What is social impact?
Social impact is the positive difference an organisation makes to people's lives and society. It can include improvements to physical and mental health, financial wellbeing, community connections, as well as education and employment.
Many of these benefits can be quantified and expressed as a financial value using established social value methodologies, allowing organisations to understand and compare the wider value they create beyond traditional financial metrics.
What is Olio’s social impact?
We hear countless stories of the incredible social impact Olio is having: from neighbours meeting for the first time and lifelong friendships being formed, to families putting food on the table during difficult times, volunteers finding renewed purpose and confidence, and people becoming more physically active as they walk or cycle to pick up items through Olio.
In 2025, the financial value of our social impact was £380 million+. Cumulatively, since being founded in 2015, the financial value of our social impact is £1.1bn+, although in reality our social impact is likely even more, as we’ve been deliberately conservative in our methodology.
What other impact does Olio have?
Olio also has significant economic and environmental impact, in addition to social impact. In 2025 we facilitated the free redistribution of £82m worth of items on the platform (£66m of free food and £16m of household items).
This had an environmental impact of preventing 70k tonnes of CO2e (equivalent to taking 260m car miles off the road) and 11bn litres of water from going to waste. You can read more about how our environmental impact is calculated HERE.
What are the components of Olio’s social impact?
Olio’s social impact is a combination of:
Mental health impact: reduced loneliness, reduced financial pressure due to getting things for free, sense of agency on climate change, etc.
Volunteering impact: value of time volunteered and of satisfaction, recognition and sense of purpose from volunteering
Physical health impact: walking/cycling to conduct FWH collections and pickups
Which methodology did you use to calculate your social impact?
We used MeasureUp’s methodology (here) because we love how simple, accessible and transparent their methodology is. Unlike many social value frameworks, MeasureUp is freely available for anyone to scrutinise, with all of its underlying methodology and assumptions published openly.
It's also aligned with UK Government guidance on social value measurement and is designed to help organisations estimate and evidence the real social value they create.
MeasureUp's methodology converts outcomes into a financial value using recognised wellbeing valuation techniques. In simple terms, for measuring things like improved mental health and increased physical activity, users complete surveys that measure changes in their wellbeing before and after using Olio.
Those improvements are then expressed in WELLBYs (Wellbeing-Adjusted Life Years), and each WELLBY is assigned a financial value based on established economic research.
By combining those values with data on how many people experience each outcome, it's possible to estimate the total social value created.
While no methodology can capture every positive impact, we believe this provides a robust and deliberately conservative estimate of the value Olio creates for society.
How have you been conservative in your calculations?
We’ve taken a number of steps to ensure that our social impact value is conservative, as we do not want to risk over-stating our social value:
We’ve only summed our social impact across mental health, volunteering and physical activity. While we have additional social impact like reducing loneliness, increasing community integration, etc. we’ve avoided counting these to avoid any risks of double-counting our impact
Rather than assuming all users experience the same level of impact, we segmented users into less active, moderately active and highly active cohorts. We calculated the social impact within each cohort separately and then combined those results based on the actual distribution of our user base, reducing the risk of overestimating our overall social impact
Even though survey data from less active users suggested that we deliver social impact for them, we purposely only included social impact across moderately and highly active users
For the purposes of calculating cumulative social value we only used the impact experienced by highly active users (to account for the fact that their usage may have been spaced out over many years); and we also only used one year’s annual impact value - rather than taking into account how many years each user has used Olio; in order to avoid double-counting our impact