Davenport-based TapOnIt’s “Keep it QC, The Community Gift Card” has made the shortlist for the Incentive Marketing Association’s (IMA) Summit Awards.
The IMA awards represent the best programs and individual contributions across all sectors of the incentive industry. TapOnIt was recognized for The Excellence in Gift Cards in an Incentive Program Award.
Also making IMA’s awards shortlist was the Tango Card – Charity On Top. Tango Card is a gifting app founded in Seattle, Washington. The card is designed to push funds to nonprofits to help those impacted hardest by COVID-19.
Award winners will be announced at the IMA Awards Ceremony on Tuesday, July 12, during the IMA Summit 2022 at The Cliff Lodge in Snowbird, Utah.
TapOnIt built a new platform, The Community Gift Card, in 2020 to help drive sales into local businesses when the world was in turmoil, and online spending was on the rise, the company said in a news release. Partnering with the Blackhawk Network as a Visa/Mastercard gift card provider, the platform provides communities with a web page where consumers can order gift cards branded for their community to be spent anywhere that credit cards are accepted.
The Quad Cities Chamber of Commerce and TapOnIt launched the Keep It QC (KIQC) Community Gift Card in October 2020. “The local branding on the individual community’s gift cards, marketing, and mailers helps encourage consumers to think about local businesses when spending the funds,” said TapOnIt founder and CEO Katie Castillo-Wilson. “Our goal was to make it easy for consumers to help support local businesses and their communities during this difficult time.”
It worked, according to Mike Oberhaus, interim president/CEO of the Quad Cities Chamber.
“TapOnIt has been a valued partner in creating the Keep It QC (KIQC) movement and showing the power of doing business locally to advance the Quad Cities’ regional economy,” Mr. Oberhaus said.
“The KIQC Visa gift card is just one portion of this program and Ms. Castillo-Wilson’s company is an example of the campaign’s embodiment,” he added. “Every dollar we keep in the Quad Cities increases our collective success. By supporting local businesses and & Keeping it QC, we as a community improve the region’s economy, help our businesses rebound from the financial impact of COVID-19 faster and make our community a better place to live.”
Since its inception, Mr. Oberhaus said QC gift card sales have exceeded $260,000. While they can be spent anywhere, “with the Keep It QC card we pumped approximately 78% of those sales back into our region. The best part of this campaign is that it doesn’t require any additional spending on the part of the consumer– just a change in where they are spending – to Keep it QC.”
Following the success of Keep It QC, The Community Gift Card has launched across several other communities with similar goals of helping to drive consumer spending across their local business, TapOnIt reported in the news release.
“Our company started The Community Gift Card as a unique way to keep people thinking local. We were excited when the No. 1 sales driver came from major corporations using the gift cards as ‘Thank Yous’ for customers and employees. What a great way to give people a way to choose where they want to spend the gift, all while supporting the local community,” Ms. Castillo-Wilson said. “I’m very proud of our team’s work on this program and am excited for that hard work to be recognized.”
TapOnIt is a female-founded, Hispanic-owned text message marketing company. Its proprietary SaaS (software as a service) Text Marketing Platform is used across the country by businesses of all sizes to build, grow, retain, engage, and even monetize databases of users that have opted-in to receive content from them via SMS and MMS. The company launched in April of 2015 and has sent millions of text messages to thousands of brands.
For more information, visit taponit.com