Hey all,
Interested in what metrics, financial or otherwise cooperatives in CoTech (or outside) track.
As most have agency type structures, interested to know what kind of shape they have and what ones that people really haven’t found at all useful.
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Hi, as any other business we track the treasury information, the income previsions, the liquidity previsions etc. Since these are very much standard overall I wanted to mention some alternative social metrics that we use in Catalonia. (This might be a theme I might repeat in the future, sorry for the future)
The cooperatives here voluntarily fill up a diagnostic tool which is call Balanç Social, the social balance sheet. It evaluates six major themes: economic function and profit distribution policy; the gender perspective; equity and internal democracy; environmental sustainability; social commitment and cooperation; and the quality of labor relations. Afterwards the evaluations are published online for transparency. It has started here but now the methodology is being applied also in other parts of Spain.
Although it is voluntary, the interesting thing is that some local governments have adopted it as an indicator in their funding evaluations. For example the social economy subsidies of the progressive Barcelona municipality, also considers whether a cooperative has done the social balance sheet or any other equivalent tool in their evaluation of the funding.
For you to take a look I leave here google translated page of the tool https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=ca&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fmercatsocial.xes.cat%2Fca%2Feines%2Fbalancsocial%2F
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Thanks very much for these. Very interesting and we could certainly use some of them.
I was thinking more of more traditional performance indicators, but open to these too.
Hi,
You might find this article helpful:
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Thanks Chris, that was a good little read. 
Most welcome Josef,
Let me know if you need more information as this is also something I am looking into at he moment and I’m attempting to collect some stats.
Best regards
Chris
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Thanks for the contribution Chris. These will be very useful when we grow a little more and have to account more carefully for mission drift.
I guess I’m interested that no one thus far as volunteered financial metrics. What do people use concretely to make sure their cooperatives are sustainable?
I guess Financial metrics are of course important for sustainability, otherwise without any income or profits to share, there is no co-operative 
I cant answer your question directly, but I found another resource which might be of use.
Best of luck.
Chris
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Hello!
At Fiqus, we are very interested in this subject.
In our cooperative we have economic, financial and customer metrics. But we are also working on developing a tool to measure cooperative actions.
In theory, cooperatives should base their actions on 7 principles, defined as the “seven cooperative principles”
Throughout the year, we carry out actions from our organization and assign them to one or more principles. Then, at the end of the year we carry out a balance, known as “social balance”. In this way we measure the impact of our actions, guided by cooperative principles, to give them as much importance as economic metrics.
The tool we are working on will be free software and will allow us to monitor our cooperative actions in order to measure their impact. As soon as we launch it we will share it.
All the best,
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Yes, please do feel free to send me more info.
I’m on the board of https://development.coop and one of the potential offering we’re exploring is offering co-ops a sort of “holistic audit” that would cover stuff like this.
What’s your role at Midcounties?
You made me think of this Moodlight tool used by the Camplight (/me waves at @Naska) co-op:
https://app.moodlight.team/plot/2Rr9L4?utm_source=medium&utm_medium=blog&utm_campaign=dial
Here’s a blog post about it:
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Yes! Camplight’s moodlight tool is a good example of non-economic or financial metrics measurements.
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Webarchitects has a requirement in our rules (pdf) to produce annual social accounts (see section 7, the last page) however we have never had enough resources to actually do this — we have always been too busy trying to stay afloat… one day we might hopefully have the capacity to start doing this…
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Last call for this! We are going to probably start pulling these together into a dashboard.
As I said above, still very interested in financial stability metrics that people pay attention to. But will take the other things people have said on board.
Guys, anyone of you track ecological metrics in your coop? (Like carbon footprint, energy use, waste production, rate of recycled materials used, air quality, etc.)
I was wondering if any coop has been implementing ecological accounting.
They’re not a co-op, but Sanctuary Computer have done a pretty comprehensive ecological audit here: https://negative.sanctuary.computer/
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