From Ambition to Action
How Big Hearts Community Trust gained the strategic clarity needed to confidently scale their impact.
Big Hearts Community Trust is the official charity of Heart of Midlothian FC. Based in Edinburgh, they provide year-round mental health, equality, and social inclusion services to vulnerable children and families through football-based activities. After achieving record fundraising results, they recognised the need to move from tactical opportunism to strategic planning.
Like many successful charities, Big Hearts had grown through a combination of passion, relationships, and responsiveness to opportunities. While this approach had delivered impressive results, including breaking through the £1M revenue milestone, the organisation recognised they needed a more structured foundation to support sustainable growth.
The challenge was familiar to many third sector organisations: how do you build strategic foundations without losing the agility and relationship-focus that made you successful in the first place?
As Craig Wilson, Chief Executive, explains: "We're an ambitious organisation with quite a tight-knit team. We needed someone from outside to give us that perspective and give us that roadmap. We didn't have that internal expertise."
Our Approach
Our Approach
The engagement began with comprehensive stakeholder consultation, designed to understand both the organisation's values and its operational reality.
"Mike came in and spoke to the senior leadership team, spoke to our IT contractor, spoke to our chair," Craig notes. "He really got under the bonnet of what we were trying to achieve and where we were at."
Through detailed analysis combining stakeholder interviews, systems assessment, and sector benchmarking, we mapped Big Hearts' current capabilities and identified gaps in their processes and systems.
The result was a comprehensive strategic roadmap addressing eight business dimensions (from data infrastructure and stakeholder relationships to fundraising and communications) across five implementation phases, providing Big Hearts with a clear 18-24 month pathway forward.
The roadmap was structured using the CORE framework, ensuring recommendations balanced immediate operational improvements with longer-term strategic development. Each initiative was tied to tangible stakeholder value, with clear success metrics and implementation guidance.
What Made This Different
Understanding the Third Sector Context
Many digital strategies fail because they apply corporate thinking to organisations with fundamentally different value drivers. Rather than optimising for profit margins, we focused on sustainable impact delivery, stakeholder relationships, and mission alignment.
Respecting Organisational Culture
Big Hearts' strength comes from its tight-knit team and relationship-focused approach. The roadmap recognised this as an asset to be preserved, not a problem to be solved. Recommendations were designed to add structure without bureaucracy, and process without losing the personal touch that makes the organisation effective.
Evidence-Based, Not Technology-Led
Rather than recommending specific platforms or systems, the strategy focused on defining what Big Hearts needed to achieve and why. Technology recommendations followed from clear strategic objectives, ensuring any investment would deliver genuine value rather than adding complexity.
The Impact
The engagement delivered more than a document—it provided Big Hearts with the confidence and clarity to move forward with purpose.
"We've got a plan that we believe in," Craig emphasises. The roadmap gave the organisation:
• Strategic clarity on how digital capabilities support their mission
• Clear prioritisation of initiatives based on value and feasibility
• Shared understanding across stakeholders about the path forward
• Evidence-based decision framework for future investments
Most importantly, the organisation now approaches strategic planning from a position of confidence rather than uncertainty.