There’s a question we hear from suppliers fairly often. They’ve signed up, they want to get involved, but they’re not finding the right project in the Directory to match with. What then?

The answer is to make your resources visible.

Instead of waiting for the right project to come up, you post what you have available as an offer of in-kind support. A spare Saturday and a van. Surplus stock. A few hours of professional expertise. Whatever it is, you describe it once, and it stays visible in the Directory until a community organisation reaches out. 

Takes under ten minutes to set up. Editable any time. And it puts you on the radar of every community organisation in your area.

PPG Architectural Coatings UK Limited has shown what that looks like in practice. 

They posted what they had available: paint.

Within weeks, community organisations across the Hyde Housing Association network were coming to them, and the requests haven’t stopped since. 

The range of need was immediately clear:

• YMCA DownsLink Group’s Youth Advice Centre – a space for young people that needed to feel welcoming.
• Toilet walls used daily by 200 pupils at Herbert Morrison Primary School.
• Chichester District Foodbank’s new foodbank, which feeds around 120 people facing food insecurity each week.
• Refuge rooms and communal spaces at Bromley and Croydon Women’s Aid, housing women and their children who have escaped domestic abuse.

PPG Architectural Coatings UK has since completed 16 matches, and counting. 

“Until you go and speak to them, visit them,” Jonathan Walker, who oversees the account, told us, “you haven’t got a clue what they are – and they turn out to be this fantastic organisation doing something very different, where half a dozen tins of paint are going to make a huge difference.”

The approach that sets PPG Architectural Coatings apart

PPG Architectural Coatings made a deliberate choice early on: treat every match like a real customer enquiry. 

That means a local contact gets assigned, site visits get offered, and the same account managers who handle major contracts handle these projects too. 

If a site visit reveals damp or crumbling walls, they say so honestly – paint alone won’t fix it. If someone wants to go over a dark colour with white, they explain why that takes a premium product and extra coats. 

“We don’t look at it as if we’re giving a freebie,” Jonathan says. “We treat them like a customer who’s purchasing the paint from us – because they’ve got a project to do.”

That’s the difference between Social Value that looks good in a report and Social Value that delivers for local communities. For the youth centre repainting a room or the family charity freshening up their welcome space, the quality of support they receive is the whole point.

“It’s nice to be able to say we’ve supported schools, mosques, family centres,” Jonathan adds. “It’s that varied group that come through which makes it different.”

That variety matters for the business case too. In contract reviews with Hyde, being able to reference a diverse range of beneficiaries changes the conversation – and the impact is fully verifiable through Match My Project’s feedback and reporting.

If you’re a supplier who’s signed up but not yet posted an offer, Jonathan’s advice is practical.

Start small. “Create your first offer, make it manageable, make the first one realistic.” Jonathan suggests breaking it down into segments of around £150. See the first one or two matches right through to completion before adding more. 

“We are a big corporate company, we have limits on what we can do,” he says. “But we can do something – so why not do it?”

The point is to start. You don’t need to find the right project yourself. Put what you have available on the platform, set sensible limits, and let organisations come to you. 

Some of them will be names you’ve never heard of. Some of them will be doing work that surprises you. A few tins of paint – or whatever your equivalent is – might be just what they need.

If this has got you thinking, the next step is simple: log in to your Match My Project account and post an offer of in-kind support. Describe what you have to give. The rest takes care of itself.