Impact measurement tool Upshot becomes standalone social enterprise
Upshot, the UK’s leading impact measurement tool, has become a Community Interest Company (CIC) with a new social purpose and a commitment to reinvesting all profits back into improving the tool and serving the third sector.
Upshot was launched in 2012, by the UK’s largest sports charity – the Premier League, The FA and government’s Football Foundation. It is a specialist tool that allows more than 1,000 organisations in the UK and worldwide to measure the impact of their initiatives and demonstrate progress towards their outcomes.
Upshot was created by the Football Foundation to assess the success of its investment in community sports facilities, and it soon became apparent that this was a tool that others in the sports sector and beyond could use. Since then, Upshot has grown to become a global non-profit company with a diverse range of clients from Premiership Rugby to Her Majesty’s Prison and Probation Service.
The decision to become independent from the Football Foundation is designed to give Upshot greater freedom to grow the team, invest in the technology and make impact measurement more accessible to a wider range of organisations.
Upshot is used to collect and track participant attendance and outcome data and ultimately prove the success of a project. In the past year alone, over 315,000 sessions with 1.3m participants across 8,000 different locations have been entered into Upshot.
The Lord's Taverners, the UK's leading youth cricket and disability sports charity, has been using the tool for the last three years. Upshot has helped them and their 50 delivery partners to input data easily and report in real time on their programmes, which use the power of sport to deliver against social outcomes.
Robert Sullivan, Chief Executive of the Football Foundation, said:
“We built Upshot eight years ago to understand the impact we were making through our community grants and immediately saw a benefit from the system. Over the years, Upshot has grown to become an expert in the field of impact measurement, supporting more sectors than we had originally anticipated. We are so proud of what the team has achieved and fully support their new journey to become a standalone social enterprise, allowing them to scale even further, invest in new technologies and continue to support the third sector to be more insight-led. We look forward to continuing to use Upshot and the team’s expertise for our own programmes.”
“We look forward to continuing to use Upshot and the team’s expertise for our own programmes.”
Preeti Shetty, Chief Executive of Upshot Systems CIC, said:
“We are very grateful to the Football Foundation and its Funding Partners for supporting Upshot’s development into the organisation it is today. We are confident that our new mission as a social enterprise will allow us to support many more organisations to better use and understand their data.
At Upshot we believe that it is critical that organisations get better at evaluating whether they are achieving their objectives. Using data to measure outcomes should be at the centre of what all organisations do. By collecting, recording and analysing real-time data through Upshot they can do this more easily than ever before.”
For more information on Upshot Systems CIC visit www.upshot.org.uk.
- For media enquiries, please contact Lin Wilson on info@upshot.org.uk.
Notes to Editors:
About Upshot Systems CIC
Upshot Systems CIC is the social enterprise which owns Upshot - an online system which helps funders and deliverers across the third sector better manage their data, improve performance, track progress, and report against outcomes - all with the aim of evaluating their impact. Built by the Football Foundation and launched in 2012, Upshot now supports over 1000 large and small organisations across the third sector, sport and non-sport with an innovative and easy to use, cloud-based system, which for some is a first important step into digitalisation.
About the Football Foundation
The Premier League, The FA and Government’s Football Foundation is the largest sports charity in the UK. It champions and supports fair access to quality football facilities for everyone, regardless of postcode, gender, race, disability or place.
The Foundation receives money from the Premier League, The FA and the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, through Sport England. This is matched with partnership funding and awarded as grants to create outstanding grassroots facilities that enable better games and attract more players, helping to transform communities.
Since 2000, it has awarded more than 17,600 grants to improve facilities worth more than £710m – including 942 artificial grass pitches, 6,426 natural grass pitches and 1,200 changing facilities. This has attracted an additional £940m of partnership funding – totalling over £1.6bn investment in grassroots football so far.
Through the Foundation, the Premier League, The FA, DCMS and Sport England have come together to create the National Football Facilities Strategy (NFFS) that will guide work over the next 10 years to transform many more local facilities. Local Football Facility Plans (LFFP) are being created to identify priority projects where demand is greatest, and the impact will be strongest and help stimulate the action required to deliver them.