Charlton Athletic and Paisley - an unlikely connection?

An interview with Gayle Brannigan, CEO of the St Mirren Foundation

Part 3: How does Charlton Athletic help the St Mirren Foundation?

In the second part of this interview, Gayle Brannigan, the CEO of the St Mirren Foundation, told us about the five key pillars that form the basis of their work, these being: community connection, health & wellbeing, education & empowerment, mental fitness & resilience and inspiring our youth. She then explained just how vital it is that the Foundation and all other football clubs’ charities and community groups maximise every opportunity to raise money. The next question I asked was, ‘how do you assess the impact of the money you get and the work it delivers…?’

“From a social return on investment point of view, being able to effectively monitor and evaluate the impact of the work we deliver across our communities is success critical. My team felt very strongly that they didn’t just want us to give our data to an external agency and pay them to create a report for us, they wanted us to cultivate a partnership with organisations who really understand what we do, are very skilled in M&E and could teach us how to create our own SROI reports.  We have been working with Charlton Athletic Community Trust, Simetrica-Jacobs and HACT to quantify and communicate the social value of our direct investment and community activities in the local area.  This, in turn, will influence our future strategy and help us to access additional support, partnerships and funding in the future. Essentially, this means we are being guided by experts, and we’ll be reporting the result of our new way of working next year.

“Prior to this point, and like many charities, we were simply not in a position to really focus on our social impact reporting. Our team was too small and were focused on delivering the good work first, as should always be the case, financially we could not afford it and most importantly we didn’t have the right partners. We have grown as an organisation and as individuals, it’s an exciting time and we are fully invested in the joint collaboration we have with Charlton Athletic Community Trust, Simetrica-Jacobs and HACT and are looking forward to developing this even more over the next few years.”

To be continued…