Give Something Back, easily

I work at a trade publication and one of our heavier fields of coverage is the campus card market (like the FSU Card program). In fact the FSU Card was a pioneering campus identification card and was the first card to be partnered with a bank for student to use. Well, this huge company (Heartland Payment Systems) has started this new campus card program that takes advantage of the payment processing company that it is. The new campus focused program is call the Give Something Back Network. Yeah, it sounds like a great idea to give back 1.5% of every transaction, but does it really work? Another thing is that you can set up the card to give the money back to yourself as well. The accounts are FDIC insured so I think that it is all legit.

Anyway, when we were working on the United Way campaigns, I thought that this would be a great way for the United Way of the Big Bend to get donations. If you think about it, you don't pay any money at all. If it says your total is $5, you pay five dollars. The way they do this is they charge the merchant the processing fee, lets say 3%, but then, the processor (Heartland) only takes 1.5% and then the other 1.5% is donated to charity. The only thing is though, I don't know if this would work for UWBB since they aren't a campus. But you would think they could get people to sign up for these accounts, and then UWBB would get a pretty constant flow of money. Maybe we should look into this more.