Football Foundation’s Upshot Becomes Standalone Company

Upshot, the impact measurement tool for the community sports sector, has announced that it has become a standalone 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.

Originally launched in 2012 by the UK’s largest sports charity – the Premier League, The FA and government’s Football Foundation – Upshot 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.

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 1.3 million participants across 8,000 different locations have been entered into Upshot. 

“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,” said Robert Sullivan, CEO, The Football Foundation.

“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.”

Preeti Shetty, Chief Executive of Upshot Systems CIC, and Sport Industry NextGen Leader (pictured above), added : “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 analyzing real-time data through Upshot they can do this more easily than ever before. “

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.