Gifting eGift cards to community members

[21a]

We are wanting to give a certain number of meals away to people working in our community during this crisis; Would eGift cards be the easiest way to facilitate this?

Essentially, we want to send free meal vouchers to our neighborhood fire station, police station, waste pickup employees, and hospitals.  The voucher would only pay for the cost of one meal and not return any change to the guest.  Anyone else doing anything like this right now, and having success with it?  Ideally I'd like to create unique codes (like the ones that go out in marketing campaigns) to track the number of meals we serve to our community, and (sadly), to prevent people from trying to abuse the system.    

Thanks in advance for your time, everybody.

[pessosices]

@21a 

This is such a great idea & an amazing thing to do for your community!!

Your best bet might actually be a marketing campaign, so each recipient can get a unique code for a specific Free Item (or any item in a category or categories), rather than a $ Amount, so it'll be a one time use, with no change or extra credit left.

You can ask the organizations to collect email addresses from their members, and create Group(s) in your Customer Directory and input them as customers in that group. You'd then create the marketing campaign & coupon and send it only to the Group(s) you created.

Hope this helps & is something you can do!

Let me know if you have any more questions about this,

Pesso

[mattd]

Hi @21a,

Thank you so much for looking to support the first responders in your community! It is a wonderful idea and I am sure it will be greatly appreciated. The eGift cards are a good initial thought because you can keep track of the outstanding amounts of them, send them out digitally, and create unique codes. However, I believe the eGift cards are only available for dollar amounts and cannot be given out for '1 free meal'. As there are likely different costs for different items on your menu, it's not necessarily an ideal fit for what you are thinking.

You could use a gift certificate, Square has some templates. Note the value as 'one free meal' and mark each with a unique code, which you mark off on a spreadsheet each time you receive one. It's not as high tech as the eGift cards, but it would allow you to manage the use of them to prevent abuse. I'd be happy to help generate this for, as I do really like what you are doing.

Sending out eGift cards for say $10 is a really good option too though. You could make them with a unique background to queue your staff that it is a first responder and comp the rest of the meal.