forecast skipped.
- Establishing scope and identifying stakeholders
- Mapping outcomes through a theory of change
- Evidencing outcomes and assigning financial proxies
- Establishing impact by adjusting for deadweight, attribution, displacement and drop-off
- Calculating the ratio and running sensitivity analysis
- Reporting, using and embedding the results
A forecast performs stage five with borrowed material from stages three and four, and skips one, two and six entirely.
Stage six is the one that matters most and gets neglected most. Academic reviews of the method are consistent on this: an SROI study that produces a ratio and changes no decision has bought legitimacy rather than learning. If you do commission a full study, budget for the embedding, not just the report.
Note also that the sector does price some things transparently and not others. Social Value International publishes its exam and report assurance fees. Nobody publishes what a study costs. That asymmetry is worth keeping in mind when a consultant quotes you.
What we still do not know
There is no published figure for what an evaluative SROI study costs a small charity. The most cited funder guide on the method declines to estimate it and lists the cost drivers instead: scope, staff skill, internal versus external delivery, data availability, timescale and audience.
We have not published what our own most recent analysis cost either. That is a gap on our side, not just the sector’s.
One next step
If you have your output counts for a full twelve-month period, run the forecast and copy the label sentence with it: SROI Forecast Calculator.
References
- Heady, L. and Keen, S. (September 2010). “SROI for funders,” New Philanthropy Capital.
- Global Value Exchange. globalvaluexchange.org
- HACT. UK Social Value Bank. hact.org.uk
- HACT. Wellbeing values v7. hact.org.uk
- Department for Culture, Media and Sport (11 July 2025). “Rapid evidence assessment of valuation methods for civil society.” gov.uk
- Maier, F., Schober, C., Simsa, R. and Millner, R. (2015). “SROI as a Method for Evaluation Research,” VOLUNTAS 26(5): 1805 to 1830. doi.org/10.1007/s11266-014-9490-x
