Shop Tablelands Gift Cards
Shop Tablelands Gift Card program is an EFTPOS based system aimed at keeping money within our local community by encouraging people to shop locally.
They are a great option for Gifts for that hard to buy for person or as a Corporate or Business incentive for your team.
The plastic gift cards tap into infrastructure that is already in place in our community, that being the EFTPOS network. This means that no additional hardware or software is required to setup and operate the system. You receive the money into your account immediately, and the cost of the transaction is the same as a usual EFTPOS card (savings / cheque account, not Credit Card).
It is often stated that $100 spent locally equates to a $180 impact on the local economy due to the multiplier effect. That is, when money is spent locally, some of that money (about 40%) is then reinvested into other local stores and so on, and so on (about 7 times). The Shop Tablelands Gift Cards help facilitate the multiplier effect by ensuring that whenever one of our cards are purchased, this money then needs to be spent back in local stores.
We will be printing 3 Gift Card Designs to start with, covering Atherton, Malanda and Ravenshoe. All of these cards will be restricted to spent only at participating businesses (sign up below) within the Tablelands Regional Council region (we are in discussions with Mareeba Chamber to expand this region to include them).
Among these participating businesses will also be a smaller subset of businesses where the cards can be purchased and ‘loaded’ with the desired funds. These businesses are what we call ‘Load Up Stores’.
Thanks to an Economic Development Grant from Tablelands Regional Council we are able to offer the first year free to Atherton, Malanda and Ravenshoe Chamber of Commerce members. We are also extending this to the first 50 ‘non-member’ businesses to sign up, after this promotion the annual fee for the first year is currently $55.
We will be provided with detailed quarterly reports so that we can see which businesses are benefiting from the program. After the first year, this will allow us to devise a percentage based fee structure to ensure all size businesses can participate.
Register your Business to accept Shop Tablelands Gift Cards
Once the cards have been designed and printed, we will have a team of volunteers visiting participating businesses to activate their EFTPOS terminals onto the closed loop system. Unfortunately devices such as Square Readers are not eligible as they cannot be connected (they are working on this, but there is no clear solution in the near future).