A couple of weeks ago an e-mail came through from the Cabinet office at Number 10, asking if they could talk to me. Intrigued, as you would be, I said yes. Once on the phone it turned out there was an independent review of the “The Power of Information” being carried out, primarily looking at improving e-democracy and how Government should be interacting in the modern age.
This week the review’s been published and it’s a hefty tome. I’m very proud that MoneySavingExpert.com is oft cited and held up as a model of how to reach people and allow interaction and info and held up as a remarkable new body. You can delve into the full report yourself here. The Power of Information
Some of the main bits mentioning the site (there are many):
Remarkable New Bodies:
“Amid this explosion of user-generated sites there is much that is of little or no relevance to government: online chat about bands, films, socialising and so forth is rightly considered none of the public sector’s business. But there are sites that clearly relate directly to major government agendas and that are highly popular. MoneySavingExpert, for example, is a site dedicated to helping people save money and get better deals on all sorts of goods and services.
“Its forum has 180,000 members and millions of visitors each month: easily on the scale of friendly societies or trade unions. One of the principal catalysts for this review was the need to find out how government should learn to live in a world that contains such remarkable new bodies.”
Box 18: MoneySavingExpert (www.Moneysavingexpert.com)
MoneySavingExpert is a journalistic consumer finance website set up by specialized broadcaster/journalist Martin Lewis, to show people how to save money on financial services and other consumer products. The site reports over 2.5 million unique users each month, with 1.3 million people receiving the weekly email. The site has a very popular forum which has over a million readers a month and 180,000 members. One of the site’s many campaigns involves helping consumers to campaign against bank overcharging. Since November 2006, over 3.3 million template letters been downloaded to this end, with thousands sharing tips and reporting successes.”
