Similar to buying a shopping mall gift certificate that can be used anywhere inside the mall, this design allows any patron to redeem value at any location inside the coalition regardless of where the value was originally loaded or earned. Under this method, a bank ACH and escrow billing or funding process is required to manage the open liabilities.


This program is suitable for coalitions desiring to upgrade from a paper based gift certificate or frequent shopper program to an electronic gift and loyalty card that can be honored community wide. In all practicality, we don’t see very many examples of pooled coalition networks that issue rewards. These types of programs tend to be strictly gift card based.

This program allows a community of merchants to issue their own branded community card that can be processed at any individual merchant inside the community. Under this design, gift value and rewards can only be redeemed at the merchant where the value was originally loaded or earned. Patrons cannot load value on their card or earn rewards at Location A and then visit another merchant (Location B) and redeem the value received by Location A toward goods and services at Location B.

This program is suitable for any community desiring to maintain individually controlled gift, rewards or fundraising structures but still market the card under a unified brand or promotions strategy within the community. This type of network design creates “walled off” balances on a merchant by merchant basis. Unlike pooled coalition designs, the non-pooled method requires no ACH withdrawal or escrow billing and thus frees up businesses to aggressively offer rewards and prepaid strategies to drive visitation while still reaping the benefits of unique customer acquisition, retention and relationships.

AmeriCardGold Stored Value Networks, LLC has designed and built several coalition models, both pooled and non-pooled. However, after evaluating each model’s unique attributes, we favor the non-pooled design’s clear superiority in every conceivable way that matters. We have designed and marketed a new type of non-pooled coalition network using a stored value card. Our proprietary design gives each merchant the ability to run their own gift, rewards, and fundraising program inside the coalition while protecting consumer balances and donation activity as exclusive to their business. Non-profit organizations can work with a business community to drive distribution of cards and sales traffic in exchange for a meaningful percentage of sales donated back to the organization on a monthly basis by the participating merchant community. Even without a fundraising component, organizations that have a sound media strategy can push customers back to the merchant community very effectively and very profitability.

Let’s examine a live case study of a coalition program in action. The table below shows coalition activity from a local sports booster club in Minnesota. These numbers are for one (1) month, September 2011 with a circulation of approximately 1000 cards. The Init Value columns below indicate how much value was initially preloaded at each merchant as an incentive to patronize for the first visit. Value can be preloaded as gift, rewards or units currency (e.g., a free lunch, item or car wash). The Total Donation column captures the amount of money escrowed for collection back to the local sports booster ($1,433.98) and the Total Admin column represents the billable administrative fees (profits) based on a percentage of the sales ticket in a real life pay per sales strategy ($1,092.30).

As you can see above, the members of this sports booster collectively generated 2158 sales transactions totally $41,540.53 in sales activity using their coalition rewards card in one month! When we drive cardholders to a business, the business accepting the card not only receives valuable sales traffic off the street from powerful word of mouth referral marketing but also gains valuable access to the cardholder’s marketing profile after the card is swiped or scanned for the first time. This capability opens up a world of opportunity for business synergy and other advanced marketing strategies, including exceptional new profit opportunities for coalition organizers.

Coalition marketing is a new, exciting area of stored value technology that’s just in the infancy stage offering a powerful ground floor opportunity for those firms who have the marketing muscle to setup a coalition inside a local town or city.