If you work in an Active Partnership, you may already have access to Moving Communities. So the obvious question is: why would you need Proof of Play?
The answer is simple. Moving Communities helps you understand place-based activity and social value at system level. Proof of Play starts with the grassroots club — and gives that club a funder-ready evidence pack, while giving you aggregated insight from clubs that would otherwise stay invisible.
"Sport England already has Moving Communities."
Yes — and it is useful. Moving Communities gives Active Partnerships, local authorities and system partners intelligence across programmes, facilities and places. It's excellent at what it does.
But access to a strategic data platform does not mean volunteer-run grassroots clubs suddenly have the evidence they need to win grants, negotiate facility support, or explain their contribution to councils and sponsors. That is the gap Proof of Play fills.
Moving Communities helps Active Partnerships understand places.
Proof of Play helps Active Partnerships activate clubs.
Moving Communities gives you system-level intelligence. Proof of Play gives you club-level evidence, club-level engagement, and club-level funding readiness.
Moving Communities helps you see the system. Proof of Play helps the system hear from clubs.
Moving Communities is designed to provide Active Partnerships, local authorities, leisure operators and key stakeholders with intelligence and actionable insight across programmes, facilities and places. Its outputs are dashboards, maps and benchmarks — for people making strategic decisions across a place.
Primary user: the system. Primary output: strategic intelligence.
Proof of Play is a club-facing evidence engine. A volunteer opens it, enters their club's data, and ten minutes later has a modelled social value figure, a full report, a chairman's summary, a press release, social media copy, a funding guide with bid-ready wording, and a direct route to matched live grants through The Funding Bench.
Primary user: the club. Primary output: funder-ready evidence.
The real question is: can a volunteer-run grassroots club directly use the tool to turn its own activity into funder-ready evidence and a practical funding pathway?
Moving Communities
The primary user is the system.
Proof of Play
The primary user is the club — and the system benefits from the data that comes back.
A club doesn't walk away from Moving Communities with a report, bid wording, or a funding pathway. That's not a weakness — it's not what it was built to do.
The clearest way to see the difference is to ask what a volunteer — a club secretary, treasurer or chairman — walks away with.
No login. No institutional account. A volunteer opens the tool, enters their club data, and walks away with all of this.
A headline annual social value estimate using HM Treasury WELLBY methodology and Sport England's Year 2 social value model. Caveated, honest, and fundable.
A complete written report covering all value lines — participation, volunteering, mental health, neurodiversity, welfare, facilities and more — ready to attach to a grant application.
A plain-English summary designed for committee meetings, AGMs and conversations with councillors or sponsors.
Ready to send to local media. The club's social value story, written up and formatted for a journalist.
Tailored posts for four platforms. Posted in minutes. No copywriting required.
Bid-ready wording the club can paste directly into applications, plus a direct handoff to The Funding Bench — matched live grants by sport, location, legal structure and need.
Proof of Play gives Active Partnerships a grassroots evidence layer — a bottom-up picture of club value, need and funding readiness that system-level tools don't reach.
Most clubs are underfunded not because they lack impact — but because they can't prove it. Proof of Play changes that.
This matters. For a volunteer-run grassroots club, unpaid contribution is often the single largest driver of social value.
Sport England technical guidance — SVC4
What the Sport England PDF says
“Please note Sport England model also includes the wellbeing value of adult volunteering which is excluded from the Social Value Calculator.”
For a public leisure centre — staffed by paid professionals — this is structurally appropriate. For a volunteer-run grassroots club, the picture is completely different. Volunteering is the engine. Coaches, welfare officers, committee members, groundskeepers — the entire organisation exists because unpaid people show up. Excluding their contribution means excluding most of the value.
Proof of Play values volunteer contribution as a core line item using DCMS replacement-cost methodology and volunteer wellbeing values. For a typical volunteer-run sports club, this element alone accounts for 20–40% of total estimated social value.
Active Partnerships are funded by Sport England. Moving Communities is a Sport England service. That's not lost on us.
Moving Communities helps Active Partnerships and local system partners understand activity, facilities, places and wider social value. It's a strategic platform built for system-level decision-making. It does that well.
Proof of Play helps individual grassroots clubs evidence their own contribution, access funding opportunities, and feed structured local intelligence back into the partnership. It operates at a different level — the level Moving Communities does not directly equip as a self-serve funding journey for clubs.
Used together, the system gets both views: the strategic place-level picture Moving Communities provides, and the practical club-level evidence Proof of Play generates. One shows what's happening across the system. The other helps the system hear directly from clubs in a consistent, evidence-based way.
That makes Proof of Play easier to say yes to — not harder.
We can show how club submissions, social value outputs and The Funding Bench connect into an Active Partnership dashboard — in 20 minutes.
Or email danny@withinu.net · 03330 500 399