As organisations around the globe grapple with the COVID-19 pandemic, a Melbourne start-up has developed a simple way for organisations and front-line social services to monitor and respond to the impact of the virus on their staff and communities.

Award-winning impact management software company Socialsuite is offering the newly-developed COVID-19 Social Impact Assessment tool free of charge, and hopes it will assist organisations to improve both personal and business outcomes as stakeholders deal with isolation, financial pressures and anxieties flowing from the pandemic.

CEO Brad Gurrie said: “The scale of COVID-19 is unprecedented in modern times and has had a devastating effect on communities around the world. Socialsuite is undertaking this project to help organisations understand the social impact on their people, and how they can best respond.”

The assessment tool uses expert-designed surveys, configured in the Socialsuite platform, to monitor sentiment across six key areas: resilience, loneliness and isolation, anxiety and fear around mortality, employment and income, access to basic needs and services, and sense of community and safety. The data is fed into an interactive dashboard that shows users how their staff and stakeholders are being impacted and highlights opportunities for improvement.

Socialsuite co-founder Dr Clara Ong led the development of the six domains. “With so many unknowns to navigate in this crisis, this tool enables organisations to understand and act on the sentiment, fears and aspirations of their people. They can use these insights to allocate resources accordingly and assess in real time whether initiatives are working.”

The COVID-19 tool is the latest iteration of Socialsuite’s impact monitoring technology, which is used by philanthropic organisations and non-profits to measure the effectiveness of community and philanthropic programs. Dr Ong said the new tool had application beyond Socialsuite’s usual customer base, and would be useful for any organisation wanting to track how their workforce or stakeholders were managing during the crisis.

She added that Socialsuite was offering the tool free of charge, recognising there would be many organisations currently struggling financially. “This tool is the perfect demonstration of just how effective digital technologies can be in responding to worldwide crises in real-time,” she added.

The COVID-19 Social Impact Assessment is the latest in a string of exciting developments for the  Melbourne-based company, which was named one of nine Global Champions at the recent World Summit Awards in Vienna. The awards recognised businesses from around the globe that are using digital technologies to meet the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals.

Socialsuite’s COVID-19 Social Impact Assessment launches on Monday 30 March, 2020. To register for the free tool, visit socialsuitehq.com/covid-19-assessment.