GiftCard Partners Blog

The Citi Thank You Program is revolutionizing the use of rewards points. Imagine being able to share points with your friends to save up for a get-away weekend, or save up points with one friend for another friends' birthday present. Many people pool points for gift cards from retailers who partner with Citi to make their gift cards available through the Citi ThankYou program such as CVS/Pharmacy and Charming Shoppes stores. This allows consumers to use points for gift cards for themselves, or to use as gifts, giving the recipient of the gift a chance to choose their own gift. You could even pool points with friends and family to make a group contribution to a good cause. Well, now you can. The new Citi ThankYou Point Sharing App on Facebook allows groups of friends to pool points in order to redeem the value of the points for a bigger reward. This app is the beginning of a revolution in monetizing social media. This app is allowing users to move assets and share funds through Facebook, a social media platform. This app will soon promote itself, benefiting not just the Citi ThankYou Program, but its users and potential users as well. The more people use the Point Sharing App, the more people will post on Facebook about it, making the App and its use go viral across the platform. A rewards program that rewards itself, an incentive social media innovation.
For more information on the Citi ThankYou Points Sharing App check out the pymnts.com article.

We don't tend to cover topics outside of the gift card industry in our blog, but this story came to us and we found it so compelling, we decided we have to share. Through the NBA lockout the entire NBA community was on edge wondering if there would be a 2011-2012 NBA season, and for teams they were wondering if there would be any opportunity to take in ticket revenue this year. But not Boston Celtics’ Interactive Media Director, Peter Stringer. He was busy maximizing the Celtics' 3-Point-Play Facebook App. This App turned 5.6 million Facebook followers into revenue generating ticket holders. He used the popularity of a Facebook App to raise awareness and strength for his brand, and parlayed that into thousands of dollars in revenue for his organization. This is one instance that proves the power of social media. How will you use that power for your organization?
This social media success earned Stringer the Pymnts.com Innovator of the Week Award this week. For more information check out the article.

Internet and social media immersion is without a doubt second nature to Gen-Yers, AKA, Millennials. As a Generation X-er and an early technology adopter; I can clearly see how our most recent generation of college grads were born 1 step from where I was.  We've seen some recent research around shopping habits, customer loyalty, and working tendencies of Generation Y; I’ll bring these findings together here to offer insight in the realm of employee motivation, incentives and loyalty. “45 percent of Millennials would accept a lower-paying job with more flexibility towards social media access, remote work and technology choice than a higher-paying job with less flexibility.
¹” This is a pretty big number, but should not cause much surprise. As an entirely remotely operating company, GCP expects people to work this way, it’s in our company DNA. But we did not expect that almost 50% of a generation would prefer it. (YAY for us/GCP). Are you an employer who will rise to this challenge, knowing that embracing a remote working situation is a core motivator and a recruiting competitive advantage? In a recent national poll conducted by the No. Carolina firm of Public Policy
²; It was found that generations precluding Gen-Y, are skeptical about younger workers' work ethics, motivation and engagement in their workplace. Gen-Yer’s said this about their own generation:

We’ve been hearing a lot about how gift cards have become the most coveted gift this holiday season, as well as their rise to the number 1 spot for workplace incentives, but; do gift cards have a strong hold on the most redeemed item in loyalty programs? Really…we want to know! A recent study released in the United States, called “Born This Way: The US Millennial Loyalty Survey”, concluded that Gen Y, AKA “Millennial” consumers (those born between the mid-1970s and the mid-1990s)  “will change the way companies and brands build sustainable customer loyalty”. HOW?

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