Collecting Data on Social Enterprises 2025

Other data gathering methodologies 2.7 While surveys are a widely used tool for gathering insights, a range of other data collection methods have been employed to create an understanding of social enterprises. These alternative approaches can help address limitations of surveys, such as response biases or difficulties in reaching certain segments of the sector. These alternative sources of data are described below, along with their limitations. Regulatory and registry data These approaches include, at the highest level of formality, the collation of registry data and official statistics by governments. Some examples include: –Several governments have implemented national registers for social enterprise, generally associated with a legal status developed to certify social enterprises, as in Austria,25 Denmark26 and Latvia;27 and in legal form in the United Kingdom (where some social enterprise data is held by the Community Interest Company regulator).28 Similarly, South Korea collects sectoral data through a dedicated support institution established through the Ministry of Employment and Labour, the Social Enterprise Promotion Agency.29 –Where social enterprise registries do not exist, similar organizational data is often held instead with a government’s business or charity registry, and may or may not be identifiable from within that wider dataset. –Official statistics are also developed by governments through national accounts, though these generally focus more broadly on the social (and solidarity) economy, as in Ecuador,30 Spain31 and Quebec.32While regulatory data, as a government source, tends to bring a high level of rigour and accuracy (for instance, potentially including accurate and up-to-date records of income taken from official taxation records), in other ways it can be quite limited. As very few regulatory bodies exist that collect specific data on social enterprise, this necessitates identifying social enterprises within business or charity registers that possibly collect varying types of data even within a single country. Similarly, governments may take different approaches to the types and formats of data they gather, and even basic details such as legal forms, given their national specificity, can impede aggregation and comparability across contexts. Beyond the challenge of inconsistency, regulatory data, crucially, excludes those working in the informal economy, which is a significant problem in contexts where the informal economy constitutes a majority of the broader economy. Furthermore, regulatory data is often inaccessible to external stakeholders and researchers without the permission and co-operation of the relevant and responsible government bodies. Satellite accounts Considerable work has been undertaken on the development of satellite accounts for the social economy – by UN agencies, for instance – as they promise extensive data across entire territories. However, beyond a few countries – Portugal,33 Ecuador, Poland and Mexico – they are nearly non- existent and largely focus on the broader social (and solidarity) economy rather than on social enterprises specifically. Beyond the challenges of facilitating alignment in satellite account data across countries and filtering out social enterprises from the broader sample, the creation of satellite accounts can be a slow and onerous process given that it requires impetus and funding from governments. 16 Collecting Data on Social Enterprises: A Playbook for Practitioners