local causes – Co-op Digital Blog

Co-operate: an online platform to bring communities together

May 30, 2019benrieveley

We recently launched Co-operate, an online platform aimed at bringing communities closer together.

So far, our research has told us we should be designing something that makes it easier for people to:

start local groups and find others to team up with
find a community space
club together financially to reach a goal
come together and campaign for something they’re passionate about

As always, we’ve started small. We’ve restricted Co-operate to one area for now: Stretford in Manchester.

This post talks about the research that’s shaped the product, what we’ve done so far, and why Co-operate is so very ‘Co-op’.

Community is part of what all co-operatives stand for

The Co-op shares many values with other co-operatives including ‘self-help’ (members joining together and making a difference) and ‘self-responsibility’ (every member supporting their co-op’s activities and using its products and services and encouraging others to support it too).

‘Concern for the community’ is one of the Co-op principles. One of the ways we demonstrate this is by giving 1% of what members spend on Co-op branded products to a local community cause of their choice. Since we launched the new Co-op Membership in 2016, £31.7 million has been invested in around 4,000 community projects thanks to members’ 1%. This has supported a range of community groups including adult literacy classes, youth clubs and schemes that bring isolated older people together close to where they live.

Our new Co-operate platform is an extension of these values and principles. It aims to help communities to make changes autonomously through co-operation – it’s a natural fit for the Co-op.

Clarifying the problem

Last year Co-op started to look into communities. The previous exploration and tests showed us that the combination of people and technology can make it easier for people to co-operate. Over the years, we’ve interviewed volunteers, charity workers, social entrepreneurs and community leaders to find out what’s stopping local communities from coming together to make themselves stronger.

Their research reaffirmed our assumption and we’ve recently been able to clarify the problem: People find it hard to connect and make things happen in their local community.

From this, we set our vision: Build the one place to go to make things happen in local communities.

Ambitious, bold and exciting.

Starting small and locally

As with all digital products we knew that we would need to start small, test, learn and iterate. We decided to do a series of hyper-local trials across Greater Manchester and build collaboratively with users in those areas.

We started in Stretford by assembling a small, multi-disciplinary team and behaving like a start-up. We wanted to build a lean version of the service so we could learn quickly, without wasted effort. By manually adding content ourselves rather than building an expensive content management system, we know what is useful.

Listening to users

We’ve been talking to community organisers in Stretford – the heroes who have managed to start groups that benefit the local area. They’ve told us about the challenges they’ve had to overcome and the ones they’re still struggling with. Most told us:

promoting events time-consuming
finding more volunteers is hard
co-ordinating volunteers is difficult
getting access to funding is complicated
connecting with other organisers doesn’t happen often

A lot of this is consistent with the research that was done last year. But we are now in direct contact with these people, and see them as an extension of our team. They are the subject matter experts – they’re living and breathing life in a community every day and pushing to improve things for many.

First feature: a ‘digital noticeboard’

As a result of listening and observing, we’ve built a product that pulls together local events and activities that benefit the local area in some way. It’s a kind of digital noticeboard for Stretford called ‘What’s happening’.

We’ve set up a simple, flexible architecture using our Heroku prototype platform along with Contentful, Algolia and Gatsby.js. This lets us quickly try things whilst at the same time being secure and performant.

To get to this point we:

Took photos of all the noticeboards in the area.
Analysed the information and grouped it into categories.
Set up our content management interface and added in the information.
Tested it with users (Stretfordians).
Improved the UX and re-wrote some of the content to make it clearer for users.

You can see this at co-op.co.uk/co-operate.

Next time, we’ll share why we started with a ‘What’s Happening’ product and the next product that we are starting to develop.

If you want to get in touch, email us at co-operate@coopdigital.co.uk

We’re particularly interested in understanding what you’d need to know before you would commit time to helping out in your local area.

Ben Rieveley
Product manager

Helping member pioneers and local causes get to grips with social

July 4, 2017May 24, 2018Co-op1 Comment

The Social team has been running online tutorials to help colleagues, new member pioneers and people from local causes use social media to create a community.

You can join our tutorial about Facebook communities on Thursday 6 July from 5pm.

Working together

Part of a member pioneer’s role is to get people talking about what matters most in their local community through meetings and events, and to encourage people to volunteer and co-operate on worthwhile causes.

My role as part of the Social Media team has some similarities. Our team’s purpose is to spread the word and encourage people to engage with their Co-op, but we do it online rather than down the local community centre. It made sense that our team shared some of our online community management skills with the new member pioneers. We wanted to help them promote their work and talk about what being a co-operative means in a wider sense.

Figuring out how we could help

The Social Media team met our member pioneers at their induction day to get a feel for how we could help them. We wanted to speak to them to find out their level of knowledge around social media before we spent time and money on designing training materials we thought they might need.

The things they wanted to know more about were:

which social channel is the right one for them or their cause
how to set up a new Twitter account
how to find people in their community on Twitter and who to follow
what ‘trending’ means
what type of thing they should tweet
what a hashtag is and how to use one
how to get started with local PR

Live broadcast tutorials

When we knew where member pioneers needed support, we could put together tutorials to help. We’ve been hosting them on YouTube Live then making them available on YouTube for anyone who missed out.

We broadcast our first tutorial ‘Getting started on Twitter’ a few weeks ago and welcomed around 30 live viewers including colleagues, member pioneers and people from local causes. People could ask us questions in the live chat as we were going along and we’ve had over 400 views of the recording too.

Our second stream was about ‘Creating content to share with your community’. In it, our social media content planning manager, Cat Storey, talked about what makes good content and how to present it.

You can watch these videos on our YouTube playlist and give us feedback to help us improve.

Join our social community of practice

We’d like to keep the conversation about effective ways to engage with people going. We listened to member pioneers and set up a Facebook group where we can chat and share advice and ideas. If you’re a member pioneer or work closely with one of our local causes, join our social community on Facebook. Hear from you soon.

Scott Bennett
Social media community manager

Join our tutorial about Facebook communities on Thursday 6 July from 5pm.

Steve Foreshew-Cain: paying £9 million to local causes and hosting our first digital operations show and tell

April 21, 2017Co-op

Steve: Hello and welcome to the weekly Digital update. Now the eagle-eyed amongst you will recognise that I’m not Mike Bracken but given that I have shaved my beard off for Easter this week you might also not recognise who I am. So, I’m Steve Foreshew-Cain and I’m the Chief Operating Officer for the Digital group.

As is the tradition in these updates we start with a big number and it’s important big number this week because this week marked the day that we gave away £9 million to our community local causes nominated by our members.

And there’s another big number associated with membership this week which is that we have welcomed 800,000 new members to the Co-op since we launched our renewed membership proposition. An impressive achievement by any standard.

The other important thing to call out for those of you who are interested in the community work that we do is an opportunity to get directly involved in that by joining as a Member Pioneer. The deadline for that, to sign up, for that is the 26th of this month so less than a week away, but if you’re a colleague or if you’re a member of the Co-op you still have an opportunity to join that important work.

Another important activity this week was the first of our digital operations show and tells where we talked about platforms, we talked about service management and we talked about security and how those capabilities form a part of the digital services that we deliver and we operate.

And as is also traditional in our weekly update we say a big hello to new members of the Digital Team to a big shout out to Ian Thomas and Michael Davis who’ve joined our data team and a big hello to Debbie Roycroft who’s joined as a software engineer in our digital engineering practice.

And of those of you who are watching this because you’re interested in the work that we’re doing here at the Co-op as ever the opportunity to come and join us exists so please look at all of the opportunities that we have out there and get in contact.

Steve Foreshew-Cain
Digital Chief Operating Officer

Giving local causes the £9 million our members have earned

April 18, 20173 Comments

Co-op members earn 5% for themselves and 1% for their local cause when they buy Co-op own-brand products. The local cause funds have been building up since we launched our new membership in September and have reached approximately £9 million.

Six months on, we’re now starting to pay that £9 million to the 4000 local causes over the UK.

To celebrate, we worked with director Shane Meadows to show some of the projects our members have been supporting. Here’s his film.

Thank you to our members for helping us make a difference to your local communities. Like George the Poet says in the opening line of the film, “Great things happen when we work together.”

If you haven’t already, join us and become a Co-op member.

Mike Bracken
Chief Digital Officer

Members, have you chosen a local cause?

April 3, 2017April 3, 2017Co-op1 Comment

This Saturday, 8 April, is the deadline for Co-op members to choose which local cause their 1% will go to. If you haven’t chosen already, sign in online and you’ll be prompted to choose one. You’ll see this:

From this date we’ll have a new set of projects in your community for you to choose from.

How it all works

Each time members buy a Co-op branded product and swipe their membership card, they earn 5% for themselves to spend at the Co-op and 1% for their community. They can choose which local cause their 1% goes towards.

And things are going well. At the time of posting, Co-op members have raised over £4 million for local causes. Co-op supports up to 3 local causes in over 1,500 communities across the UK. You can learn more about how we’re getting on on our local community fund page.

We talk about the 5% and 1% stuff regularly on the blog but we haven’t spoken in much detail about how everything works behind the scenes. So here’s what happens next.

Paying out after 6 months

We let the funds from the 1% build up for 6 months, so in this case it’s from September when we launched the new Membership, to now.

At the end of each day a member’s 1% balance is checked and one of 2 things happen. If a member has selected a cause, the 1% earned goes into that pot. If they haven’t, the funds stay put in an unallocated pot.

At the end of the 6-month cycle we’ll do the number crunching. Then we’ll split the 1% balances for anyone who didn’t choose a cause equally between the causes in their community. We’ll then send the sums over to the Charities Aid Foundation (CAF) and they’ll process the payment so each local cause gets what they’re due.

See where your money’s going

Very soon we’ll have a new page on the Membership website where you can see your giving history. The page will show a list of the causes that you’ve supported. From here you’ll be able to see how much you’ve contributed as well as revisit the profile pages of the local causes to see how much they raised.

A new set of projects from local causes

If you’re a member you’ll carry on supporting the cause you chose until 8 April or until you choose a different one. On 9 April however, we’ll have a new set of projects from local causes for you to choose to give your 1% to. Between November and January, local causes applied to be part of the new round of funding. Since then we’ve checked the applications are eligible and have given our colleagues a say in which local causes they want to be part of the Local Community Fund.

You can become a Co-op member online or pick up a temporary card in store.

You can see the latest data on the 5% and 1% rewards on our Membership data page.

Liam Cross
Agile business analyst

500,000 new members since September

February 3, 2017Co-op3 Comments

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.

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.

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

Join us! We want a million new members in 2017

January 18, 2017January 18, 2017Co-op4 Comments

In 2017 we want to recruit 1 million new members to our Co-op. That’s a million more people who can join us in making a difference to causes in local communities.

Picking up where we left off

We made big changes last year. Our return to a brand identity rooted in the Co-op’s history meant we went ‘back to being Co-op’. We also went back to putting our members and their communities at the heart of everything we do. Since we launched the new Membership in September, our members have already earned around £16m for them and £3m for local causes. We update the figures each week on our Membership Data page.

Nothing made up

If you become a Co-op member you get 5% back on anything you spend on Co-op branded products as well as 1% to put towards a cause in your local community. In 2017 we’ll be spreading the word so more people know about the difference that choosing Co-op can make and more people will want to join us. To achieve this we’re changing the way we’re communicating with our members and potential new members.

‘Nothing made up’ is one of our communication principles and that means we show real people in real communities who can benefit from becoming a Co-op member. It made sense then to make the people who keep the local causes going in communities the stars of the show.

We also wanted to strip back the gloss of advertising and make something unembellished and emotive and show people being completely natural in front of the camera. We were thrilled to work with director Shane Meadows who does all those things superbly. He also shares our values.

Real people. Real communities. Real causes

So Shane has created a series of short films that show some of the 4266 causes (at last count) that are being supported every day by Co-op members. You can see the films on our Youtube channel.

Here’s the director’s cut which will be shown in cinemas across the UK from 20 January.

This is just the start. 2017 marks a new way of advertising our Co-op. We offer value with values and we’re going to shout about it.

You can keep an eye on our progress towards the 1 million new members on the Co-op Membership Data page.

Join us. Sign up to become a member.

Helen Carroll
Head of Brand

Local causes and location

November 17, 2016November 21, 2016Co-op2 Comments

Charlotte King recently talked about the changes that we’ve made to make it easier for our members to select a local cause to support with their 1%. I’ve been looking at those local causes, what type they are and where they are in the United Kingdom.

This image is a scatter plot of those local causes that our Co-op Members are supporting when they buy products and services from us.

This shows the relationship between the people who live in the UK and the Co-op. The Co-op is supporting local causes right across the nation so where there’s a community, there’s likely to be a good cause that our members are supporting.

What do the colours represent?

When a local cause applies to receive support, they’re asked to classify themselves into a category like ‘Health’ or ‘Environment’ and the colours above are distinct for each category.

I’d love to give you an interactive map where you can explore the data for yourselves but I can’t do that today so instead, I’ve done some exploring for you.

This scatter plot below just has the categories Health (yellow) and Community Development (purple).

Both types are widely spread but something I noticed was that there seems to be a split between the urban centres of Greater London and Northern England. London appears to be more densely covered by Health causes whereas places like Greater Manchester, Merseyside, Leeds, Tyneside are more balanced with Community Development causes.

Here’s another plot, this time with Social Inclusion (black) and Young People (blue).

Social Inclusion causes seem relatively concentrated in certain areas of the country. These tend to be the main cities. Causes within the category of Young People are both numerous and well spread, there seems to be a nation wide concern for causes that will help the next generation.

Don’t forget we’re looking for the next round of good causes to support in May 2017, the closing date for applications is 16th December.

Alex Waters
Data Science.

Making it easier for Members to choose a local cause

November 16, 2016November 16, 2016Co-op3 Comments

I’m Charlotte and I’m an Agile Business Analyst working on the Membership service.

Since launch of our new Membership, one of the things that we noticed was that the number of our members selecting a local community cause to support with their 1% was lower than we expected.

We looked at what the analytics were telling us

30% of total members clicked through to the causes page from the member dashboard.
72% of new members were clicking through to causes.
64% of members visiting the causes page then went on to select a local cause.

Statistics from 21/9 – 18/10 from Google Analytics.

We listened to what our members were saying

“I want to support the cause I saw in my store not one of the three you have shown me”.

“I don’t understand how the funding cycle works”.

“I don’t understand why I am being shown these causes”.

Feedback from 21/9 – 18/10 from user research/feedback form.

We identified some key outcomes

Increase members understanding of the cause selection process.
Increase members understanding of the funding cycle.
Increase click through rate from the member dashboard to causes for new members.
Increase the number of members selecting a cause to support.

What changes did we make?

We added new content onto on to the website explaining the funding cycle and how the causes were selected.

We now display the cause that a member is supporting on their membership dashboard.

We ask members to check their address if they didn’t have any local causes displayed.

We improved the site by simplifying the information displayed within each of the cause summary panels and removing the support button to make the whole panel clickable.

We improved each cause profile page to include the button and changed the call to action from “Support” to “Back this project”, making it more meaningful.

We’ve improved the journey for members so that they are able to navigate to a cause profile page by using the URL. This will allow causes to promote themselves (and their URL) and allow our marketing emails to promote specific URL’s.

What difference has this made so far?

We’re now averaging 19% click through rate (of total members) to the causes page from dashboard (decrease of 11%).
However we’re seeing an average of 79% click through rate for new members clicking through to the dashboard (increase of 7%).
76% of members visiting the causes page go on to select a local cause (Increase of 12%).

Statistics from 18/10 – 11/11 from Google Analytics.

You can see that the total number of members clicking through to causes has decreased. We expected this to happen as a direct result of us displaying the cause that a member is backing on their dashboard. The number of new members clicking through to causes has increased by 7% which was one of our measures of success. Those members that do click through to causes, are 9% more likely to support one of the local causes.

It look’s like our changes have made a positive impact to date. It will be interesting to to see how these figures change when we give members the option to support a different community with their 1%. This functionality will be coming shortly.

Don’t forget we’re looking for the next round of good causes to support in May 2017.

Charlotte King
Agile Business Analyst