Contribution of Customer loyalty programs to charity

Charity is one of the most admirable areas where customer loyalty programs have shown up their support. They provide customers with an option of donating their earned points towards their favorite charity or a community project.Hudson Bay’s Company was one of the first companies who introduced a program where customers can donate their reward points to charities. Even companies such as air miles are providing tax receipts on all donations you make through their card. This is a unique way of maintaining loyalty with the customers and at the same time serving community causes. On the other hand, Aeroplan has set up a special account for making donations towards Red Cross Fund.

Recently, Canadian Tire came up with an innovative idea of upgrading their current loyalty program. This program is basically designed to allow customers to collect money electronically with a loyalty card or key chain fob. The main idea behind this is to reduce the use of paper money. Currently they are testing this program in Nova Scotia. The customers also have an option to donate Canadian Tire money towards their charity program called JumpStart. I would say this new program will also help in saving trees and will definitely be considered as an environmental friendly loyalty program.
Few months ago, Air miles came up with an idea of giving instant cash rewards to its customers. Before, it was quite hard to redeem rewards for air tickets as one had to collect a certain number of air miles points before they could redeem them. However, now they have made some changes to their loyalty program allowing customers to redeem their air miles points for cash. A lot of positive changes are being made to customer loyalty programs to make them more attractive to customers.