Tania Mason worries that the scale and ambitions of civil society are no match for the mighty markets that are driving unprecedented consumption of our planet's resources.

Recently the UK homelessness charity, Crisis, announced it is using SROI analysis to publicise and put a financial value on the benefits of its ‘Skylight’ schemes. While Crisis should be applauded for this effort — not enough big charities measure their results, and even fewer share the results and the details of their attempts to do this — in this post I want to sanction caution about the use of social return on investment (SROI) as a sole means of capturing charitable impact.