Ask most procurement teams how they measure social value and you will get the same answer — it's in the weighting.
Some teams bolt it onto the evaluation matrix. They use it to score, a supplier wins or loses a few points, and nobody looks at it again until the next tender. That's more of a compliance step than looking for real impact.
The organisations doing this well have stopped treating social value as a scoring exercise and started treating it as a delivery obligation — tracked the way any other contracted outcome would be. Local jobs created, Aboriginal business spend, apprenticeships sustained through the life of the contract, reported against what was actually promised at tender, not what sounded good in the submission.
Some public sector clients are actually further along here than most of the private sector realises, because the reporting obligations demand it. But the same discipline works anywhere — pick two or three outcomes that matter to your organisation specifically, not a generic list lifted from a policy template, and build the contract management routine to track them properly, on a cycle, with someone accountable for the number.
The uncomfortable truth is that most social procurement commitments made at tender are never checked again. The supplier banks the points, delivers whatever is commercially easiest, and the social value line becomes a figure nobody can actually stand behind.
If you can't tell me, contract by contract, what was promised and what was delivered, you don't have a social procurement outcome. You have a social procurement intention.
There's a real difference, and it shows the moment anyone asks for evidence.