Origin

“Show your Heart” is an impact measurement software that supports several environmental, social and governance (ESG) accounting methods. It was developed by XES, the Catalan Network of Solidarity Economy (Xarxa d’Economia Solidària de Catalunya) in 2008 to help members self-assess their commitment to social economy values. By 2016, the solution had been adopted by REAS, the Spanish Network of Networks of Alternative and Solidarity Economy (Red de Redes de Economía Alternativa y Solidaria) and hence scaled up to the whole national territory. It enables social cooperatives and other legally recognised social enterprises to assess and improve their social and environmental impact, as well as their governance practices.

Version 1

The current version deployed for production (V1) is yearly used by over Spanish 1000 organisations to measure their impact and assess their performance on ESG topics. Find a summary of the REAS Social Audit/Balance in our ESG accounting page. The results of these ESG accountings are aggregated in several reports and infographics that help building the identity of social enterprises, show pride in the social and environmental commitments of the members of REAS, inform policy making and ethical public procurement processes in some municipalities. This version of the tool is available here. However, with the exception of several pilots taking place in the Netherlands during 2025, new users cannot register until we finish and release the upcoming new version of the tool (see below).

Merge with the openESEA project

openESEA is an academic project initiated in 2016 in Utrecht University, within the Software for Organisational Responsibility lab. After investigating the worldwide landscape of impact measurement methods and tools, the team developed an ontology that served as a foundation for developing a tool, also named openESEA.You can find several scientific publications in the Resources page. In 2024, the openESEA and the Show your Heart projects have agreed to merge, in order to join forces and develop a tool that combines scientific rigour with industrial practice. We aim to produce a tool that is recognised internationally and highly adopted by social enterprises to measure their impact.

Version 2

A new version of Show your Heart is being developed, with the support of the Scentiss project, the Spanish Network of Networks of Alternative and Solidarity (REAS), the Catalan Network of Solidarity Economy (XES), the Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs, the Spanish Ministry of Labour and Social Economy, and Utrecht University (find more about these stakeholders here). It will imply an overhaul of the user interface to improve its usability and provide new features. The software architecture will also be refactored to improve its security and maintainability. We are establishing an open-source ecosystem of partners who will steer, use and maintain the tool. The estimated release date is September 2025. After thorough validation and testing, we will migrate the data from V1 to V2.