GiftCard Partners Blog

Timeliness!

Incentive Magazine recently published an article called
“Forget Employee of the Month and Focus on Employee of the Moment”, where they discussed the rise of importance of immediate rewards for brilliant performance. In the past year, our connected sociability brought a 250% increase in tweets per day, 100% growth of LinkedIn users, and Facebook’s increases logins to 250 million each day, indicating a rapidly growing culture of immediacy. How does this effect HR professionals? Razor Suleman’s Incentive article announces that it’s time to institute an “Employee of the Moment” strategy by launching a social networking campaign to:

All employers use the upcoming holiday season as an opportunity to recognize their employees. Whether it is a holiday party, bonuses, or rewards such as gift cards, holidays are the time to say "thank you" to your employees.  But more and more companies are using the recovering economic climate as a tool to recognize employees and energize them for the year ahead.  Instead of just saying "thank you" retroactively employers are now using holiday recognition to renew employee commitment and drive, and catapult the momentum into the year ahead. Boosting employee morale at the end of the year is a way to boost morale and confidence in the year ahead. "If business is moderate or down, there's an attitude that develops and you are not in a good place when you look toward the next 12 months." says  Robert Preziosi, professor and chair of management at Nova Southern University. Confident employees who feel valued reduce fear and increase productivity. Does your company try to close with a boost in revenue? Do you make an effort to recognize employees to increase confidence and productivity? Let us know what your company is doing for its employees this holiday season.  
For more about holiday rewards as motivation for the new year click here.

Veteran’s Day is this Friday, November 11th and we're seeing lots of gift card promotions, offers and sales …but how many of them actually benefit US Veterans? One VA Medical Center held a women’s health program that gave away $20 gift cards to women who received HIV testing in the month of September. This was a great way to support our veterans while promoting routine female healthcare checks and disease control. You may know that GCP has been collecting and sharing the great employer health and wellness uses of gift cards that we are capturing in our series of surveys –
check out our blog: Health and Wellness Employer Gift Card Successes: for more great healthcare gift card uses. Source:
The Business Journal of Greater Milwaukee

eGift and mobile gift cards are a popular topic as excitement grows around digital technologies. CreditCards.com reports that one half of the major gift card brands that offer eGift cards only started offering them this year. Retailers and merchants are ramping up to take advantage of growing mobile and tablet buying segments, as they are quickly becoming some of the most valuable online shoppers. Interestingly, when GCP recently surveyed B2B gift card buyers; we found that the B2B market still prefers to purchase physical plastic cards over

Wellesley, MA – November 1, 2011 – Today
GiftCard Partners (GCP) announced the addition of four new client brands: The Limited, Burlington Coat Factory, Speedway gas, and Boston Market. GCP acts as an outsourced program management team and extension of their retailer and merchant clients’ gift card marketing teams by creating or further developing their B2B gift card programs. GCP places these brands into corporate gift card programs such as employee incentive programs, loyalty programs, workplace programs like health and wellness, fundraising, Scrip, and consumer promotions (incentive/gift with purchase).