Beyond Buzzwords: What PR Can Learn About Real Social Impact
If you've ever sat in a boardroom or brainstormed a campaign with the words "social impact" scribbled on the whiteboard, you're not alone. But ask three people what that phrase means—and you'll get four different answers. A new international study highlights this conceptual muddle, and more importantly, offers a fresh way forward for communications professionals who want their work to matter.
“Social value is not just what we create, but how we co-create it—with stakeholders, not for them.”
This quote, paraphrased from the report Social Impact and Social Value in Public Relations/Communication, captures a crucial insight. Conducted across Ecuador, Lithuania, Türkiye, and Uruguay, the research reveals how much our profession still struggles to define and deliver meaningful impact.
Five Key Insights for PR and Comms Professionals
We need more precise definitions: Many professionals use “social impact” and “social value” interchangeably, but they aren’t the same. Impact is the change we cause. Value is how those changes are perceived.
The relational approach offers a roadmap: Social impact isn’t something done to people. It’s something shaped with them. This means co-design, community engagement, and real accountability.
Social value remains vague: The dominant definition was “maximising the common good”, a noble aim, but too abstract to guide decision-making. Far fewer saw social value as emerging from stakeholder collaboration.
Context matters deeply: Uruguay’s post-dictatorship embrace of communication for social justice differs greatly from Türkiye’s corporate philanthropy traditions. Ethics, politics, and professional history shape how we define impact.
We're not there yet: Most professionals say they care about impact and value—but stakeholder involvement, measurement, and evaluation remain underdeveloped in practice.
Rethinking Our Role as Change Agents
At Pluri, we often discuss impact fluency… that is, the ability not only to measure impact but also to understand its contours, to speak the language of outcomes and value without resorting to vague promises or feel-good optics. This study validates our view: unless PR/Comms embraces a relational mindset, our talk of impact risks becoming performative.
Interestingly, only 3.7% of respondents explicitly mentioned collaboration with stakeholders when defining social impact. That’s alarming. If we’re not engaging stakeholders in determining what counts as value, we’re not doing our jobs.
Moreover, while many participants saw social value as about “the greater good,” few could articulate how it’s negotiated or experienced. That’s a missed opportunity, because value is dynamic. It’s not static, and it’s undoubtedly not decided in isolation.
So, Where Do We Go From Here?
This paper offers more than a critique—it gives us tools. The relational approach to impact and the stakeholder-centric typology of social value are both practical starting points for understanding social value. They demand that we:
Ask “who defines value?” before jumping into solutions
Treat stakeholders as co-creators, not audiences
Build in measurement and reflection as non-negotiables
Recognise that context matters—and so do ethics
For PR and comms professionals who want to lead with integrity, this is a wake-up call. Let’s stop chasing buzzwords and start doing the hard, worthwhile work of listening, learning, and leading alongside communities.
Read the full paper: “Social Impact and Social Value in Public Relations/Communication: An International Analysis for a Conceptual Framework” Available on SSRN here
And if you'd like help building a framework to define, measure, and communicate your organisation’s real social impact, get in touch with us at Pluri.
