The ROI of Social Learning

I write this as I am formulating my thoughts.

There is a debate about how to do ROI on Social Learning and technologies or even if there should be an ROI at all.  Can it even be done?  My answer is NO.  Not in the traditional sense of the definition of ROI.  There are efforts to measure using the traditional ROI.  I have not seen anything widely successful (although I have not looked really hard either).  But what I do know is that many people have tried and have come up with some great case studies instead.

ROI is “Return On Investment.”  But the return of what?  Value.  How do you measure value?  Using a philanthropic example, I could say that an employee of mine has a certain ROI and I could calculate that fairly easily.  So what is the ROI of a baby who is born with Down’s Syndrome?  Through this little person’s life, they will probably never produce more than they consume – in terms of money.  But they have a high ROI in other ways.  How is that measured?

An extreme example, I know.  But this shows that some things in which we invest resources can have an intrinsic value (having value by its very nature) and not a hard measurable number to define its value (there is a word there that I am not finding to describe this…).  Yet we know they are valuable.

How do we prove that?  How do we prove that Social Learning is valuable?  Maybe it is in a new type of ROI, one that shows a value measurement of some other type.

I don’t have the answer, but it is certainly worth looking into more.