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Brandon Burton 0:00
This is the Chamber Chat Podcast, the show dedicated to chamber professionals to spark ideas and to get actionable tips and strategies to better serve your members and community.
Hello, Chamber Champions. Welcome to Chamber Chat Podcast. I’m your hosts Brandon Burton. And it’s my goal here on the podcast to introduce you to people and ideas to better help you serve your Chamber members and your community. You’re joining us for a special episode as part of our 2023 ACCE Chamber the Year Finalist Series.
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Becki Womble 1:03
I’ve been using Community Matters for probably six or seven years now. And in a previous life, I sold commercial printing so I can highly recommend Community Matters because it’s a complete turnkey job for any busy chamber exec and it’s a wonderful, beautiful printed product whenever you’re finished. And I just I’m very sold on Community Matters. And with a printing background I just big endorsement from me.
Brandon Burton 1:44
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Our guest for this episode is Donovan ski Donna is the co founder of Yiftee Donna has combined her interests in local community building and her interests in high tech to co found nifty to bring profitable business to local shops and restaurants. Yiftee has grown to more than 500 communities now 15,500 merchants and helped to keep $45 million local to help small businesses just the last three years. Prior to giftee. Donna has led several startup companies and worked with top tier venture capital firm. She teaches entrepreneurship at Stanford University and frequently speaks on topics related to entrepreneurship and women in business. Donna holds a BS and industrial engineering with distinction from Stanford University and a Harvard MBA. And Donna, I’m excited to have you with us today on chamber chat podcast, I’d love for you to take a moment to say hello to all the chamber champions that are out there listening and to share something interesting about yourself so we can all get to know you a little better.
Donna Novitsky 3:05
Thanks, Brandon. And hello chamber champions. It is such a pleasure to be here. I’ve really enjoyed meeting many of you at the ACCE show and on zoom over the year, last few years. But let’s see something interesting about me. Well, I guess depending on how you count them, as As Brandon mentioned, I’ve been in tech. So Yiftee is my third or my 19th. Startup. out right. So I guess you could say I’m an entrepreneur at heart. My dad taught me that word when I was 12. And it kind of stuck. So I love starting new things and helping others do so too. So I end up doing a lot of coaching and mentoring of young people, which is super fun, because they’re always challenging me to learn new things.
Brandon Burton 3:58
Right now that is that is interesting. I like getting these little facts about people. And I’m sure we could dig in deeper on on how you count those businesses that you’re part of starting. Well, before we dive into our topic for today, why don’t you take a few minutes and just tell us a little bit about Yiftee what Yiftee is kind of the purpose the vision with it. And then we can dive in a little bit deeper on on how it all works.
Donna Novitsky 4:24
Okay, great. So we launched Yiftee over 10 years ago, and for the first five or six years, the business went through the typical startup rollercoaster. In 2018. We did the first what we now call community cards. And I’ll talk a little bit more about that in a minute. But then the pandemic hit in 2020. And many chambers were worried about losing all their small businesses and they were looking for ways to help their members and we happen to have a solution for that. So calm cards as We call them took off. And as bright as Brandon mentioned, were in more than 500 communities and 15,000 local businesses. So I guess you could say we got here with hard work, a lot of stubbornness and even more luck, because who would have predicted a pandemic? We’re a small team. We are 100% remote and our headquarters in the Bay Area. And we have teammates in California, Michigan, Ohio, South Carolina, Florida and Puerto Rico. So we’re all over the place just like you guys.
Brandon Burton 5:35
Awesome. Now that definitely gives a good introduction to what Yiftee is, and I’m excited to get in a little deeper on it as we settled on our topic for this discussion. Today we are going to talk about keeping local dollars local. And as I mentioned in your bio, you guys have helped keep over $45 million local for small businesses and communities across the country. So I’m excited to dive in deeper on this learn how the program works and help tell chambers how they can help keep dollars local in their community as soon as they get back from this quick break.
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Raquel Borges 8:28
What if you could keep holiday shopping local this year? Launch a community card with Yiftee. And you can. Hi, I’m Raquel from Yiftee. Yiftee works with over 500 chambers, main streets, cities and downtown associations providing custom branded electronic gift cards that can only be redeemed at your local businesses. This program is free for you and your participating businesses. And if you sign up now, you’ll watch your local businesses thrive this holiday season. Email sales@yiftee.com to learn more, that’s sales@yiftee.com.
Brandon Burton 9:08
All right, Donna, we’re back. So tell us what with Yiftee How does it work? You’d mentioned these comm cards. So what is a comm card and how does it work and how does it lead to keeping dollars local?
Donna Novitsky 9:23
Okay, a comm card or community card. It’s a digital gift card and it is branded for a city town or neighborhood and can be redeemed exclusively at the local shops and restaurants in that area. So shout out to Spartanburg South Carolina chamber who was our very first chamber customer back in 2018. Followed by Lake Zurich, Illinois, Niles, Illinois and DeWitt, Iowa. If you’re out there thank you guys. Chambers often make the program a member benefit because they Control specifically which merchants can participate in it. It’s kind of like next generation chamber checks. But we do all the sales, customer service technology and financial management. And our chamber partner in each community promotes the program and recruits the merchants. So it’s a real partnership with the chambers.
Brandon Burton 10:23
So what does the recruitment look like as the chamber goes out to recruit businesses to participate in it? Is their marketing material that’s provided as their scripts is their coaching that goes along with it? What does that look like?
Donna Novitsky 10:36
Oh, that stuff. So in terms of getting the program up and running, we all they have to, there’s no cost. First of all, for the program, the chambers don’t have to pay anything. And the merchants don’t have to pay anything to participate. And it’s backed by MasterCard. So any merchant that takes MasterCard can participate in the program, and there’s no special equipment or integration with their POs that they need. So all they have to do is sign the agreement. And then we’ll have their portal set up within 24 hours. And we start sending lots of materials, there’s a four week launch program with lots of materials. So we’ll give you the copy to recruit an email to send an email message out to your members to invite them to the program. And then when you’re ready, we send what we call an activation card to the merchants, which is a 10 cent prepaid MasterCard, they process that they get the dime. And that registers their POS with us. And that’s how we limit the cards to be used exclusively at your members businesses. So we’re providing a lot of information along the way. Honest, to be honest, the long pole in the tent in terms of getting the program running is, is recruiting the merchants because they are just super busy. And you got to get their attention. So
Brandon Burton 12:05
Right. So in your experience over the years of launching these community card programs, is there an ideal time of year? Or does it depend on the community? Or how did how do you see the most successful timing maybe as far as rolling out a community card?
Donna Novitsky 12:22
Well, as you guys might know, gift cards are the number one requested holiday gift. So that means that your merchants are probably paying more attention to gift card programs at the holidays. So the ideal time to launch it takes about four weeks to launch in general, you can do it faster, but would be probably around September, October, because that’s when your merchants are starting to think about gift card programs. And you’ll it’ll be easier to get their attention. So we do six months worth of business in the month of December. So Oh, wow. By far the high point of the year for for the gift card business.
Brandon Burton 13:15
Yeah. So can you talk to us a little bit more about the digital gift, gift card aspect of it. So it’s a digital gift card in nature. So how does that work? Does it go on their phone? How do they do the transactions? How do they make the purchase? How does that? How’s that all of that structured?
Donna Novitsky 13:32
Right, so this is an all digital program. That’s how we can do it without any cost to the chambers or the merchants. So there’s no little plastic cards. The way that it works is people you’ll have a website where that we host for you, but it’s branded for your community, so you don’t even see it on that website. It’s all about your local community. And people you put a link on your chamber page, a button that says buy our community gift card, and go there to buy the gift card. And it’s just a really simple process that they go through to buy that card online. They can either send it to whoever they want to send it to through email, or they can print them out. So if they want it put it in somebody’s holiday stocking, they just print it out and put it in the in their holiday stocking. Then the recipient will get that either on a piece of paper or through email. And they take it into the shop. When it’s by eat if it’s on paper, they can also save it to their phone with a QR code. And they take it into the shop or the restaurant and show their phone to the say one of your merchants who is participating in the program. They will process that MasterCard, it’s a MasterCard so that merchants gonna process it like a like a phone order. So they would enter that the code from the MasterCard, MasterCard immediately validates that transaction And they know they’re gonna get paid in their normal nightly settlement with all the other credit card transactions from that day. And then the balance on the phone will change. So if you had a $25 card and you bought a cup of coffee, now your phone’s gonna say you have a gift card for $21. And I could go next door to the next shop and get my nails done or buy something in a boutique. So it’s multi use card, just like a MasterCard gift card, but it only works at your members stores.
Brandon Burton 15:31
Yeah. So I see, you know, similarly, I’ve got kids in high school, and every year that football team does their little, they do a fundraiser where they’re selling coupons to local businesses, and, and this year, they went digital with it. So it’s on your phone, you got to go show, if you go to the restaurant, it’s not nearly as high tech, you’re literally showing them the screen. And then they go manually enter it and it’s done. But I see this as being much more valuable in the fact of you have $1 amount that’s fixed with this gift card with this community gift card. And then you have your list of vendors that you can go spend it on whatever you want with any of these vendors, right, like you’re not limited to redeeming, you know, $5 off after a $25 purchase or anything like that. It’s not a confined it’s an actual cash on a card,
Donna Novitsky 16:23
right to build just like any other gift card, but it works at multiple different stores. And you know, until the money runs out on the card.
Brandon Burton 16:31
And then is all the list of vendors is that just kept up to date on the website, or is that within? How do the users of the gift card keep up to date on who’s participating? Yeah, we
Donna Novitsky 16:43
maintain that. So if a merchant if a new merchant joins your chamber and they and you want to add them to the program, they will automatically show up on the website once they run their activation card. And the all the people with cards out there in your community can just click on the card itself, scroll down and see all the participating merchants so it’s automatically updated.
Brandon Burton 17:07
Okay, so as a chamber rolls out a community card program, who are the typical people who are buying the gift cards and why?
Donna Novitsky 17:18
Well, that actually we had some surprises on that. So of course, when you think gift cards, do you think consumers so there’s a healthy chunk of consumer business of the people who buy cards, but also where a lot of our business comes from is bulk purchases. So again, if you have chamber checks, you know you sell a lot at the holidays from local businesses who buy them for their employees so they can keep their money in the community. Well, that has happened in spades with this program so schools will buy them for all the teachers in the school. Kent State University bought 10s of 1000s of dollars for their faculty of the Kent Ohio card. We’ve had Spartanburg had their local hospital buy cards. Frankfort, Kentucky and Riverdale Park Maryland have government programs for low income families where the government funds cards for these families and all the money stays in the community. Realtors and developers in Mountain View California give them as welcome gifts to new tenants and homebuyers. A nonprofit in Bullock, Arizona buys them for their volunteers, employers in Detroit and lots of other cities buy them for employee reward programs. And of course, there are huge corporate orders or holiday gifts. So that was we didn’t understand when we started this company that things you learned that about a third of the 180 $9 billion US gift card market is corporate purchases. Before this program, all that money was going to the big box stores and E commerce like Amazon and Starbucks, right? So now those organizations have a way to keep their dollars in the community. And that has been a great opportunity for us
Brandon Burton 19:23
that really turn the light on in my head going through that explanation because especially at the holiday time, a lot of these major employers, a lot of them are going to be big supporters of the chamber financially, you know, maybe some of the major investors, but they also have a lot of employees in the community. And around the holiday time it’s a normal thing to see whether it’s bonuses or some kind of a gift or maybe they give you know Amazon gift cards or Starbucks gift cards like you’re saying and if they can make that shift and say here’s a community gift card that you can use it any one of these men ders, that’s listed in the community. And instead of sending all of this, you know, purchasing power to Amazon, let’s keep it in our community and have it keep turning over, you know, time and time again. That’s very powerful. So I’m curious it with an individual chamber running their community card program, are they able to keep track? Or is there like a running total of how much money they’re keeping in their community?
Donna Novitsky 20:26
Yeah, there is. So we give them they can run reports anytime they want. As I mentioned earlier, they have a portal and you can log into your portal and run a report and see everybody that has purchased cards, and their how much the dollar value of the card and how much remains on the balance of that card. And they actually have marketing rights to that information. So if you have a chamber newsletter, you could add them to your newsletter or something, you know, contribute to building your community. But my favorite report is the gifts redeemed report. Because in that report, you can see every single transaction that was spent at each merchant in the program, so I could see that $4.27 was spent for a cup of coffee at the local coffee shop, I could see that someone went to a boutique and spent $92. So I can’t we don’t tell you who had the coffee or went to the boutique, that’s a privacy issue. So we don’t share that information. But for your members, you have reports of exactly how much business you have walked into the door in their stores. So yeah, program, you can really show the value added.
Brandon Burton 21:42
Yeah. And there’s really there’s no cost or no downfall really for business to participate to if you’re that local coffee shop or retailer. There’s, there’s no downside to it, it just gets access to more people coming in and to be able to get a report from the chamber saying we’d sent X number of dollars to your business over the last year, whatever the timeframe is, that can be pretty powerful, and and create that stickiness factor with your members with your with your chamber. Yeah, so I can imagine, you know, over the 500 communities that you’re working with, and over the years, that there’s probably been some pitfalls in rolling out a program. What are what are some of these things that you see that maybe get overlooked? Or maybe assume maybe something’s too easy? What are some of these pitfalls rolling out? The community card program?
Donna Novitsky 22:38
Yeah, life happens, right? Go. So honestly, the hardest thing about the program where the snags can happen is on the merchant recruiting side, you know, you think it makes so much sense, because it’s all upside for them, it doesn’t cost him anything, and we’re going to drive business in the door, but they are busy. And this is something new, and it needs to be explained. So sometimes that takes more time than the chamber anticipated. And it just doesn’t happen. Or it doesn’t happen as quickly as they wanted. So that’s one thing to be prepared for. And we’re always upfront about that. The cool thing is, as we and then I guess I would say the other thing is, you guys in chambers wear so many different hats, right? So the program will get launched. But then you’re off to planning, you know, the labor day parade or the Halloween festival or whatever is happening next, because there’s never a dull moment in the chamber. So the focus on marketing the program locally in the community wanes, and then the community forgets about it. So what we’re doing is, since we’ve been able to grow, I’m beginning to have started hiring some people on the 50 end, to help out our chamber partners and help them recruit some of those bulk purchasers or do some local marketing for them, or even help recruit those merchants. So as we grow, we will continue to be able to put more resources into ongoing sales of the cards and training and recruiting of merchants.
Brandon Burton 24:16
Yeah. So the thought just came to me as I say, for example, a chamber says we want to do a community card program. What is the onboarding process? Like? Do you try to get a certain number of vendors on board with it? So there’s some value as you start selling the cards or where’s that balance where that trade off is like Okay, now it’s time to turn this on and start selling the cards.
Donna Novitsky 24:39
Yeah, it’s a chicken and egg thing, isn’t it? Right? You need merchants you need card buyers. So we always say for the merchants. The best way to recruit is every community has two or three trendsetter merchants, you know the ones who are out there ahead of the pack and the other merchants really respect them generally So you start with those guys. And then they can help you recruit the next wave, we’d like to say we’d like to see around 15 to 20 merchants on the program at launch. And that’s plenty. And then it just grows from there. So they can get added in over time as as they figure out what’s going on in want to jump on board.
Brandon Burton 25:21
So that definitely makes sense. And there are those trendsetters and those individuals in the community that have some influence that that can bring others along with them. So great strategy. As we start to wrap things up here, I wanted to ask, I’d like asking if there’s any tip or an action item you might have for chambers who are listening, who want to take their chamber up to the next level, what what piece of advice might you have to offer?
Becki Womble 25:50
Let’s see. Well, there’s
Donna Novitsky 25:53
one more aspect to the program that I wanted to make sure and cover, which is which was also I mentioned at the beginning that we got here through a lot of luck. This is another part of the luck piece. So since 2021, when the US federal government issued $350 billion to the cities all across the country, 19,000 cities, and in the American rescue plan act, some of that money is still floating around out there. It doesn’t have to be spent until it doesn’t have to be allocated until 2024, or spent until 2026. And a lot of those dollars have found their way to this program. As a bonus program. So for instance, buy $100 card, get a free $50 card. And that is a win all the way around. Because to the merchants, they’re going to see it’s going to triple the grant money, right? To the consumer, they’re getting free money. And also to the merchants, it’s driving foot traffic into their stores, which is what they really need long term is the community shopping there and developing those new shopping habits. So I just want to throw that out there. Because I probably should have mentioned it when you asked about who buys the cards, because that has driven a lot of purchases lately.
Brandon Burton 27:22
Yeah. We also want to circle back to that.
Donna Novitsky 27:25
Yeah, we also have seen some programs sponsored by banks or realtors will sponsor bonus programs. So while it while that’s still that money is still available, it might be worth speaking with your City Office of Economic Development to see what might still be out there on allocated.
Unknown Speaker 27:48
That’s good. Yeah.
Donna Novitsky 27:50
So back to your other question of what to think about now? Well, you know, of course, I would love to, we’d love to chat with you and see if this kind of a program would be a good fit for your community. So that would be the next step, I guess.
Brandon Burton 28:05
Yeah. Well, and as many of you know, EFT is one of the sponsors of chamber chat podcast and the shows only here because of the sponsors that keep it going. So love for you to reach out and check out EFT and see if it’s a good fit for your community. But Donna, I like asking everyone I have on the show, as we look to the future of chambers of commerce, how do you see the future of chambers and their purpose going forward?
Donna Novitsky 28:34
So like, as I mentioned, we attend various chamber events like the ACCE and some of the regional ones. And it’s clear to us that chambers are really community builders. They bring residents, merchants, employers and city government together for the betterment of the community from a business point of view. And this program is something that we think is that is truly actionable and provides measurable results to the Chamber’s members, both for the employers who purchased the cards and the merchants who redeemed them. So I just see chambers can continuing to do what they do, which is, you know, build their communities from a business point of view. And hopefully, we can be a tool that helps them do that.
Brandon Burton 29:25
Awesome. So why don’t you share with everyone how they can reach out and connect. If you have any other questions about how the community card programs work, and how to get in contact with your team and get things started in their community. What would be the good next step or where would you point them to?
Donna Novitsky 29:42
Sure Yiftee.com and you can sign up there for a demo. We do them three days a week. And usually there’ll be a couple other chambers or sometimes main streets or downtown’s on the demo, which is super fun. It’s like little zoom party we have. And everyone gets to hear each other’s questions. And I love the collaborative nature of this community of chambers. It’s such a joy to work with people. And from there, you’ll get plugged into me or probably you’ll meet Raquel or Tyson on my team. And they’ll be doing a live demo. So you can ask all your questions. And we go from there. We’re happy also to do webinars or demos for your board of directors or whatever helps you.
Brandon Burton 30:33
Yeah. So another question I thought of Do you ever see a chamber and a Downtown Association, Merton to come together in a program like this to really leverage the the impact they both have all the time? Awesome, good deal? Well, I’d encourage everybody to reach out and and check out the demos they offer the FDA offers and just you know, explore it, see if this is a way that you can help keep local dollars local in your community and make a bigger impact as you and your chamber continue to build your community. Donna, I appreciate you coming on with us and spending time with us today on chamber chat podcast and, and I hope a lot of people take you up on the offer to check out what you guys have to offer in their communities.
Donna Novitsky 31:22
Thank you so much. And thanks to all the Chamber Champions out there for what you do. It’s amazing.
Brandon Burton 31:27
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