Home Advantage: How Chelsea FC Foundation Put Its Community Mission on One Platform

Chelsea FC Foundation works where the club lives - the streets around Stamford Bridge, Kingsmeadow and Cobham - delivering programmes across three pillars of wellbeing, community and futures, and support for every former Chelsea player across the men’s, women’s and academy teams. Last year the Foundation set itself a bigger ambition: keep delivering directly, and also raise funds, give grants, and mobilise the wider Chelsea community as volunteers. Four new or newly formalised functions, one year, and a promise that none of it would run on spreadsheets.

“It’s the most important development we’ve had in the Players’ Trust in the time I’ve been involved.” - Adam Burrage, Head of the Chelsea Players’ Trust

• 40 hours – saved every month on case administration by the Players’ Trust

• 3,000 – former players across the men’s, women’s and academy teams the Chelsea Players’ Trust is built to support

• 800 – club staff, each with two available days of volunteering leave a year - a first for the club

The ambition

Few club foundations attempt what Chelsea FC Foundation set out to do. It had grown into a respected delivery organisation - and its strategy asked how much it could further its impact: fundraising through supporters and corporate partners, grants that back brilliant local organisations where they are best placed to deliver, volunteers drawn from across the Chelsea community, and a Players’ Trust ready to support far more former players. Ambition on that scale needs infrastructure to match. Four new functions could not be built on separate documents, inboxes and spreadsheets - they needed one platform, designed for all of them from the start.

The approach

Working with Cirrico, the Foundation ran a Discovery and Planning phase to design all four functions, then built them on Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud in a single implementation programme: a fundraising pipeline with daily automated PayPal donation imports and automated thank-yous; an end-to-end grant lifecycle with applications flowing in through integrated online forms; a volunteer management capability with onboarding and safeguarding compliance built in; and secure case management for the Chelsea Players’ Trust, with role-based access protecting sensitive information. Because fundraising and volunteering were being created rather than replaced, the platform and the programmes were designed together, from day one.

The people it works for

Mariel Zelhart, Head of Philanthropic Partnerships, joined to build the Foundation’s first fundraising function and made the platform a condition of the plan. Her team now runs bespoke relationships with major donors and corporate partners - including a patrons programme - with every conversation, gift and restricted fund designation tracked in one place.

For Adam Burrage, Head of the Chelsea Players’ Trust, every request for support becomes a case the moment it arrives - logged once, updated wherever the day takes him, with a complete and confidential record behind every decision. He estimates the platform saves him around 40 hours a month - time that now goes back into supporting former players.

The results so far

“Starting to build out our Salesforce for grant-giving has enabled us to bring far more consistency, rigour and transparency to the way we do grant-giving - and has really helped with communication and join-up across the team, and longer-term sustainability and institutional memory of all our work.” - Alice Braybrook, Head of Grants and Charities

Ten grants managed with full history in one place and the next funding round ready to run end to end on the platform. A fundraising operation live in its first season, a volunteering programme in soft launch, with every member of club staff now given the option of two volunteering days a year. And a Players’ Trust that supports former players across the men’s, women’s and academy teams - now running every case through one secure, accountable system.

What comes next

The Foundation’s ambitions run well beyond a first phase: hundreds of volunteers drawn from staff, fans and corporate partners; thematic grant funds tackling loneliness and homelessness across South West London and Surrey; and a Players’ Trust ready to welcome many more of the roughly 3,000 people who have worn the shirt. As Mariel puts it: “Make sure you have strong foundations and systems in place, so that as it grows you don’t need to go back and scramble to keep it all together down the road. The right tools and the right team are really important.”

Cirrico’s promise is simple: accelerate your mission with smarter, simpler technology. Chelsea FC Foundation shows what that looks like - and sets out a path any club foundation could follow: engage your community, fund what works, and build it to scale from day one.

Inside the work

A closer look at each of the four areas delivered in Phase 1.

Fundraising: built right, from day one

Most fundraising teams inherit years of spreadsheets. Mariel’s team started with a clean sheet - and treated it as an advantage. The Foundation’s first fundraising function was designed on the platform from the start: unified supporter records, gift and recurring commitment tracking, restricted fund designations that keep every donor’s wishes visible, and dashboards showing the pipeline at a glance. Donations through PayPal arrive automatically every day, and thank-you’s go out without anyone lifting a finger - with the high value ones flagged for a human touch. The team’s patrons programme invites supporters to join at £25,000 or more over three years. “Everything we do is exciting and new, and we think everything is a big win - from £10 to £100,000,” says Mariel.

Grant-giving: consistency, rigour and memory

The Foundation has historically been a delivery organisation. Its strategy asked a sharper question: where others are better placed to deliver, why not fund them? Ten grants on from that decision - three multi-year commitments and seven one-year awards, including funding for four organisations tackling loneliness in its local communities - grant-giving now runs on a platform built for the whole lifecycle. Applications arrive through integrated online forms and land directly in Salesforce; assessments, due diligence and decisions are captured against each one; and reporting from funded partners will build a picture of impact over each grant’s life. For a grants team, the quiet superpower is institutional memory: every relationship, every decision, held in one place, whoever is in the room.

Volunteering: a programme and its platform, built together

Volunteering began as a blank slate - and in a piece of good timing, the Foundation’s new volunteering officer joined just as the build began, so the programme and the platform shaped each other. Volunteer roles, shifts, assignments and hours are structured in the system, with onboarding and safeguarding compliance tracked for every volunteer from the first sign-up. The programme is in soft launch with club staff - every one of whom now has two days of volunteering leave a year, a first for the club - before opening to corporate partners, fans and supporters’ groups. When the wider launch comes, the Foundation will already know its numbers: who volunteered, for how many hours, and where they made their mark.

The Chelsea Players’ Trust: care with discretion

The Chelsea Players’ Trust provides welfare and wellbeing support to former Chelsea players across the men’s, women’s and academy teams. Its work is sensitive by nature, which is why the platform matters: every case is logged from the moment it arrives, every step recorded, and access limited so information is seen only by those who should see it. Privacy comes first - the record behind every case is complete, consistent and confidential, so the Trust can account for every decision while protecting the people it supports. Fifteen to twenty cases have been supported through to conclusion over the past year, and in the weeks since going live every new case has run through the platform. With around 3,000 former players connected to the club, the Trust is built to welcome many more. “It’s the most important development we’ve had in the Players’ Trust in the time I’ve been involved,” says Adam Burrage. His advice to other clubs: “Don’t concentrate on the fluffy stuff first. Get your house in order and have a system in place.”

On working with Cirrico

“Everyone has been responsive, helpful, and willing to be creative with us. There is no precedent here for what is possible or what has been done before and the team has been willing to build.” - Mariel Zelhart, Head of Philanthropic Partnerships

“From our first session, there was already a draft template we could work with and adapt for what we need at Chelsea Foundation. Key challenges we would throw over were investigated and worked out - it was fantastic.” - Alice Braybrook, Head of Grants and Charities

“The team were coming up with solutions for things that we hadn’t even thought of yet.” - Adam Burrage, Head of the Chelsea Players’ Trust