GiftCard Partners Blog

Innovation can be hard to come by, especially during December when everyone is counting down the days until the holiday break. Crowdsourcing ideas is one great way to help get the innovative juices flowing and build camaraderie among colleagues. Here are 3 ways to cultivate and maintain your team's efforts:
Be Realistic: Identify key organizational challenges and use team competitions like a "hackathon" or a full team brainstorming day to allow employees to innovate and overcome the key challenges for the organization. This gives employees ownership of their company and the competition gives the employer solutions to major issues within their organization.
Provide Basic Training: Instead of giving your employees the proverbial fish, teach them to fish. Provide enough comprehensive training to let employees' minds run free to create constructive and innovative solutions to problems.
Be Specific: Frame employee innovation competitions around specific initiatives. Trying to solve one problem at a time focuses employee innovations and allows thoughts and ideas to be more creative. Focused initiatives also make problems seem more realistic to solve. Employee innovation can be a powerful tool to transform your business externally and internally.
For more ideas on how to cultivate employee innovation check out this article from Inc.com.

Employees can be your greatest advocate or a horrible detriment to your customer interactions. They are face of your brand, and can create exceptional customer experiences that last in the minds of your customers or they can create bad experiences that leave a horrible bad taste in your consumers' mouths. Here are 3 ways that, when motivated, your employees can
positively affect your bottom line.

Gift cards are versatile and make as good an employee reward as they do a sales driver to promote your brand.
First Data has released its 2014 Consumer Insights Survey, and it shows that gift cards can do as much for sales numbers as they can for motivating employees toward organizational goals. Here are two key components from the survey.

Surprisingly, we've found that fixed pay (salary) and individual performance pay have little affect on innovation, while variable group pay and indirect pay (employee benefits) have a much stronger impact.

It’s no secret that gift cards are the most popular item on almost everyone’s wish list this year. Innovations in the gift card industry have made gift cards more secure and easier than ever to use. The average gifted gift card is around $50 and the most popular categories are restaurants, department stores, and coffee shops. Though your gift card will be a well-received gift, there are a few things you should know about this year’s gift cards before you make that final purchase: