What’s different this time around?

Last week saw the launch of our latest Sustainability report. Over the last few days I’ve enjoyed receiving feedback into my inbox and on Twitter – it’s fascinating to see who picks up what bit of the report. That’s what I love about our approach, it works for our many different audiences. My personal favourite this year is our new sustainability vision film – due to popular demand we’ve recreated our first film from 5 years ago, to enable our employees to tell our story, you can watch it here. We had to buy a lot of brownies and cupcakes to say thank you!

So what’s new with our approach this year?

An updated strategy – After talking to our employees, 500 consumers and some experts along the way, we’ve launched our new strategy. Our vision remains Digital that makes good things happen – but this is now clearly supported by two areas of focus: growing responsibly and sustainability, and doing more good with digital. We’ve produced a handy guide that summarise this. Clarity around our strategy has brought a sense of purpose, helped to drive momentum and a new sense of confidence to our plans.

Our 5 in 5 goals – these are our biggest and boldest set of sustainability goals yet. They mirror the ambition currently within Virgin Media; in February we announced Project Lightning – the largest investment in the UK’s internet infrastructure for more than a decade. Our ‘five in five’ sustainability goals sit alongside our ambitious growth plans and will ensure we grow responsibly and sustainability, while doing more good with digital. You can view our 5 year roadmap here.

Partners – We know that people are key to helping us to achieve our goals, that’s why to date our focus has been on embedding accountability for sustainability issues within the business. Going forward, we also think that partnering will be key. Our new two year charity partnership with Scope is a perfect demonstration of how we can use our knowhow, people and a little Virgin Media magic to truly transform the lives of disabled people and deliver real social impact. It’s so far been a lot of fun working with the team at Scope.

Improved navigation - As always, we used a twinned concept of ‘human’ and ‘digital’ for our report. The purpose of this was to ensure we continue to utilise the best available digital technology while harnessing the power of our best asset - our people. This year we focused on the user experience - making the navigation much simpler and easy.  We spent a long time thinking about the navigation for the site - now all of our content is easily reachable from our website homepage. ‎We also avoided throwing links in everywhere that would mislead people and take them on a convoluted journey - all content in this year's report has a clear home and journey to access it. We hope this means users won't be frustrated and feel that they can't find what they're looking for.

As always, we think reporting is all about having an open and honest conversation – we’ll keep the blog posts coming (written by people within our business), to give live updates on what we're up to behind the scenes and we hope you find that our content is shareable. As always, please do get in touch and let us know what you think.

I’d like to thank my team for all their hard work in pulling together our goals and report – we got through a good supply of Twirl bars in the process!

Katie