CEO Update – January 2023
What a year it has been!
It was great fun to celebrate the 25th anniversary of our co-op. Thank you again to David Lach, who, as member #9 is one of Modo’s longest-tenured members, for reminiscing with CBC on our milestone and reminding us that, while much has changed in terms of vehicles and technology, we have remained true to our Purpose from that very first day. We continue to innovate – a recent example is our child car seat pilot program which is seeing good results. So far, so good as we continue to seek new ways to make carsharing more accessible to more people in more places.
It has been a busy year. Long-time members like David were joined by more than 5,000 new members, bringing total membership to more than 28,000 by year-end. You kept our Fleet team busy as you logged more than 13 million km on a fleet that has grown to more than 800 vehicles and kept our Member Care team active with more than 100,000 emails and phone calls. A busy year indeed!
During the year, we continued to engage with the community on numerous occasions, including marching proudly in the Victoria Pride Parade, crewing a celebration station during Vancouver’s Go by Bike Week, helping out at the Big Elf Run and providing electric vehicle education to the public in Kelowna and Nanaimo. We were proud once again to donate our entire hourly revenue on September 30th to the Indian Residential School Survivor Society and were very pleased to be invited by the Musqueam Nation to locate a shared electric vehicle at their leləm̓ community development at UBC.
Thanks to the nearly 3,000 of you that responded to our recently completed annual member survey. Once again, you expressed a very high level of overall satisfaction at 95%, with ease of booking and vehicle variety getting particularly high scores. And 94% of you said you were likely to refer Modo to a friend. (In case you haven’t already done so, that would make a wonderful New Year’s resolution 😊).
In addition to the ratings, you also provided a large volume of comments, which we have learned much from. Comments such as “I love being a Modo member. Car-sharing is one of the easiest things…and is convenient and saves me a ton of money” and “You guys are great. I’ve had Modo for a number of years. I appreciate the convenience, low cost and great service. It’s such a great alternative to owning your own vehicle. Keep doing what you are doing!” are moving to read. We deeply appreciate your confidence, support and feedback.
In an effort to gain deeper insights into member views, we launched the Modo Advisory Council and had the first meeting in November. Thank you again to the 300+ members that expressed interest in participating and to the 15 that were ultimately selected for the first cohort. That first meeting was oriented to our transition to electric vehicles and yielded some constructive insights. More on this later as we go deeper into EVs and other topics in subsequent meetings.
And finally, while there remains work to do to close out the books, I can confidently say that our co-op is in good financial health, and we have continued to bolster our resilience against whatever the future may bring.
We wish you a great start to 2023 and underscore our commitment to keeping your co-op affordable, convenient, inclusive and sustainable.
