How housing association SNG (Sovereign Network Group) and its supply chain are reshaping Social Value delivery — one connection at a time.
The biggest win is time; not only saving it, but freeing it. Match My Project reduces manual admin and gives us immediate visibility of community needs.”
— The Social Value Team, SNG
Numbers tell part of the story. £55,703 worth of money, materials and resources channelled into communities. £23,134 in direct cash donations. 297 hours delivered. And 74 projects completed at the point the 100th match was made — meaning three quarters of connections had already delivered something meaningful on the ground.
But to understand what those numbers actually represent, it’s worth hearing directly from the people behind them.
For housing association SNG, the milestone carries weight beyond the headline figure. “Hitting the 100-project milestone shows how far we’ve come in aligning Social Value delivery with SNG’s corporate plan and Community Foundation strategy,” the team explain.
“The milestone reflects how Match My Project has become a foundation for building relationships, onboarding suppliers and enabling more delivery on the ground — all of which contributes to our ambition of investing £100m into our communities.”
Before Match My Project (MMP), SNG’s Social Value team describe a process that relied heavily on manual effort and internal networks.
“A lot of information relied on our colleagues feeding things back,” they explain, “we simply weren’t as well connected — either to suppliers or to community groups, and any matching was manually held by the Social Value team.”
This created a bottleneck, limiting both speed and scale.
Match My Project created a transparent meeting place where needs could be posted and suppliers could take ownership, removing the heavy admin burden and making the whole process more open and responsive.”
— The Social Value Team, SNG
The introduction of the platform, in their words, “created a transparent meeting place where needs could be posted and suppliers could take ownership, removing the heavy admin burden and making the whole process more open and responsive.”
The impact on speed has been significant:
Of the first 100 matches, 45 were made in under 10 days, 28 in under 5 days, and 10 in under 24 hours.
For SNG, this represents a fundamental shift: “The biggest win is time; not only saving it, but freeing it. MMP reduces manual admin and gives us immediate visibility of community needs, enabling better conversations with suppliers. MMP has allowed us to grow relationships, scale our reach and focus on meaningful impact instead of managing the mechanics of matching.”
Geography is a dimension the team have thought carefully about.
SNG operates across a wide area, and the distribution of activity inevitably reflects where suppliers are concentrated. But they’re clear on what the platform is actually designed to deliver:
“The platform gives equal visibility to all areas — it’s about equal access and letting suppliers choose what resonates with them. Naturally, areas with more suppliers like London and Bristol see more activity, but community partners in more remote areas now have access they didn’t have before. The platform removes us as the gatekeepers and shifts decision-making to suppliers — even if outcomes vary by geography.”
The platform removes us as the gatekeepers and shifts decision-making to suppliers.”
— The Social Value Team, SNG
Two projects in particular stand out to the team as emblematic of what good matching can look like.
Lyde Green Community Association dedicated to fostering community spirit demonstrated something different but equally valuable: breaking a large ask into smaller chunks led to repeat supplier engagement — “ongoing support” that a single, harder-to-access request might never have generated.
And Zebra Collective, a co-op dedicated to building a more just and sustainable society, became “a brilliant example of sustained, layered support that snowballed over time.”
Zebra Collective took on a neglected but loved community space in April 2024. In under two years they’ve brought it back to life — running activities six or seven days a week, from toddler groups and youth clubs to English language classes for asylum-seeking and refugee women. Much of the building work has been carried out voluntarily by community members, including Simon, who has been showing up for local projects for over 30 years.
The Match My Project platform proved an invaluable component, where Bradford’s Building Supplies supported three projects: a second external noticeboard, new loft insulation, and new front and back doors.
Marc Gardiner, Lead Worker at Zebra Collective, reflects on working with SNG and supplier Bradford’s Building Supplies across multiple projects:
“It’s been a heartening experience: generous, clear, proactive, strategic – a strong and growing sense of partnership.”
We’re more confident now, more flexible, and more focused on what partners genuinely need and what suppliers are passionate about.”
— The Social Value Team, SNG
Perhaps most telling is how SNG describe the evolution in their own thinking from project 1 to project 100.
“We’ve moved from a more rigid, checklist approach to a relationship-driven model,” they reflect. “We’re more confident now, more flexible, and more focused on what partners genuinely need and what suppliers are passionate about. It’s less about strict categories and more about meaningful outcomes.”
As for what comes next, SNG are unambiguous.
With the housing sector facing increasing scrutiny around ESG and the Procurement Act, they see MMP as central to evidencing the difference between pledges and delivery, helping them to track outcomes, build more resilient networks, and demonstrate real‑world impact behind the raw data.
And for any other Housing Associations still managing Social Value manually, their message is direct: “We’d genuinely ask them — how are you managing it?! With the scale of SNG’s contracts and everything our team oversees from volunteering, impact measurement, community partnerships, supplier engagement etc., doing this manually would be impossible. MMP hasn’t just streamlined our work; it’s enabled us to grow our reach, deepen relationships and deliver more for our communities than would ever have been feasible without it.”
Here’s to the next 100.
All figures were captured at the point the 100th match was completed. A number of the remaining matches were still active at that time.
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