What is the founder(s) background?
We (Andy and Oli) are long time friends having met when we both worked in Brussels in 2005. Andy is a trained lawyer, sports journalist, marketeer and has worked for British Olympic Rowing, agency side for Virgin and in the charity sector for Walking with the Wounded. Oli worked in sports and political administration roles post university before moving to EY for 11 years as a Strategy and Management Consultant. He then ran a 40 person, £25m revenue sales team at a FTSE 100 company.
Oli Latham and Andy Sloan
What drove you to start Goalgiving? Seeing that sport has the power to change the world! Specifically, the idea was sparked at a Tottenham game (Andy is a fan), seeing the joy of fans when Harry Kane scored! It created a kernel of an idea....
What if every time a player scored or your team won it raised money for a good cause? What if rights holders, clubs, players and brands engaged in campaigns using their assets to engage and incentivise fans, raise awareness and build their own brands in the process, all while making a huge societal difference?
What key milestones have you achieved so far? 1. Launched an MVP 2. Had professional campaigns with Football, Rugby and Cricket 3. 14 active customers and a growing pipeline 4. Social impact with over £30k raised for good causes
What has been the biggest challenge?
Getting campaign traction when leading with the charity. Professional clubs say they want to support the ESG agenda, but when it comes to investing time and marketing effort, they only offer tokenistic help. Therefore, we are pivoting to use the campaign as a fan engagement tool with commercial benefit to the clubs or rights holders.
What have lessons have you learnt so far?
So many! Two major ones are:
1. Not having a dev co-founder with Andy and I has meant a very sharp learning curve and some challenges with developers
2. The level of support (or lack of) given to club foundations from the clubs
Lowest moment? We probably had two: Being told by a Premier League football club that they expected us to provide all the marketing effort and investment to engage their audiences when they would receive 95% of the income – i.e. they would not use their own channels to get to their own fans to support themselves! Developers! We have had multiple issues with developers not hitting deadlines or scope!
Biggest highlight?
Ben Stokes, Joe Root and Jos Buttler tweeting about goalgiving!
Ambition The scale of our ambition is vast – to raise £100m per year for good causes by 2030. We want to help every sports club and every community to prosper by bringing performance-related giving to life for them, as sport is at the heart of every community. We are also chasing the first £1m ‘goal’ (Whether that be a win, wicket, run, goal, try, birdie or basket). If Trevor Francis was the first £1m footballer, who would be the first £1m goalgiver? This is our purpose. This is what drives us. To harness the power of sport to make a difference.
Find out more at Goalgiving.com