Taking our partnership to our people

Virgin Media launched its two year Transforming Lives partnership with Scope, the UK’s largest pan disability charity, in July 2015. The partnership is underpinned by a corporate donation from Virgin Media of £1million which has been used to; Connect Families, Inspire Independence and End the Awkward. Click here to find out more about these three great projects and what Scope and Virgin Media have achieved together to date.

The partnership with Scope is really important to Virgin Media and I’ve seen first-hand how enthusiastic our employees are about it. For example, just over one year into the partnership, our people have fundraised an amazing £161,571.85, more than 250 people have signed up for sporting challenges and over 1,720 bags of stock have been donated to Scope for their charity shops, worth upwards of £37,000 as gift in kind.

We have a lot of employees – 13,000 here in the UK– so we embrace every opportunity to ensure our people are aware of the partnership and know what they can do to support it because engaging this many people is no easy task. Recently an opportunity presented itself in the form of Summer Sessions. This is an annual briefing event for our frontline teams, whose jobs involve daily interaction with our customers.

The event is one of the biggest employee engagement events in our calendar, with over 2,000 people attending. The purpose of Summer Sessions is twofold; primarily it provides our front line teams and managers with an important update on business priorities and performance. However the event is also about boosting awareness of other initiatives within the business and having some well-deserved fun. This is called the ‘hands on’ tent and we made sure our Scope partnership was on show in style there.

Summer Sessions visited our six biggest contact centres and our Transforming Lives partnership stand was manned by some of the team from Scope. The stand provided information about the partnership and gave our people the opportunity to have a go using some assistive technology devices which Scope guided each person through.

Our people really valued hearing how our partnership has evolved in the last year and what Virgin Media and Scope have achieved together to date. Having watched people trying out the assistive technology, I can safely say they were blown away by being able to write their name using their eyes. You can find out more about our partnership with Scope here.

Organising Summer Sessions is an enormous project. This year’s was a great success and I am looking forward to including Scope in next year’s event once again.