This week’s Glad Tidings is all about value - both for your wallet and for the planet.

Ben opens with a simple question: if £5 could turn into £2,000, would you be interested? That’s the essence of Glad. For just £5 a month, members unlock exclusive savings while their membership fees go into the Climate Pot - funding the removal of greenhouse gases already in the atmosphere.

So how do we measure the savings? Rather than intrusive data tracking or surveys, we calculate “Savings Value” - the amount a member could save up to per year across all live offers. Right now, that figure sits at £2,400 a year and it’s climbing quickly, with two or three new brands added every week.

Our goal of course is to ensure the savings outweigh the membership fee, meaning members stay both cost-positive and climate-positive.

This week also saw two exciting savings additions:

• Pact Coffee - a certified B Corp offering a free cafetière (worth £26.95) with every subscription.

• Gandys - 12% off their travel-inspired clothing and accessories, with 10% of sales funding education projects worldwide.

And of course, there’s the totaliser update. The Glad community has now funded the removal of 52,000 kilograms of greenhouse gases - a number that keeps growing as more members and partners join in.

Another week of progress, another reminder that small contributions really do add up to something bigger.

Watch Episode #15 now

Links

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Transcript:

If I could take five of your hard-earned pounds and turn it into £2,000, would you be interested? And what if that same fiver went directly to cleaning up the mess we've made of our atmosphere? So that whilst you were saving money, you were also helping to save the planet.

Hello, and thanks for tuning in to Glad Tidings, your weekly update on the Glad community's journey towards cleaning up the atmosphere. I'm Ben Wynn and today we're looking at just how much money you can save as a member of the Glad community. How we calculate it and why the amount is increasing so fast each week.

So let's talk about savings value shall we? That's the metric we use to measure the value of the Glad Climate Saver Card. Now you might be new here and you might be new to the world of Glad. So let's do a quick reminder. Our approach to tackling climate change is really, really simple. We focus on providing incentives that make it worthwhile for people to take action. Joining Glad costs £5 a month and it gives you access to savings on everyday essentials and nice to haves from really well loved brands. We then take those membership fees, pool them together into a climate pot and deploy that climate pot to cleaning up greenhouse gas that's already in the atmosphere.

And so given that savings are a core part of what we do at Glad, we felt it was appropriate to quantify just how much a member could save. And to do that we'd love to be able to talk about the actual savings made by members so that the data is real. And it comes from real spend, real savings made by members. But there's a problem with that.

One way we could tackle it is through deep integration with our brand partners. So technical integration deep into their systems so that every single transaction could be fed back to us and we would understand exactly how much is saved. There's a real problem with that. Not only would it put many partners off, it would take a lot longer, cost a lot more to build, and it would mean that the pool of brands we could work with and the amount that they could afford to invest in the saving itself would be diminished. So we feel that's counterintuitive.

There's another way we could do it. We could just go and ask members. So every time a saving is redeemed, we could knock on the members door and say, well, exactly what did you spend and therefore how much did you save? We could do that. But for us, it seems a little intrusive, far too cumbersome, too costly and just not really the right approach.

So instead, what we've decided to do is calculate savings value as the amount you can save up to. And we found a way to do that, which is simple, quick for us to do. We can do it using our own algorithm, and we do it this way. We take every single member and we look at the saving they're providing, and we look at what they sell, the products or services they sell, and how they price it. Is it per product? Is it a subscription? Is it a contract?

And so with analysis of is it a percentage discount, is it a fixed price saving, we combine all of that together and with a unique approach for each partner we look at everything they sell and find the most expensive items. And we do that because we want to communicate savings value as the amount you could save up to.

And right now, across all Glad partners, that value is £2,400. Now, we're not saying that with £5 a month membership you could get £2,400 or that most members are doing so. We're saying that's the amount you can save up to.

We believe that all we really need to be doing is making sure that savings value goes up so that on average members save more money than it costs them to be a member of Glad. So it costs £5 a month. If we can get that to be that you can access savings more than £5 a month, we feel your cost positive whilst being climate positive.

So we're at £2,400 right now. The number is going up quickly and that's because we're adding two to three brands every single week. And speaking of which, a couple of brands added this week.

First up is Pact Coffee. So Pact Coffee, a certified B Corp, they're offering Glad members a free cafetière worth £26, £27, £26.95 with every subscription taken out. So if you're a Glad member and you want some new coffee, you want you to up your caffeine dose, then go and get your coffee from Pact and you get yourself a free cafeteria.

Next saving added this week is with Gandys So this is 12 % off their offering Glad members. It's a travel inspired lifestyle brand with a brilliant backstory. It's two brothers who founded this business. They're also a certified B Corp and they donate 10 % of all of their revenue to educating children worldwide. So a fantastic purpose led brand. Really pleased to have them on as part of the platform.

So next good news is good news for my own OCD. So where's our totaliser at? Our totaliser is the amount of greenhouse gas that us as a community will remove from the atmosphere from your contributions, from your membership fees. And my OCD is happy this week because it's at a round number, it's 52,000 kilograms.

Okay, so that's all we have time for this week. Thank you all for listening. Thank you for watching. Thank you for being a part of this community.

Until next week, goodbye.