Nectar card solves social problems using loyalty expertise

 

Over the last nine months we’ve had the pleasure of working with the Nectar card partnerships team at Aimia on the Loyalty for Good Challenge. Through the Challenge the marketers have been using their expertise in loyalty management to help five great causes to build stronger relationships to overcome social problems.

The Loyalty for Good Challenge has enabled:

• Sky Badger to engage more schools in their School Awards programme, which is reducing the bullying of disabled children.
• Ambition to build stronger relationships with their donors and their members, which is providing more support for youth centres around the UK.
• Hackney Pirates to build a loyal customer base at the Ship of Adventures, which provides one to one tutoring in literacy for disadvantaged children.
• Blue Ventures to build stronger relationships with their volunteers and with corporate partners, which is helping to rebuild tropical fisheries and support the communities that depend on them.
• Yes to Life to be more ambitious in asking for more from their corporate partners and supporters, which is providing alternative solutions to cancer patients in the UK.

Each cause has been working with a dedicated team of six or seven people over the last nine months. The length of the programme has allowed the teams to dig deeply into the challenges faced by their cause partners. They have built stakeholder engagement plans to help the causes to achieve their strategic goals. And they have also helped to develop the marketing capabilities of the causes' staff themselves, so that they are better able to implement the plans after the Challenge.

The teams have also inspired other Aimia employees to give their time to their cause partners where needed. For example they have recruited specialists to build a CRM database for Ambition; social media experts to promote Sky Badger's School Baking Competition; and have engaged the business development team at Nectar Card to train Yes to Life in pitching their charity to potential partners.

This programme has contributed to Aimia’s talent development objectives of building stronger innovation capabilities by supporting the Nectar Partnerships team with training in innovation and strategic thinking and then giving them the immediate opportunity to put this training into practice through the work with their charity partners.

The Challenge officially ended this month and it is clear to see that the teams have achieved breakthrough success by helping the causes to development the resources and capabilities to build valuable relationships that will ultimately help the causes to raise more funds, engage and retain customers and develop successful partnerships.

We will be following the progress of each of these causes over the coming weeks and months, so look out for individual stories about the impacts of this Challenge.