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Digital for Good
Boosting businesses
VOOM is our way of boosting the UK and Irish economies by creating opportunities for 100,000 small businesses to grow through digital.
Since 2010, VOOM has grown to become a unique and powerful community of entrepreneurs and small business owners who come together with Virgin Media to make connections, share their expertise, find peer-to-peer support and compete for their chance to ‘pitch to Rich’. The community is packed with great advice from successful startups, business leaders and leading brand partners like Virgin StartUp, Crowdfunder.co.uk, Paypal and LinkedIn.
Virgin Media Business has driven this initiative forward and Peter Kelly, Managing Director of Virgin Media Business is the executive sponsor for this goal.
The three areas we focus on:
Boosting the speed of business: In 2017, Virgin Media Business launched VOOM Fibre, to become the only provider in the market to offer its top speed of 350Mbps as standard. After learning that the average employee loses 15 minutes a day to slow internet speeds [1], we went a step further introducing a new speed of up to 500Mpbs, the fastest widely available speed in the market [2]
Building connections that really matter: The VOOM Pioneers digital platform provided a place for small business owners to meet like-minded entrepreneurs and potential business partners
Getting ahead: From humble beginnings in 2011, VOOM Pitch has grown to become the UK and Ireland’s biggest pitching competition giving entrepreneurs the chance to pitch to Sir Richard Branson and giving away over £3.5 million worth of prizes to more than 52 businesses
[1] A small business with eight employees used for illustrative purposes only. Eight people losing 15 minutes for five days equals 600 minutes, or ten hours of time, lost. According to the Department for Business, Innovation & Skills, businesses with 0-9 employees account for 96% of all UK businesses.Virgin Media Business Digital Opportunities report, 2016
[2] Speed claim: The UK’s fastest major business broadband provider based on VOOM Fibre 350Mbps vs major UK B2B ISPs max: 314Mbps BT; 80Mbps O2; 76Mbps Plusnet; 76Mbps TalkTalk; and 76Mbps Vodafone. Virgin Fibre areas only
Virgin Media’s partnership with The Valuable 500
In 2019 we announced our strategic partnership with The Valuable 500,a global movement putting disability on the business leadership agenda.
The Valuable 500 aims to encourage business leaders to commit to putting disability on their board agendas in 2019.
The Valuable 500 seeks to tackle the trend for businesses to claim they are diverse, but exclude disability from their definition of diversity. Research by EY commissioned by #valuable has found disability is still woefully absent from the majority of board level discussions globally – with the majority (56%) of global senior executives rarely or never discussing disability on their leadership agendas.
The Valuable 500 launched in Davos at the 2019 World Economic Forum where a disability inclusion session was held on the main stage for the first time.
We’re supporting their ambition to find 250 UK and Irish leaders to be the tipping-point for change and to unlock the business, social and economic value of people living with disabilities across the world. As a strategic founding partner, Virgin Media is funding the creation of resources for leaders. Find out more here.
