The vision of Cardiff City FC Community Foundation is to use the unique appeal of Cardiff City FC to change lives by supporting children, young people and families in South Wales to achieve their full potential.

The work of the Foundation is centred around three long-term outcomes, these include:

• Increasing people’s understanding of how to lead healthier and more active lives
• Improving opportunities for people to access education, employment or training
• Reducing the likelihood of offending and re-offending

The mission of the Foundation sets out to use of the unique appeal of Cardiff City FC to change lives.

Why did Cardiff City Foundation approach Substance?

Over time, the Foundation made good progress in capturing data utilising the Views system. However, this largely related to the quantity and frequency of beneficiaries engaging with the Foundation’s programmes. The area where Simon Stephens (Programmes Director at Cardiff City FC Community Foundation) identified a need to make improvements was in demonstration of impact and the difference their programmes are making to the lives of those engaged.

The initial step taken to achieve this was to engage Substance to develop a Theory of Change, enabling them to better understand the challenge(s) that existed within their target communities and how the Foundation’s work would address them.

How Substance helped?

Through Theory of Change workshops, the Substance research and consultancy team worked alongside Simon and the Foundation to facilitate internal discussions about why it is they exist as an organisation, to identify key goals and how their programmes would enable them to deliver their desired outcomes. In turn it was hoped that the learning would help to shape the Foundation’s programming going forward, also allowing offers to become more focused.

In addition, Dr. Kath Edgar (Co-Founder & Senior Researcher at Substance) identified a range of impact measurement tools for the Foundation to use to help them demonstrate the progress they are making towards achieving their mission.

Overall, the work the Foundation has done alongside Substance has allowed them to better understand who they are, what they would like to achieve and how they will achieve it. This had led to the development of a more focused delivery strategy which is supporting the Foundation in having a greater impact on the children, young people and families it works with across South Wales.

What Did Cardiff City FC Community Foundation Say?

“The journey with substance has been such a valuable one for all involved, it has helped us to better understand the areas where we can make the greatest contributions to the lives of those in the communities we work with.

The development of the impact measurement tools has been hugely beneficial, seeing us streamlining our data collection processes and only measuring the things that matter to us, whilst enabling us to gain valuable insight from the data collected that will support the development of our programme offers year on year.”

Simon Stephens (Programme Director at Cardiff City FC Community Foundation)