Every scrip coordinator worth his or her gift cards knows that the traditional holiday shopping season is a blessing for your scrip program. Your regularly participating families are shopping more than ever, and for at least a few weeks each year, you can tempt some of the more hesitant families to at least try shopping with scrip. It's not unusual for many GLSC customers to rack up 60% of their annual scrip earnings in the traditional holiday shopping season.
That's why it's more important than ever for you to plan ahead for what we're calling the "Christmas Calendar Crunch".
What's the "Christmas Calendar Crunch"? Every year, Thanksgiving falls on the fourth Thursday of November. Because of the peculiarities of our modern-day calendar, this year Thanksgiving will fall on November 27, the latest possible day for Thanksgiving to fall.
You might be asking yourself, "what's the big deal"? The implications for your scrip program are huge, and they'll be costly if you don't plan ahead:
- The 2008 shopping season is 24% shorter than 2007 - There are only 26 shopping days between Thanksgiving Day and Christmas in 2008. This compares with 34 shopping days between those two dates in 2007.
- Most holiday shoppers are procrastinators - Retailers know that many holiday shoppers have good intentions of shopping early, but in reality they want until the traditional Thanksgiving to Christmas shopping season. The shorter the traditional shopping season, the less they buy.
- Gift card givers wait even longer! According to several of our colleagues in the gift card industry, the six days before Christmas are the biggest days of the year for retail gift card sales. Unlike retail gift card buyers, scrip buyers have to plan their purchases, so unless you've planned accordingly, your families will buy those gift cards at retail instead of buying them from your scrip program.
Over the next seven years, the traditional Holiday shopping season will grow by one day each year. In 2014, we'll once again have an optimally long holiday shopping season. Until then, it's best to plan ahead for the "Christmas Calendar Crunch" and try to get your families to do their shopping early.
Here are a few suggestions from Great Lakes Scrip Center:
- Communicate early and often - Do your families know your order drop-off times? Do they know the last possible date they'll be able to buy gift cards from your program? Look at a calendar, set the dates and publish them.
- Plan inventories carefully - With only three full weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas, it will be more important than ever to have the cards in stock when families show up to buy.
- Plan a special holiday gift card shopping event or contest - Several GLSC non-profits use special promotions to promote special shopping events. For instance, each gift card order placed on a certain day earns a family a chance to win a special drawing like a restaurant gift card, or a free gift like a gift card wrapper. Just remember to plan the event early!
- Share our Holiday Gift Guide - GLSC clients tell us the gift guide is a great way to remind families to shop early, and give them ideas for everyone on their shopping list. Watch for it soon, in plenty of time for early distribution.
©2008 Great Lakes Scrip Center, LLC