A Welsh charity just costed its impact at £66m — what smaller community groups can take from it

A story out of Welsh sport this month made the case for social value evidence better than any policy paper. Cardiff City FC Community Foundation — the club's official charity — had its work independently assessed and costed at more than £66 million of social value over two seasons. In 2024/25 alone the figure was £32.9 million, with every £1 invested returning an estimated £19 in benefits to people and communities across Cardiff and South Wales.

It's a big number from a big organisation. But the interesting part for a smaller charity, community group or delivery org isn't the headline — it's how the number was built, and why the same discipline is within reach whether your budget is millions or a church-hall float.

Where a £66m figure actually comes from

The assessment was carried out by Substance, specialists in measuring the impact of sport and community organisations. Their model doesn't invent figures. It takes participant outcome data and attaches recognised public value measures to real changes: someone's mental health improving, a young person gaining a qualification, a participant becoming more active, a community feeling more connected.

You can see the shape of it in the 2024/25 breakdown: £17.4m came from health and wellbeing outcomes, £10.2m from social and community outcomes like stronger relationships and a greater sense of belonging, and £4.9m from education and employment — participants gaining confidence, transferable skills and routes towards work. Behind those pounds sits plain participant data: 93% reported an improved sense of belonging, nine in ten said their wellbeing had improved.

That is the whole method in miniature. Outcome data plus a recognised proxy value equals a costed figure a funder will take seriously. No made-up numbers, no guesswork — just the everyday work, recorded, and priced against a credible reference.

The proxy values aren't a football-only secret

The reference points these models lean on are public. The HACT UK Social Value Bank — now on its version 7, uprated for 2026 and adjusted for inflation — puts wellbeing values against close to 100 outcomes, from employment and youth outcomes to physical activity and community participation. Those same recognised proxy values are what let a small organisation cost a confidence-building session or a volunteering programme the way a football foundation costs its academy work.

What separates the £66m charity from the community group down the road usually isn't the quality of the work. It's that one of them recorded the outcome as it happened and the other trusted it to memory. By the time a funder asks "what changed?", the session is months gone and the evidence with it.

The lesson: record it while it's happening

You don't need an evaluation contract to start. You need two habits: capture the before-and-after shift in the room — a confidence score in and out takes seconds and stays anonymous — and log the activity so it can be costed against recognised proxy values instead of sitting in a headcount register. Do that consistently and, over a year, you have the same kind of costed impact story Cardiff City's Foundation can now put in front of its partners.

That's exactly what Owl Impact is built to do for organisations without an in-house impact team. Log a session in about two minutes and a costed, professional social value report lands in your inbox. Our distance-travelled tool captures the before/after change anonymously, so you're evidencing what shifted — not just that a session ran.

And if you're funded or bidding for funding: the cost of doing this can be built into your grant or bid as the monitoring-and-evaluation line — the evidence layer your funder already expects — so it's covered by the funding, not paid out of your own budget.