Mike: Hello, welcome to the weekly update. Week 3, big week back for us, the Digital team. Firstly 2 big meetings.
Board meeting for the whole group, they’ve seen our preparation, our presentation for the year, very happy with that, lots of good challenge.
For us as a team we have a digital advisers group, and our Digital Advisory Board met this Wednesday, we have 4 advisers, Jonathan Luff, who is helping us with our horizon scanning and vendor market place review; Jeni Tennison from the Open Data Institute and Andrew Eland from Google Deep Mind, those 2 are really helping us with our data services and our open data principles and standards work. And Sophie Fenwick-Paul who’s helping us with our communities and our futures work, particularly helping Rufus around membership and community.
Those 4 constitute our Advisory Board and I’m delighted they are helping us. We are also looking for at least one other person to help us with our e-commerce development around our electrical business, so if you know anybody please let us know.
And just a couple of stats this week to wrap up. I’m delighted that at the end of the period of our community cause programme, we’ve had over 6000 applications from causes, charities, social programmes all over the country who want to participate in the 1% programme. And we’ll be putting money into these causes over the next few years.
We’ve now got some sifting work to do because we were very, very much oversubscribed, but we should have causes in every part of our country and in every one of our 1500 communities, so that’s a great achievement.
And finally membership continues to grow. The Join Us campaign is starting to make an impact and last week we had over 30,000 new members join the Co-op. So that’s some great stats, I hope to give you some more next week, but until then, join us.
Mike Bracken
Chief Digital Officer