Liam's got issues: November

I've signed up to Twitter. It's a bit like sex - you don't quite get it until you start.

Am I keen to know what people think about a junior government minister's views of something they found out eight minutes ago, or how amazing the cocktail party was after the conference on world poverty? Not really. But I have come across some great work that is going on that I had no idea about. It is encouraging to uncover so many people doing good stuff all over the world.

I am a late adopter of technology and, although two years of self-employment have forced me to take more responsibility, I still have special needs compared with the bright shiny things of the twittersphere.

One field where I was ahead of the game though is social reporting. In Liverpool over a decade ago I was leading the wonderful FRC Group. We began trying to get a fix on what real impacts we were having upon the lives of the people we said we were working to help, and thinking about how to communicate that to the people who were important to the business.

We were pretty simplistic and far from systematic. But we stuck at it because (a) we thought it was useful to find out if we were as good as I was telling everyone we were, so (b) we could improve, and (c) it was a matter of integrity to justify to the taxpayers that their cash was being used wisely.

This was all theory. Truth was in 1998 I was making it up as I went along. No change there then, eh?

Fast forward to the British Library on 28 October 2009. Verity Timmins, FRC's impact manager, is telling the Good Deals conference audience why and how FRC tries to prove the value of what it is doing. It was very moving listening to her. Here was a young social enterprise leader making the case for social reporting - or 'proving it' in FRC argot - with ten years'-worth of independently verified data to draw upon and still using the language we made up when she was at school!

The wonderfully appropriately-named Verity told us that FRC's commitment to understanding and quantifying its impacts had recently been crucial to seeing off all-comers to win a piece of work which is potentially worth £7m. Result! So, it's the right thing to do and it's good for business.

Now that is worth twittering about.

Contact Liam on Twitter @LiamABlack or visit thesamewavelength.com