Great Mondays

While working with Costco's marketing department, I was responsible for finding local events and potential partners that Costco could collaborate with to increase membership sign-ups.

This meant researching sports tournaments, community gatherings, family events and local organisations to identify opportunities worth pursuing.

The process was time-consuming. Information was scattered across websites, social media and event calendars.

And finding an event was only the beginning. Someone still needed to identify the organiser, find their contact details, reach out, arrange a collaboration and eventually understand whether the event generated new memberships.

I realised that much of this process could be made significantly more efficient.

I saw an opportunity to turn a repetitive marketing task into a more automated, measurable workflow.

What if every Costco warehouse could receive a shortlist of relevant local partnership opportunities every Monday?

Instead of spending hours searching for events, the person responsible could focus on contacting organisers and securing worthwhile collaborations.

And by recording how many memberships each event generated, the system could eventually learn which opportunities delivered the strongest results.

The goal was to save time, improve outreach and make community marketing more effective.

Great Mondays is a marketing intelligence and partnership discovery tool designed to help Costco warehouses identify and pursue local collaboration opportunities.

Each warehouse can be configured with its own location and search radius. Every Monday, the system is designed to generate a shortlist of upcoming events and potential partners within that area.

Rather than presenting an overwhelming list, it prioritises opportunities using factors such as location, event type, audience and potential relevance.

For each opportunity, the tool is designed to provide the event name, date and location; distance from the selected warehouse; event category and audience; organiser information and available contact details; a relevance score and explanation; a suggested outreach email; partnership tracking; and membership sign-up results.

This creates a workflow from discovering an opportunity to evaluating its eventual marketing performance.

Great Mondays started with a problem I experienced directly while working with Costco's marketing department.

Finding events, researching organisers and identifying worthwhile partnerships required considerable manual effort.

I saw an opportunity to build something that could simplify that process for individual warehouses while making community marketing more measurable.

The ambition was never just to find more events.

It was to help employees spend less time searching, more time building partnerships and ultimately make better decisions about where Costco should invest its marketing efforts.