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Upshot Becomes Standalone Social Enterprise

Upshot, the impact measurement tool for the UK’s community sports sector, 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 sports 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 would be of huge value across the whole of the sports sector.

 

Since then, Upshot has grown to become a global non-profit company with a diverse range of clients including Premiership Rugby and the European Football Development Network.

 

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 support more organisations in the sports sector.  

 

Organisations use Upshot 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. 

 

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.”

 

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 sports 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