At Virgin, we’re all about creating unique customer experiences, challenging the status quo and championing people and the planet. For five decades, in five business sectors and on five continents, our purpose is to change business for good.
The home of Virgin is Virgin Group – supporting the Branson family and the growth of the Virgin brand by developing and nurturing valuable Virgin businesses around the world. Virgin Group works alongside all the different Virgin companies and their teams around the world. Virgin Red is our loyalty platform that rewards customers who live the Virgin lifestyle. As the Virgin network hub, we foster deeper customer understanding, opening doors for partners.
Virgin’s key mission is ‘changing business for good’ and across our Virgin companies - along with our non-profit foundation Virgin Unite - we have a wide variety of activities in the sustainability and activism space.
These initiatives range from supporting mangrove forests in the Caribbean to tackling digital exclusion by rehoming old smartphones with those who need it most to trialling Sustainable Aviation Fuels (SAF).
Each Virgin company is currently carrying out their own projects, and it is very difficult to see a complete picture of our work. This means we are not able to effectively monitor and track our projects, bring together colleagues from across the Virgin companies, or share our activities with our Virgin customers, to get their support and input.
We'd like you to design and build a collaborative platform that centralises key programs and partnerships across the Virgin Group and its partners, bringing together people to collaborate and drive meaningful environmental and social action.
The platform should act as a repository for all activities, categorising and grouping together projects in similar areas. There should be detailed pages for each project which give background to the project, highlight key metrics and suggest actions that can be taken (e.g. sharing information for environmental studies, making a donation or participating in crowdsourced initiatives).
As an additional feature, Virgin customers would be able to log in via the Virgin loyalty platform and see their profile detailing the actions they have personally achieved. Adding gamification would allow customers to earn badges and compare to others, and suggestions about techniques to prevent customers gaming the system and ensuring trust are encouraged. Creative solutions about how members could collaborate, communicate or submit their own ideas for projects would be a bonus.
Your final presentation will be an interactive walk-through of the platform.
- The platform will act as a centralised location to take the Virgin customers along on our sustainability journey with us. It will inform them about all initiatives and signpost them to how to get involved to support their preferred sustainability and social action goals.
- Our Virgin companies will also benefit from sharing more details about their projects to a wider audience and allowing others to collaborate with their work. They will get support and input from others, whilst learning about similar initiatives across the Virgin Group.
As this is a prototype, we have no hard requirements for what technology is used, though we would suggest you consider designing a tool that meets basic accessibility requirements to enable all our customers to get involved.
Assume that all tracking, monitoring etc is already taken care of. In the future this could be integrated with our APIs, and we’d be interested in suggestions about this, but there is no need to set up any connections as part of this project.
Mocks and designs are fine here, the key is showcasing your ideas and what is possible.
We've provided a spreadsheet file containing a sample of our Virgin initiatives, with a summary, call to action and a link to find out more. This can be used to help with the design of your repository, to check you have included all the key details. Link to Sample Initatives (Excel File) Link to Sample Initative (csv)
[Link to the video pitch coming soon]
- The Virgin brand is well known for being creative, having fun and doing things a bit differently. We’re looking at how you can convey this feeling to our customers, and make sustainability something they would be excited to get involved in.
- The use of innovative and emerging approaches is encouraged, particularly ideas that have not been explored before. These may enhance or personalise the experience, build trust and transparency, or create features that resonate with a new audience.
- We’d love to hear suggestions of ways you think we can help people collaborate better. Whether it’s a messaging platform, skills matcher or something completely different, bonus points are available for your creative ideas that will bring this platform to life.
- The platform is intended to look visually appealing. Like the rest of our Virgin sites, we’d like this to be bold and engaging, with a touch of the playful. We’re looking for an exciting platform that has real energy to it.
- We've provided the Virgin logo in the 'resources folder' to help your design feel more 'Virgin', though please be mindful of copyright rules and restrictions.
- We’d like something that is relatively straightforward to integrate with our existing systems and that requires limited ongoing support.
- It should be simple for Virgin Companies to be able to add in details of new projects without requiring developer support.
- The platform should engage and retain its users. Your prototype should be easy to navigate and able to convey potentially large amounts of information in an easily digestible way, with clear calls to action.
- Your presentation should be well structured, understandable and easy to follow. We’re looking for you to sell us your platform and its benefits through a clear and effective walk-through. You should also manage your time to ensure you cover everything as planned.
- Tracy Ayepe, Head of Data Science
- Louisa Flemington, Lead Data Scientist
Each team member will receive a Meta Quest 3 headset