Like many people I am passionate about sport – indeed passionate enough about wanting it to be taken more seriously that in the early 2000's I tried with colleagues to get Sportsthinktank.com going. While that put its head gingerly above the ground with a few reports and events it then faded away due to lack of attention from over-busy founders. Luckily, Andy Reed has now taken up the cudgels and is doing a fine job.

I now head an organisation, NPC, that tries to help people think about how we can use the non profit sector to help address social and other issues and again I feel that sport is a route into a great deal of this. But having said that, it then gets tricky.

You see lots of sports people are so keen on their own sport that they believe that if everyone did it – and they had the funding to allow this – then all sorts of behaviours would be transformed. People would no longer want to join gangs; they would learn the importance of discipline, and teamwork; they would thrive through the focus that training hard involves. If young people were only introduced to (their) sport early on they will do activity for ever and hence solve the looming obesity crisis. Indeed if you listen too hard, you would think at least half of all government expenditure should be spent on sport and then everything else would take care of itself! If only...

At a recent NPC event we heard versions of this story. From Adrian Turner, former Olympic swimmer and Founder and Director of Total Swimming talking about his 'pop-up' swimming organisation getting more children used to swimming, including those who find it culturally alien; from Richard Joyce, of innovative charity StreetChance who take 6 a side cricket out into communities; from former Sports Minister and Trustee of the Football Foundation Richard Caborn, talking mainly about the role of community sports facilities in Sheffield as the old sports centre needs replacing; and from Andy Reed himself in his guise as Chair of the Sport and Recreation Alliance.

But all these guys get it – there is no naïve simplicity here. They know they have to do more than assert that all this sport does good; they know they have to produce evidence and proof and to monitor what actually happens. That is not easy, but organisations like ourselves are well equipped to help people think about how to do it and lots of good charities like the BoxingAcademy, are already doing good work in this area.

And they also realised that often the things that sport does that helps create better social outcomes are less about the sport themselves than related factors. A child having decent adult role models for the first time; having someone who cares about them succeeding; a different set of peers as friends, something StreetChance has been very successful in; the beginning of aspiration; a collective activity that can help reduce loneliness for those in later life. Much as sport may be a route in to these things, being more conscious of these other factors helps to make the impact of sport on social and health outcomes much more likely to be achieved.

Additionally, if sport organisations want to convince public sector commissioners in health, criminal justice, youth serves, troubled families and social care to support them or even if they are seeking funding from the ever more demanding charitable foundations and philanthropists, then they need to be able to evidence that they really do make a difference.

Sport is one of the greatest things about life and we should enjoy it just for itself. But it can do a lot more than that and if we are smart about it we can make sure it really achieves.

Dan Corry is CEO of charity think tank and consultancy NPC (thinkNPC.org). He is a former government adviser including in the Treasury and Downing Street. He was one of the founders of the orginal and short lived verison of sportsthinktank.com