Nuneaton Signs is a not-for-profit organisation with Social Value at its heart. It was created in 1982 by the local authority to meet two needs simultaneously - creating high quality road signs, and providing meaningful employment to people with disabilities.

While Social Value has always been a driver at Nuneaton Signs, growing interest from its customer base has created a need to robustly measure and analyse the Social Value being created.

To this end, Nuneaton Signs joined Social Value Portal, using the Social Value TOM System™ to track and report successes while understanding how to take its Social Value further.

Our customer base has been asking us for the next stage of our story. They say our ethos is fantastic but there’s been a push as to what’s the next chapter, what’s the next part of the journey because they’ve wanted to get involved with it. So the natural progression for us has been taking on the Social Value part and really embracing it and analysing everything that we do.

Commercial Director at Nuneaton Signs

Getting into the supply chain

Before working with Social Value Portal, Nuneaton Signs didn’t take a monetary approach to measuring its Social Value. Instead, it measured the number of people with a disability that the company employed and the cost to the local authority if these people were unable to find suitable employment. While these were useful measures, they didn’t reflect the full Social Value the business generated.  

Using the TOM System enabled Nuneaton Signs to track the positive outcomes resulting from customer spend, such as additional opportunities created in the workplace through apprenticeships and work placements, rather than the financial outcome of that spend. The TOM System can also be understood by everyone in the business, which hires individuals from a variety of backgrounds, including those that have been long-term unemployed, single mothers, and those with disabilities.  

Business improvement is another area of opportunity being unlocked by the TOM System. The team can now assess every stage of each process, finding opportunities to increase their Social Value creation.

This has meant looking far more closely at the business's supply chain. Nuneaton Signs had traditionally looked at its supply chain in terms of capability and capacity; as a Social Value Portal member, the organisation places a greater emphasis on whether a supplier is giving the best value.    

We have a new buyer and part of their role is to ask our supply chain: ‘How are you producing Social Value, what is its format and how are you measuring it?' Because we don’t want fictitious figures. This is very important to us. It’s very, very close to our heart. And we want to make sure that it’s been taken seriously at every stage of the sign-making process.

Commercial Director at Nuneaton Signs

Aspirations and growth

Creating an initial Social Value benchmark has allowed the team to quantify their current level of Social Value maturity and set targets moving forward. As Nuneaton Signs expands its operations, it will be extremely important to use the right Measures to track its Social Value achievements.  

The team has set out some bold ambitions, including:

• Generating £3 million of Social Value over the next year
• Creating six new apprentice positions
• Having 80% of staff participate in annual learning on key subjects
• Planting 3,000 trees
• Ensuring that 80% of people empowered by the firm’s social education initiatives will be from under-represented groups

All of the items on our pledge are measurable within the TOM System. Our ethos has always been at the very heart of everything that we do, and every sign that a customer decides to buy from us genuinely helps us change lives. Being able to measure our Social Value is incredibly important to us, as business is more than just the bottom line. We want to do business for good, and measuring what we are doing allows us to set goals and look at different aspects of the business going forward.

Commercial Director at Nuneaton Signs