Membership

Co-operate: an online platform to bring communities together

benrieveley

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.

Poster that says: 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.

poster that says: 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’.

Photograph of Co-operate's What's happening in Stretford

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:

  1. Took photos of all the noticeboards in the area.
  2. Analysed the information and grouped it into categories.
  3. Set up our content management interface and added in the information.
  4. Tested it with users (Stretfordians).
  5. 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

Karen Lindop: Agile Manchester plus work begins on personalised digital offers

Co-op

(Transcript) Karen Lindop: Hello, and welcome to our update on what’s happened in the Digital team this week. It’s been a short week, but there’s no shortage of things going on in the team.

We’re proud to have been a sponsor of Agile Manchester this week. As always it’s been a brilliant couple of days, thank to the organisers who have done a great job. Also a massive thank you to Gillian MacDonald, Neil Vass, Ian Thomas, Danny McCarthy, Cara Bermingham who all presented, doing a fantastic job of representing the team and Co-op at the event.

This week our Membership ‘join in’ monthly email was released. This month we’re focussing on pizza, neighbourliness and digital coupons – so there’s something there for everyone. If you’re interested in finding out more you can from our Membership website.

You may remember reading a few months ago a blog post about about the discovery work that some of the team did in partnership with our food colleagues to investigate personalised offers for our members. Well the team have reformed, with the aim of building an end-to-end test of personalised offers via digital channels, ready to test with real members in Q3, 2018.

They are made up of colleagues from our Food business, Retail IT and Digital, each bringing their own expertise to different parts of the service. If you’re interested in finding our more they’re based on the 13th floor of Angel Square.

This week we’ve had some new people join us. Tom Clegg, Daniel Cork, Paul Clarkson, Tom Simcox and Marianne Knowles all join our design community. We also welcome Dale Hudson and Michael Doyle as front-end developers. Welcome to Co-op everyone, it’s great to have you here.

That’s it for this week. Don’t forget to subscribe for all our updates on our blog and follow us on Twitter. See you next week.

Karen Lindop
Head of Digital Operations

What local cause data tells us about our members

Co-op

We’re proud of the Co-op Membership scheme and what it gives back to our members and local communities. When members buy own-brand products or services from Co-op, we give 5% back to the member, and 1% to the Local community fund to support local causes as chosen by members. At the end of each funding period a new ‘round’ begins and members can choose from a new set of local causes.

Now that 2 rounds of payments have been completed, the Data Science and Community Engagement teams have been looking into the data and what it tells us about our members, the choices they’re making and what those choices might say about us as an organisation.

Learning more about the Local community fund

We looked at data around causes across 10 different categories:

  1. Art and culture
  2. Community development
  3. Education and skills
  4. Environment
  5. Health
  6. Social inclusion
  7. Sport
  8. Young people
  9. Animal welfare
  10. Other

Using these categories we’ve been able to see the number of members choosing each cause, the popularity of each category, and the amount of funding each one received. We especially looked for significant or unusual data that provide specific insights and which can help direct our future campaigning.

Here’s what we found.

Community payouts increased between round 1 and 2

Our members have raised £20 million for local causes through the Local community fund  – £9,196,993 in the first round and a further £10,825,772 in the second round.

We saw a rise in the number of causes chosen, as well as in the income that was generated for each different cause category.

Young people and social inclusion received the most funds

It’s unsurprising that our data shows members supporting causes that align with Co-op values. In fact the Local community fund is specifically targeted at causes benefitting members’ local communities. However, clear favourites do emerge under each category.

For both round 1 and round 2, the category receiving the most funds was ‘young people’. Causes relating to this raised nearly £5 million: more than £1 million more than the next category down, which was social inclusion. We have done a lot of work in this area, including through our partnership with the Red Cross.

Between the 2 rounds, the number of causes related to young people has increased from 882 to just over 1,000, showing that this remains a priority in Co-op communities. Social inclusion groups have reduced in number between rounds 1 and 2, but remain consistent in the level of support they receive.

Homelessness is an important issue to members

The high number of causes in the social inclusion category, and the many members choosing to support them, provide a clear indication that members share our appetite for tackling the problems facing communities.

Causes in the social inclusion category were amongst the most successful at encouraging members to support them – proving the most popular cause in 43% of all the communities where they were represented in both rounds.

In the case of causes that are working to address social issues, such as homelessness, this proportion can rise even higher. Across both rounds, causes supporting the homeless proved the most popular with Co-op members in 55% of the communities where they were represented.

Promotion works

As we approached the end of the second round of funding, more than 1,600 members were choosing a cause every day. This shows that interest in causes remains alive throughout the funding round, and messages about choosing causes were being received through friends and family, stores and across the media.

However we found that this number increases significantly when the Co-op, and causes themselves, begin to promote the Local community fund. The chart below shows that once social media is used, either by Co-op or by the charity, to highlight both membership and local causes, members respond by logging in and choosing.

cause-selection-promotion-04-14-nov-2017Between 11 and 13 November, driven by social media activity, the daily number of members choosing a cause rose 78%. This then increased to a total of 35,000 on 14 November when we emailed our members encouraging them to select a cause, showing clearly that email is currently our most effective tool for mobilising people.

Round 3: hoping for even bigger payouts

If you’re a Co-op member, you can now choose your next local cause by logging into your account. Alternatively, if you’re involved with a local group or established charity, you can register your interest for the next round of the fund, and use social media to raise awareness. As we can see from our data, that can make all the difference.
Simon Kirby, Community data and insight manager
Charles Gordon, Senior community data analyst

Steve Foreshew-Cain: the Funeralcare service exits beta and Design Manchester has begun

Co-op

(Transcript) Steve Foreshew-Cain: Hello and welcome to this week’s Co-op Digital update.

Well since I last spoke, our Membership app trial with our colleagues has begun and over a thousand people have already signed up to join the trial. They’ve been giving us loads of feedback already and we’re learning quite a lot from it so we’ll be sharing what we learn on our blog.

Some other great news, the service that we’ve been working on with our colleagues in Funeralcare has exited its beta phase. There’s been a lot of hard work since we did the initial inception back in April 2016, but as a team were really proud of the product that it has been built and the amazing job frontline colleagues have done to help us design a service that we have proven works and will give colleagues time back to care more. So big thank yous to all of those involved.

Now you may remember a few weeks ago I told you that The Federation had been nominated for an Inspired Places Award 2017. Voting opens today and we’ll share the link on our blog and our Twitter account so please, please vote and remember if you’d like a tour of The Federation, get in touch with Victoria Howlett who can arrange that.

This week also saw the start of Design Manchester, Manchester’s annual design festival. It runs until the 22nd of October and there’ll be talks exhibitions workshops films and loads more across the city celebrating design in all its various forms. We’ll be running and speaking at several events this year too so we’ll be talking a lot about service design, something that’s really relevant to what we do here in the team. Everyone’s welcome so please once again, the links to register will be on our blog. Please take advantage.

Now, yesterday it was our pleasure to host the first Northern Data Governance Forum. It was great to welcome lots of organisations to share their thoughts and experience on data governance. Thank you to Catherine Brien and Ian Thomas from the team who were amongst the speakers there.

And finally this week Kate Towsey has joined us as a user researcher and she’ll also be helping us build our very own user research lab in The Federation, so welcome Kate, it’s great to have you onboard.

That’s it for this week you’ll find our latest vacancies on our blog and don’t forget to subscribe for all of our updates and follow us on Twitter.

We’ll see you next week.

Steve Foreshew-Cain
Group Digital Director

 

The last 2 weeks in Co-op Digital

gailalyon

As always, there’s been a lot going on over the last fortnight. Here are 8 highlights.

1. We put our app for members live on Monday and so far we’ve had 1,000 colleagues sign up, with 500 downloads. We’re trialling it with colleagues and a handful of members at the moment to validate our assumptions. Users can give us their feedback through the app and we’ll post more about what we’re learning and where we’re going next as the trial continues. You can read about our discovery into the app and our progress 2 months later.

2. The Leading the Way team went to a conference for Food store regional and area managers. We showed off our products How Do I and My Schedule and got some great feedback. We also ran sketching sessions with over 200 attendees! We asked the field teams to share their ideas on how life could be made easier in store which was a really useful exercise. We also got lots of validation on things we are already doing.

3. Congrats and thank you to data scientist Alex Waters who organised our first data hackathon. Around 50 folk from around the Co-op Group teamed up and worked with data that wasn’t familiar to them and used tools they’d never used before. You can see highlights of this massively valuable event on #coopdatahack

4. Our Head of User Research James Boardwell and our old colleague Tom Walker have set up a meet up for user researchers, User Research North. Tom wrote a post explaining why they’ve co-founded this group and last night they held their first event at The Federation. Speakers included Gillian MacDonald, user researcher at Co-op Digital and major foodie, and Mark Branigan who worked with our Funeralcare team.

5. We held our first show and tell for everyone who works in The Federation. Each organisation described what they do and what they’re working on. Here’s to more of these cooperative vibes please.

6. Danielle Haugedal-Wilson has been asked to join our Co-op Member Council. She’ll help make sure that members’ opinions and concerns are heard at the highest level in our business. Nice work, Danielle.

7. Alberto Brandolini came in to show us how to do some ‘event storming’. Alberto says this technique helps teams “tame complexity with agility” and by helping them understand the bigger picture. Thumbs up to Gemma Cameron for organising this.

8. Lastly, hey there and welcome to our new starters. Digital Engagement Manager for The Federation, Rebecca Rae and quality analyst Paul Carey have joined us.

If you’re interested in working with us, have a look at our work with us page. You can also follow the blog and follow Co-op Digital on Twitter.

Gail Lyon
Head of Digital Engagement

Dave Johnson: introducing ‘Fed Talks’ and more on our mobile app

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(Transcript) Dave Johnson: Hello, and welcome to this week’s Co-op Digital update.

You may have read our blog post last week about the mobile app that we’re building to allow our members to scan their phones at the till and view their balances and transactions.

We’ve spoken to our store colleagues and customers and our members who’ve highlighted that a digital membership card could provide value to our members. We’re building the first part of this new functionality to act as a platform to grow in the future and we’re going to test it with our colleagues first in the support centre here at Angel Square.

We have show and tells every other Thursday, so come and join us. They’re in the auditorium on the 6th floor at Federation House. The first one’s on the 10th August at 2pm.

We also held a ‘Fed talks’ session in Federation House this week. The theme was food and agriculture. Thanks to Lawrence Kitson for organising and for Shirley Sarker and Abby Rose from Wool for spending their time talking with our colleagues. Thank you.

The lower floors of Federation House are also coming along with the coffee shop, events spaces and meeting rooms – they’re all almost ready. If anyone would like a tour you can contact Victoria Howlett who will happily show both Co-op colleagues and anyone else who is interested the space at Federation.

In the last few weeks we’ve welcomed a few new faces to the Digital team. Paul D’Ambra has joined us as a software engineer and Hannah Horton joins us as a content designer.

Finally, congratulations to Karen Lindop who is now our Digital Head of Operations and also to Gail Lyon who has been acting in the role for sometime but is now our Head of Digital Engagement. Well done.

That’s it for this week, don’t forget to subscribe to our blog and follow us on Twitter. Thank you.

Dave Johnson
Director of Digital Engineering

Making the move to user research

Co-op

User research helps make products and services that work for the people who use them. It takes loads of different forms including lab sessions and interviews, onsite visits and analysing data but, regardless of its form, it must be present throughout the design process. And even after the thing is live.  

Moving into a user research role

I’ve worked at the Co-op for just under 2 years. I originally joined the Analytics and Optimisation team, but for the last 10 months I’ve been a user researcher at Co-op Digital.

User research really appealed to me because it’s about listening to users as well as looking at data. My old role was heavy on the quantitative side of things: I evaluated data collected from user journeys and improved the experience for users. Good user researchers consider both quantitative and qualitative research so I’ve been working on my qualitative research skills. Now I feel even better equipped to help teams design the right thing.

User research at Co-op Digital

I applied for a user research role after seeing the work that our now Head of User Research James Boardwell and the team were doing with wills. The multidisciplinary team was working in an agile way to build a digital service to make it simpler and quicker for Co-op customers to get a will.

I saw how both data and qualitative research fed into the design process. User research formed the basis for discussions and the team could test ideas, put them in front of people and iterate them quickly. The whole team came to user research sessions so that everyone saw first-hand how users behaved when we put prototypes in front of them and asked questions. The team analysed the themes that came out of the sessions together which meant that everyone had a similar idea about where the design was heading.

Everything moved so quickly and decisions were based on things that the team had seen or heard. At each show and tell the team knew so much more than the week before – they’d added another piece to the jigsaw. They’d started small and built the right thing, quickly. I loved watching their progress.

My first taste of user research

Supporting James was my first experience as a user researcher. I joined the Wills team during a sprint focused on increasing the number of people making it to the confirmation page. I already had good experience in this from my previous role but here I also got to see James talking to people, showing them the prototype and doing qualitative research in lab sessions.

The data I’d collected told us what was happening with real people using the website, and James’ conversations with people told us why it was happening. The data showed that the exit rate from the ‘Your details’ page was disproportionately high. Qualitative research told us that people felt uncomfortable giving their personal details before knowing exactly what the service offered. Changing the order of the pages, so, giving the user more upfront information, resulted in more people completing the form.

The 2 kinds of insight complemented each other. You can read more about this in James’ post, User research and sample sizes.

Learning how user research works in a product team

I spent 6 months working with the Membership team too. User research gives us the chance to test things to make sure we’re doing the right thing for users. This way, any decisions we make are better informed.

Working on Membership opened my eyes to other ways of doing research too. It’s not just about interviews. We:

  • used qualitative website feedback and quantitative analytics to compare what users told us with what they actually do
  • visited stores to find out what our members and customers talk to colleagues about
  • spoke directly to members

It’s about analysing all available resources.

Leading my first project

Photograph of a user research session. Shows 10 members of the Electrical discovery team talking about and analysing what they've seen in the user research lab.

For the last 2 months I’ve been leading the user research on a discovery in our Electrical business. This project has helped me learn a lot about how user research informs service design through techniques like customer journey mapping and service blueprints. Service design is a fairly new way of thinking at Co-op Digital so leading this project was sometimes challenging, but we’ve got a strong user research community at Co-op Digital and support and advice was always available if I needed it.

Hard work, but worth it

I think the biggest challenge for a user researcher is using all of their observations and data to find the need, and working with the team to translate these into things we can work on.

User research encourages teams to take a more balanced approach to design. It changes the way teams work and brings the business and digital sides of things together. It’s a way to stop people jumping to conclusions about what’s ‘right’ because we’re using evidence to make decisions. And ultimately, that’s going to work better.

If learning about how people behave and why sounds interesting and you want to help teams build the right thing, quickly and cost-effectively, get in touch with James Boardwell or leave a comment on the blog.

Vicki Riley
User researcher

Mike Bracken: 4.5 million active members, Federation and thanks to Jamie

Co-op1 Comment

(Transcript) Mike Bracken: Hello, welcome to the Co-op Digital weekly update.

We’ll start as ever with a big number, 4.5 million active members now at the Co-op, so those numbers keep growing and that’s a huge change since September 21st last year, so well done to the team for that. And that work’s being recognised.  This week the team in Membership have been shortlisted for a Retail Week Technology Award for that program, so well done to them.

Other highlights of the week, we’ve opened our co-working space in Federation building, the Federation right over the road from Angel Square you can now go see that check out the details on the blog.

I’d like to welcome a few people Nassali Douglas has joined as a Member Pioneer Manager, Richard Shenton coming as a Finance Manager, they’ve come from other parts of the Co-op, Louise Nicholas has joined us as a designer welcome to the Co-op and I’d like to say goodbye to Jamie Arnold who’s been brilliant leading our agile work as a delivery manager, he’ll be much missed.

Thank you very much to him and see you next week.

Mike Bracken
Chief Digital Officer

Speaking to our members about how their personal data is used

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Last month, the data team blogged about how we want to become trusted with our members’ data. We said that one of the pieces of work we’re doing to help us strengthen our position of trust is around understanding how members feel about personal data. We wanted to find out what our members thought about their data being used and shared for various things.

A survey to start

We asked members to take part in a survey. 148 people completed it but not everyone answered every question.

Here are 5 things we’ve learnt so far.

1. 50% want more transparency around how data is used1.2.50%-want-to-know-more

Half of the people who took the survey said they’d like to know more about how personal information is used by organisations and businesses, but they don’t know how to find out. To set the Co-op apart from the rest, we should be clear about how we’re using this information and, if people want even more information, we should make that easy to find.

This leads us to our next learning…

2. Members would like to understand how their data is used

We asked members whether they thought they understood enough about how organisations use their personal information.

Three out of 10 members said they feel they know enough or everything about this. Which leaves 7 out of 10 wanting more information or having no idea about how personal information is used. That’s good to know. It indicates we should be explaining more about what we do, and what we don’t do, with member data.

3. What people do before trusting someone with their data

When it comes to thinking about trusting an organisation with personal details, only 2% of people said that didn’t do anything before hitting the submit button.

We asked: “Which of the following do you routinely do before submitting personal information?” The most popular answer was: “Make sure I amend my marketing preferences.” “Check for secure symbols/assurance marks on the website” was a close second.

Only 3 out of 10 people said that they read the terms and conditions or small print though. We think that we could go further in making our privacy notices easier to understand and more likely to be read and understood.

4. Members are happy to share their data for the right reasons

We asked our members if there were any reasons why they’d be happy for us to safely and anonymously share their data. Unsurprisingly for Co-op members, 70% said they’d be happy if it benefited the local community! Some of the comments around this were “Because the Coop is for local people”, “Local community is important” and “Because it’s for a worthwhile reason”.

One respondent said that although they don’t like the idea of their data being shared, the best reason to do it would be if it helped the local community. That person emphasised that their data must be safe and whoever has the data must be accountable. We completely agree and we’ll continue to prioritise data safety. We will also continue to speak to our Member Council and Members as we go.

5. People trust us

Over three quarters (76%) of our respondents said that they trust us to keep their data safe and to use it sensibly (79%). This is also good news. However we can’t sit back and relax on that one. We know that we must do the right thing, not the easy thing in order to bring our Co-op difference to data. We’ll continue to work in the open.

image shows text that says: People trust us and a graphic of two hands shaking an the Co-op logo

Turning learnings into policy

We’ll look at and analyse the feedback we got from the survey more closely to pick up more themes. But the conversation around whether we use and share member data, and how we do it, isn’t closed now. We’re still listening to your thoughts on this. Over the next few months we will start to discuss improvements to our policies around data and, with a lot more information and discussion start to make those policies real.

Tell us what you think

We’re holding an event Shaping our Co-op: Data trust and transparency event at Federation House on Friday 19 May, 5:15 to 7:30pm. You can register for tickets.

We’d like to speak to members regardless of how much you know about how your data is and can be used, as well as people with an interest in data consent. The only prerequisite is that you have an interest in doing the right thing for members.

Rob McKendrick
Head of Data Engineering

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

Co-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