Australian Unity’s Community and Social Value (CSV) framework, calculations and training

Australian Unity is a 180-year old member-based organisation, established to look after the health and wellbeing of its members. With a mission to help people thrive, Australian Unity offers a wide range of products and services that help improve quality of life. It operates aged care and residential facilities, invests in social infrastructure, and provides investment products to help people achieve financial wellbeing and save for retirement. Read the 2023 Impact report.

Our impact

Australian Unity’s first Our Impact report was published in 2021, and is published annually.

Australian Unity received recognition for its work in July 2022 when it was awarded the Australian Financial Review’s specialist award, the ESG Metrics Innovator award for developing a social value impact measurement framework. In July 2023, it was recognised as one of the AFR’s Sustainability Leaders again.

Australian Unity also won initiative of the year at Environmental Finance’s international IMPACT Awards 2023.

Vision and objectives

Australian Unity sought to:

• Develop a robust framework to describe how its diverse activities came together to create positive outcomes for its communities.
• Use this framework to demonstrate and value the social impact on individuals and broader communities.

We initially worked with Australian Unity in 2019 to develop a framework to define, measure and value the community and social impact it creates in its diverse businesses. We have subsequently supported Australian Unity to continue to refine the community and social value calculations, train Australian Unity staff in social value methods, and support the development of the annual impact reports.

Role we played

Working alongside Australian Unity, we:

• Engaged with leadership teams across 14 business units and 90 products and services to understand their offerings and the impact they had on members, customers, employees and the broader community.
• Developed and refined an organisation-wide ‘Community and Social Value (CSV) framework’, which articulated a set of overarching outcomes based on input from across the business.

We then used the CSV framework to measure and value the total community and social value created by the business, placing a financial value against each outcome using a social value lens:

• Established a set of principles to guide this work informed by the Social Value principles and adapted to fit the unique needs of the organisation.
• In FY21 initially measured total community and social value and then refined each following year, resulting in more rigorous approaches to valuing those outcomes.
• Supported Australian Unity in the independent audit of the judgements made in the calculations.

Trained Australian Unity staff in social value methods, and supported the development of the annual impact reports.

Read the 2023 Impact report.

The impact report allows us to clearly articulate what our role is in the communities we support, to use it to inform investment decisions and opens us up to multiple new and innovative opportunities. It will enable us to consider each decision through a community value lens and remain focused on the holistic impact of our portfolio.” Rohan Mead • Group Managing Director, Australian Unity

We introduced our Community and Social Value outcomes framework not only to help us design our products and services, but also to capture the value of our impact and make sure we’re ‘walking the talk’ and being held accountable when it comes to making a positive impact.” Darren Mann • Group Executive, Finance & Strategy and Chief Financial Officer, Australian Unity