What started as Native Rewards in 2015 has evolved. Our first few years were spent working with Local Merchants to better understand how we could change shopping habits that have led to Brick & Mortar closing it's doors and tax dollars leaving Main Street for Wall Street.
The Native Rewards concept was based on a local lottery that issued a digital lottery ticket to people that visited local businesses and scanned a QR code into the Native Rewards app. Each week we would draw winners from those local shoppers and reward them with Native Bucks (monopoly money that could be redeemed at our participating Merchants).
In those first few years we gave away over $30,000 in Native Rewards that went back into the northeast Alabama economy, but it wasn't having a real impact on the bottom line of our Merchants.