Join Us

500,000 new members since September

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We’ve passed the 500,000 new member mark since we launched our new Membership in September last year.

With the additional 500,000 members (531,000 is the latest figure) we have 4.16 million active members. This is fantastic because it means that there are now 4.16 million people who are earning 5% for themselves and 1% for their local cause when they buy Co-op branded products.

Celebrating 4,000 local causes with films

There are now 4,000 local causes which members can choose to give their 1% to and we were lucky enough to work with Shane Meadows on a series of films about some of them. On Monday we held a screening of the director’s cut – a combination of all the films in the series. We invited some of the people Shane featured in the films as well as local Co-op colleagues and Co-op Council members.

photograph of people watching the join us film at the screening

Hard work is paying off

I’d like to thank the whole team for their hard work making things better for our members and the local causes our members support. Of course, we’re not finished yet. We’ve already said  we want a million new members in 2017 and Channel 4 news anchor Jon Snow is one of the 90,000 members who joined us since 1 January.

Channel 4 news anchor Jon Snow holding up his Co-op membership card next to a Co-op colleague

You can keep an eye on our progress on our Membership data page.

If you haven’t already, sign up to become a member. Join us.

Rufus Olins
Chief Membership Officer

Mike Bracken: data, dividends and ‘Join Us’

mikebracken

Mike: This week, stand out stuff is data and dividends and join us. Let’s start with data, had the data leaders back this week for the second, people from all over from the co-op working on our data principles. We’re getting to grips with this, remember I said last year at the AGM, we would become synonymous with radical transparency. We’re really getting ready to get those data principles out, not just in the Co-op but with our partners and supply chain, that’s better for our members, so keep watching the blog for that.

This week some more numbers around Membership. We have made a real breakthrough with member data. We’ve gone past 4 million active members, that’s a huge rise. That more than 412,000 new members since September 21st (2016). That keeps going upwards, we keep improving the service, Derek, Nathan, all the team working on membership are continually iterating and making it better for members.

Big feature this week for some older people like me, is the dividend numbers. Many people remember the dividend and the dividend points, you can now see those on your own personal page on the membership site. You can go to coop.co.uk/membershipdata and see all those dividend points and all the other things that make up great membership.

So, the final number on membership is we’ve now passed the 20 million mark in returns we’ve passed back to our members, both in the 5% back to individuals and the 1% to causes, so it’s looking great and we keep passing barriers all the time.

The final thing to say this week is we launched our campaign and you’re gonna see more of this nationally and locally about how to join the Co-op. We’ve have a great film by Shane Meadows, we showed that as we always do to colleagues first in Manchester on Wednesday, the first place you can see it is shown before Trainspotting in cinemas in the very near future so do watch it. The film is all about the Co-op, all about our values and it encourages people to join us, so if anyone’s watching this video, join us.

Mike Bracken
Chief Digital Officer