Case Study
Funding Futures CIC
Find out more about Turn Up the Value's work with Funding Futures CIC, delivered as part of social enterprise support programme Proper Good
About Funding Futures
Even before Billy attended the Proper Good social impact workshop, he and his wife Hayley Darroch were already making a massive difference to the lives of disadvantaged women in Greater Manchester.
So I was really excited when Billy asked me to be his mentor through the Proper Good mentoring scheme.
Since 2021, Billy and Hayley have been steadily building momentum. They use beauty therapy and wellbeing training as a tool, helping women overcome challenges and build their careers and confidence.
Offering courses, qualifications, work experience and paid employment opportunities in their salons, their community investment company, Funding Futures CIC, is driven by both Hayley’s decades of beauty and wellbeing entrepreneurship experience and Billy’s background in finance and management consultancy.
But to successfully grow Funding Futures, they needed to build an entirely new skillset.
What Funding Futures needed
Funding Futures was growing fast, and places on their programmes were in high demand. To expand their offer and get more funding, Billy and Hayley needed better systems in place to help them capture vital data that would demonstrate their social impact.
“Collating, evidencing and reporting on social impact was a huge gap in our skillset…that meant we had no answer for the very simple question of, ‘so what?'”
Billy Darroch, Funding Futures CIC
As Billy’s Proper Good mentor, it was also my job to make sure that Billy could develop his understanding of the evolving (and occasionally confusing) terminology of the social value world. Sifting through concepts like theory of change and social return on investment can sometimes be a distraction for newcomers to the sector, obscuring what’s most important.
Our Proper Good solution
Thanks to Proper Good Bolton’s holistic support for developing social entrepreneurs, I was able to offer Billy three 1:1 sessions, so that we could build a social accounting framework tailored to the needs of Funding Futures.
We focused on three main areas to guide our framework:
- Identifying values – what matters most to Funding Futures and the women they support?
- Impact mapping – exactly how and where do Funding Futures make a difference?
- Stakeholder consultation – who is affected by Funding Futures’ activities, and how can we make it work even better for them?
Going above and beyond, through our extensive network of partners, we were able to create new connections for Billy with key individuals at Bolton at Home to help them explore more opportunities together.
About Proper Good…
Operating across Greater Manchester with programmes in Bolton, Oldham, Wigan and Stockport, Proper Good offers free-to-access business support and social investment for ideas and businesses that aim to make a positive difference.
If you’ve got a Proper Good idea, you should get in touch at propergood@boltoncvs.org.uk to see how we can work alongside you – to do what you do, as well as you possibly can.
"Our thanks to Karen for helping us in these early stages - now we’re taking our own social value reporting to the next level. I’ve become Level 3 ETCAL qualified in the social value journey, learning how to calculate more detailed reports, and developing ways to visually display this to commissioners and funders. "
Billy Darroch, Director, Funding Futures
The results
Funding Futures reached out for support at exactly the right time for their business – they’ve now secured a major new contract which has allowed them to quadruple the number of women they can support through their programme.
With TUTV and Proper Good’s assistance, Billy and Hayley were able to develop new automated digital systems which let them consistently capture the right data, right from the start of every new project.
As a result, they can communicate their social impact and value much more effectively to funders, networked partners and commissioners. Billy’s also begun his own social value journey, taking a Level 3 ETCAL qualification to further improve his social impact reporting abilities.
Through Proper Good, we’ve continued to champion and support the great work of Funding Futures.
What our support meant to Billy at Funding Futures
“Social value isn’t a game to play to win funding - it’s a mechanism to reduce cost to society.
“Whether that cost is financial, emotional or environmental, measuring social impact is a great way to demonstrate the part you’ve played.
“It lets you take the steps you need - from being a person or group with a will to do something good, to being a social enterprise with an evidence-based approach that can deliver lasting change within our communities and the places we love.
“Karen provided the tools and guidance we needed to create our own approach towards mapping, recording and evidencing our social impact.
“Karen had a solution-based approach to our issues. Being able to tap into her experience and bounce our ideas off her meant we could quickly plug the gaps in our knowledge. With our new tools in place, it was quick and easy to deploy a system and strategy.
“We weren’t just given a working knowledge of social value frameworks - we were given all the practical understanding necessary to apply it.
