I posted a blog last week about how giffgaff wants to be a positive force for change. One of our core values is that we should be doing things for the collective good. giffgaff has a positive environmental and social stance. While we’ve be doing some thing’s since launch, we could be doing more, my blog last week alluded to this however I didn’t mention how we were going to do this.
A while back, we were talking about how it's amazing to read so many comments in the Forum and Facebook from people feeling a sense of freedom once they escaped their restrictive mobile contracts and got on board with giffgaff. When someone mentioned that people locked into contracts were like battery hens stuck in their cages the idea of freeing caged hens seemed a nice thing to do. With a bit of post rationalising it made quite a bit of sense too:
We want to free more people from contracts and let people know that unlocking a phone isn’t illegal. We want to do something disruptive, different and help out. We could also free battery hens that are in need of new homes, especially as the EU have banned caged battery hens by 2012, which means a lots of hens need re-homing.
This idea then evolved a bit more: Unlock a phone, Unlock a chicken - for each person that unlocks their phone and joins giffgaff through our Chicken campaign, a battery hen will be re-homed. It combines the message we want to portray with something we believe in.
I went to meet Wood Green, The Animals Charity to talk to them about the process of re-homing, which was an insightful experience. Wood Green care for and re-home over 5,500 animals including the introduction of re-homing ex-battery chickens in 2008. They take in chickens from Battery Farmers who no longer want or need them. They work to rehabilitate the battery chickens, as most have had a bit of a rough time, bringing them back to being happy and healthy chickens. I’ll post a separate blog on this later this week but through this campaign we have the opportunity to help 1000’s of chickens get re-homed. Wood Green run purely on denotations from the public (so they are on a shoestring, a lot like us) so it’s great that we can help out. It’s also great to support a UK Animal charity. And Battery chickens can go from this…..
This is a battery chicken, three days after being freed from a Battery Farm to Wood Green.
This is the amazing rehabilitation of a chicken, ready for re-homing a few weeks later!
This is just the first of a number of exciting initiatives that have been designed to do ‘something for the common good’. I appreciate there will be loads of opinions about the types of charities that we/individuals could and should support – I’m sure you’ll be respectful of everyone’s varied opinions, and the hard work that Wood Green largely voluntary staff are trying to achieve.
Just in case people are wondering, no Blackberry’s or Data goodybags, were hurt in the forming of this campaign, this is a separate work stream and in no way has been delayed or effected by this idea.
Tonight I'm going to talk to a friend who takes in chickens once they are rehabilitated and need a new home, to find out more about this. In the mean time it would be great to hear how many of you would support us with this campaign so please let us know your thoughts.
While this new initiative is about promoting giffgaff to an audience that hasn’t yet heard of us - our existing members can help too by supporting all the new people that come to our community – I’m sure you’ll make them feel at home.
Tom