Hello everyone,
I have some great news to share with you all today.
Some of you might have seen a statement on Gov.uk from the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport regarding telecommunications support for the NHS frontline staff.
I am very happy to let you all know that giffgaff has proudly joined forces with the rest of the mobile networks and the government in committing support to our wonderful NHS staff during this difficult time.
Over the next few days, our teams will be working together to find the best way to bring to life the commitment we have made to ensure that our NHS frontline staff can stay connected while working remotely, without having to worry about any extra charges.
As soon as we have everything ready we will come back here to give you an update, so keep an eye on this thread.
In the meantime, I hope you are all staying safe and keeping well.
Thank you,
Ash
Update - 23 Apr 2020
Hello everyone, hope you are all well.
We recently confirmed we would join a government sponsored initiative to help hardworking NHS frontline staff stay connected during these hard times.
Teams at giffgaff have been working around the clock to find the best way to support them. We wanted to make sure that they’ll have enough minutes, texts and data to enable them to work from home without worrying about any extra charges.
As you know, all of our goodybags now come with plenty of minutes and texts, so they will keep you connected no matter which one you’re on. To match that, we’re also helping NHS frontline staff by making sure you don’t run out of data. If you’re an NHS frontline staff member and need more data to carry out your work, talk to your manager about how to make sure you’re on the NHS central list of people eligible for this.
Once you’ve registered with the NHS, there will be no need for you to change any settings on your giffgaff account in order to benefit from this, as long as you have an active goodybag. For technical reasons, we can’t add this automatically onto members’ accounts who use their mobile on a Pay as You Go basis, only using credit . If you have already registered with the NHS, use solely Pay As You Go and are unable to buy a goodybag please reach out to our agents and they can help you further.
Just a heads up - once you’re benefiting from this, the amount of data left shown on the account dashboard will appear to be frozen. Don’t worry, this is to be expected and is due to the tech magic we are implementing in the background.
At the moment, we’re offering this until June 30th and the allowances will be valid for another month after that. We’ll come together and reassess to extend this if needed. We’re also going to be keeping an eye on the data usage, to make sure that we can keep NHS frontline staff connected. We are adding some FAQs in our terms that will hopefully answer some of the questions and will update our main coronavirus page here to include all of this information.
Since this is a joint effort, the NHS will be helping us by identifying the frontline staff in need of this support and sharing the details of those that have signed up for it with us. There will be more from them soon on what the process is and we will update this post with their advice as soon as we have it. Once we have the info, it will take one working day for us to apply the new allowances to the accounts that have been shared with us.
A massive thank you from all of us at giffgaff for our wonderful NHS staff who are working day and night to keep us safe, and thank you to all of you for your continued support.
Ash
