When reporting against economic development data, you will need to establish what you want to measure and what you want to report publicly before the data is collected and processed. If your policy is to create new jobs you can choose a metric that would create a report relating to the number of jobs that have been created by the award of contracts.

You should be clear about how you are recording and calculating these metrics and make the underlying data available for analysis by others. For instance, you may wish to distinguish the number of jobs that a contract is supporting against the number of new jobs you have created by selecting firms based on their positive economic development credentials.

In the following scenario we can calculate the jobs that contracting supports and the number of new jobs that would be created by awarding the contract to Supplier A. By subtracting the number of jobs supported by the incumbent contractor from the number of jobs that would be supported by the new contractor it is possible to determine that nine new jobs would be created.

Buyers can also group any reporting on a range of additional factors to give context to an economic development project. For instance, it is possible to group jobs by the region in which they have been created, the category of purchasing (e.g. construction), the nature of the jobs created (e.g. skilled) or the type of companies supported (e.g. female owned).