A couple of months ago I was at a very nice pub close to our office in Beaconsfield, The Royal Standard of England, and a couple things struck me.
First off was just how long this giffgaff thing has been going on. Giffgaff is an old word that means to give a gift and get one in return – and it plays a big part in the history of The Royal Standard. The pub supposedly received its royal warrant as a thank you from King Charles for hiding him from the Roundheads (although its apparently more likely due to the blind eye the landlord turned when the King met up there for liaisons with various ladies).
The pub also has a good selection of ales – some of which the landlord has as a “guest” - they’re usually a bit experimental and always get a debate going amongst the regulars about whether they should stay or go.
So in some ways The Royal Standard is like giffgaff – in fact that’s why we're introducing giffgaff labs next week – our version of a guest beer.
The idea is that we offer something new and different for our members to try out for a short period of time – if its wildly popular we’ll keep it going and if not we’ll move on to something else. Its also a great place for us try out some of the great ideas that our members submit in to our ideas board.
The first giffgaff lab is all about flexibility. The trouble with many so called “value bundles” is that you have to guess up-front how many minutes you need to buy. Buy too many and they’re wasted, buy too few and you have to pay higher rates when your bundle runs out. So they can end up not being very good value at all.
But with our first giffgaff lab you can get 75% of our standard call and text rates for a whole month just by paying £5 – that’s just 2p for calls and 1p for texts. There’s no limit on how many discounted calls and texts you can use – and as long as you use more than about 3 minutes of calls or 6 texts a day you’ll be better off vs our standard rates.
So regardless of whether you’re a giffgaffer or not why not tell us what you think in our community forum and vote in poll that will be going live next week.
Cheers!
Mike Fairman
gaffer@giffgaff
P.S. If you want to hear more about how giffgaff is run, and how we’re making waves by pioneering ways of working with our members I’ll be talking about this at the ad:tech conference on 22nd Sept.
