TruCentive Turns to Square to Enhance Gift Offerings

Incentives delivery platform TruCentive has added Square Gift Cards to its catalog of incentive options, the company announced Thursday (Oct. 27).

“Marketing, HR and operations professionals can now include gift cards from Square’s expansive global network of sellers in their programs to encourage employees, customers and partners to shop locally,” TruCentive said in a news release.

Based in Palo Alto, California, TruCentive says it helps organizations promote local businesses and support their communities while letting recipients choose their favorite retailers with Square’s merchant gift cards.

“As organizations become more diverse, so have the preferences of employees, customers, prospects and partners — offering a single item is unlikely to satisfy everyone,” the company said. “TruCentive allows recipients to choose from the sender’s curated selection of merchandise, national gift cards, payments and now local gift card options.”

TruCentive added that senders can curate gift cards to match their program’s messaging: for example, encouraging employee wellness with a card for a local spa.

The partnership comes at a moment when corporate gift giving is broken, and in need of a relaunch, Jonathan Legge, co-founder and CEO of Ireland-based global corporate gifting company &Open, told PYMNTS recently.

“Corporate culture has kind of sucked the soul out of gifting. It’s made it transactional. It all exists on Excels [spreadsheets] and in doing so, has made it pretty thoughtless and worthless,” he said.

Read more: Corporate Gifting’s ROI Linked to Thoughtfulness and Joy, Not Spreadsheets

Worse still, Legge said, most corporate gifts end up in a landfill, a painful, poorly kept secret in an industry he said has historically been rather wasteful.

“So, our manifesto, and what we’re looking to fix, is about bringing back the thought and care to corporate gifting and making it joyful again and easy for the sender and the recipient,” he said.

At the heart of this revamp, Legge said, is the idea of making it easy for businesses to make gifting decisions and the financial commitment that goes with them simple and justifiable. It’s a shift, especially for SMBs, that means letting companies make ad-hoc decisions rather than committing to year-ahead annual contracts.