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SOCIAL AUDITS (THE MISSION STATEMENT)
Objective:
This session seeks to highlight the need to grant equal importance to both market forces and social aspirations in any community media project. Most new projects will understand the need to establish sound economic strategies, but they should also be encouraged to remember their social rationale. If they have been set up as a community media project, not as a profit making initiative, but as a tool for community development, then a systematic and objective auditing procedure should be implemented in tandem with standard auditing processes, and given as much consideration. This will ensure that those internal and external factors not covered by financial auditing are constantly kept in view.
As a start, the group should be encouraged to create a Mission Statement. This is a recognised tool of many enterprises, commercial as well as community. However, the concept of Social Auditing, introduces a range of procedures to enable a community project to regularly monitor its identified 'social' activities. You can supply a list of 'missions' as a prompting tool if you wish, to get the group started, but you should remind them not to just rely on this list, (i.e. selecting some and writing them up. These are just prompts to stimulate ideas.) This is a serious attempt to elicit each participant's aspirations for a real project.
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