The soaring popularity of business practices in the social sector has elicited numerous calls from academics and practitioners to adopt appropriate methodologies to quantify and compare social value creation. However, "as yet, there are no standardized calculative mechanisms for social value creation, nor any comparative unit of measurement" (Nicholls, 2009: 758). We help bridge this research gap by developing a conceptual framework that allows us to compare the effectiveness of social interventions serving the different needs of different treatment groups in different socioeconomic and institutional contexts. We do so by bringing insights from both literatures on subjective well-being and organizational effectiveness theory into not-for-profit and social entrepreneurship research.