Donating Loyalty Points to Charity

zalanx

Having dumped all my loyalty cards I discovered that I could donate my Kenco points to Macmillan Cancer Support. For 65 points I can get 100gm of Millicano, inc. p&p, which retails at £2 - £4. If I donate my points to Macmillan Cancer Support I find, only by delving into the Kenco T&Cs, that Macmillan will only get 1p/point.

As a comparison Nectar will donate £1 to 'Action for Children' for 250 points - 500 Nectar points are worth £2.50 discount at Argos.

I will continue to support genuine charitable and 'Green' loyalty schemes but I will be more careful in the future. Some of these are cynical marketing exercises with no no more than a nod to 'Green' or 'Fair Trade' principles.

Alan

LittleVoice

zalanx wrote: »

Having dumped all my loyalty cards I discovered that I could donate my Kenco points to Macmillan Cancer Support. For 65 points I can get 100gm of Millicano, inc. p&p, which retails at £2 - £4. If I donate my points to Macmillan Cancer Support I find, only by delving into the Kenco T&Cs, that Macmillan will only get 1p/point.

As a comparison Nectar will donate £1 to 'Action for Children' for 250 points - 500 Nectar points are worth £2.50 discount at Argos.

I will continue to support genuine charitable and 'Green' loyalty schemes but I will be more careful in the future. Some of these are cynical marketing exercises with no no more than a nod to 'Green' or 'Fair Trade' principles.

Alan

What is also the case is that, if you are a UK tax-payer, you could take the value to you of the points you use but would otherwise have donated and pass that amount to the charity together with the confirmation that they can claim, as giftaid, the basic rate tax you have paid on that sum.

Arthog

I think it would be good if there was a Charity Loyalty card at the checkouts, with a nominated charity, changing every few months.
This used to be the case at the Co-op when we just had a number, and there was a Charity number we could ask for our 'Divi' to go to.

rarrarrar

Nectar point's can be used to buy Oxfam's "Unwrapped" gifts see:

http://www.nectar.com/spend/oxfam-unwrapped.points

zalanx

Clearly, loyalty points can be donated to charity but my point was that you should check the actual value of those points to a charity.

In my example, I could buy 100gm of Millicano (£2-£4) including P&P (£1?) for 65 points. Macmillan get only £0.65p for the same 65 points. A caring business would donate at least £2 to charity for those 65 points.

If you are old enough to remember the Green Shield and Pink Stamp schemes (lick & stick) massive donations to charity destroyed their business model. They never expected anyone to amass sufficient 'stamps' to buy their most attractive, expensive items and relied on most 'stamps' being discarded or the punters realizing that the products on offer were of inferior quality or could be bought for less than the 0.1p value of the stamps. In the 1960s there were many of these 'Pyramid Shemes'.

All of these Loyalty Schemes are scams. Someone, please, point me to a scheme that actually pays good value to a charity - at cost or maybe half of retail price?

Alan (OP)

Dustykitten

Just had an email from oxfam/nectar appealing for points to be donated to help fight against Ebola. Examples are:

500points - £2.50 towards clean water
1500points -£7.50 for buckets

Similar rate to some of their standard offers but not as good as the higher ones.