Reflecting on our partnership with Scope, one year in

Today marks the beginning of Virgin Media’s National Charity Week. This is where people and teams from across our business get together to raise funds for our National Charity Partner, Scope.

This year’s Charity Week coincides with the one year anniversary of our two year partnership with Scope. Reaching this big milestone I wanted to take a moment to reflect on, and share with you, what we’ve achieved in one year - wow have we done a lot.

The partnership, which is underpinned by a £1m corporate donation and fuelled by the enthusiasm of our people, is focused on transforming the lives of disabled people in the UK through three key projects that have digital at their heart. Watch our new video below to find out more!

While I’m pleased with the progress we have made on each of these three projects, I have to say that the achievements that have most blown me away have been the ones led by our people. Here are just some examples:

• Watching our nine Digital for Good Champions really go above and beyond in their role as activators of our ‘digital for good’ strategy. The team’s enthusiasm has no bounds and it has been great to work with them to help deliver our Scope partnership activities – from recruiting hundreds of participants for sporting challenges like the 2016 London Marathon to participating in internal videos to drive engagement.
• Calculating that our people had raised nearly £30k in Charity Week 2015, just three months after the partnership launched. The week’s activities reached 10,000 Virgin Media people and I believe this played a big part in raising awareness of the partnership – this was shown by 71% of our people agreeing that they were aware of the partnership and its purpose in an annual survey.
• Supporting our senior leaders to collaborate and skill swap with their peers at Scope. For example, our Director of Digital is helping Scope to shape their digital strategy and our Executive Director of Transformation has dedicated resource in their team to help drive digital technology pilots that could improve the lives of disabled people. One exciting example to come out of this is a home sensor project, but you’ll have to stay tuned to find out more as I can’t give too much away at this point.

All this momentum shows that our people are really getting behind the partnership with Scope – we’re making good things happen. We are only half way through our two year partnership with Scope and I’m looking forward to reporting back soon on what else we’ve been up to.