Virgin Media O2 Renews Its Partnership With Good Things Foundation
Virgin Media O2 Renews Its Partnership With Good Things Foundation
What it means at the local level
Virgin Media O2 has just renewed its partnership with Good Things Foundation, marking five years of the National Databank, the mobile-data equivalent of a foodbank, and setting a new target of connecting 500,000 low-income households by 2030 under its Responsible Business Plan.
The headline numbers are genuinely significant. Over 550,000 people experiencing financial hardship have been connected through the National Databank in the past five years. Good Things Foundation’s wider National Digital Inclusion Network, the same network IFB Gaming sits within, has reached 1.7 million people in the last three years alone.
But the number that matters most to us isn’t in the press release. It’s this:
Almost a quarter of all O2 SIM cards distributed through the National Databank have gone out through local community organisations and libraries, not head-office logistics.
That’s the part of this story we know from the ground up, not the headline.
We’ve already seen this network work
A few weeks ago, we had a request for a SIM card from someone in East London, outside our usual Southwark and Lambeth delivery area, who also couldn’t travel to collect one. We couldn’t post her a SIM directly. But because the National Databank network already reaches into local libraries, we were able to point her to her nearest Newham library and get her connected without her needing to come to us at all.
That’s what a renewed, well-funded national partnership actually buys you at street level: more local doors that can say yes, even when the organisation someone first reaches out to can’t be the one to help directly.
Where IFB Gaming fits
Our own Winter Data Care programme and Data Waypoint network operate on the same underlying principle: national infrastructure means nothing if it doesn’t have a genuine local front door. We’re not a competitor to the National Databank, we’re one of the local access points that makes a national commitment like “500,000 households by 2030” actually reachable by an actual person, in an actual borough, this week.
As Virgin Media O2 and Good Things Foundation scale this ambition, the organisations doing the last-mile work, in libraries, community centres, and local outreach like ours, become more important, not less. National funding and infrastructure only convert into real impact when there’s a trusted local presence to carry it the final few miles.
If your organisation is thinking about becoming a local access point, whether through the National Databank, or through our own Data Waypoint network, this is a good moment to have that conversation. The demand is real, and it’s growing in places the headline numbers don’t always show.