Social Audit: 4 Major Features and Benefits of Social Audit!

Social audit is a systematic study and evaluation of an organisation’s social performance.

It is concerned with the possible influence on the social quality of life instead of the economic quality of life. Social audit leads to a report on the social performance of a business unit.

Features of Social Audit:

The features of Social audit are discussed below:

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(i) The areas for social audit include any activity which has a significant social impact, such as activities affecting environmental quality, consumerism, opportunities for women and other disadvantaged people in society and similar others.

(ii) Normally, the social audit is that it can determine only what an organisation is doing in social areas, not the amount of social good that results from these activities. It is a process audit rather than audit for results.

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(iii) Auditing social performance is very difficult because most of the results of social activities occur beyond the companies limit.

(iv) Both quantitative and qualitative data are essential for social audit to evaluate the organisations social performance.

Benefits of Social Audit:

The benefits of the social audit are as follows:

(i) Social audit enables the company to take close look at itself and understand how far the company has lived upto its social objectives.

(ii) It is the fact that social audit encourages greater concern for social performance throughout the organisation.

(iii) Social audit provides data for comparing effectiveness of the different types of programmes.

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(iv) Social audit provides information for effective response to external claimants that make demands on the organisation. The society, welfare organisation and variety of others want to know what a business is doing in areas of their special interest, and a business needs to respond as effectively as possible. The social audit shows a business where it is vulnerable to public pressure and where its strengths lie.

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