Shout Your Local! is a ‘pay it forward’ social enterprise project to help Melbourne’s local restaurants, pubs, cafes and live music venues get through the Covid-19 lock down. Local businesses can signup on the website and sell gift vouchers to unlock cash flow today and customers tomorrow when things return to normal.
Shout Your Local! is founded by Mark and Josh – two local software entrepreneurs who until recently ran a small event technology business that worked with some of Melbourne’s well known music venues.
“As Covid-19 hit, our customers were some of the first businesses to shut their doors with a devastating impact on their businesses, their lives and the communities they support,” they said.
“However as we began cancelling event listings our ticket holders began to ask if it was possible to donate or keep their ticket for a (presumable) future event. This gave us the idea for a website where passionate locals can ‘pay it forward’ by buying gift vouchers for tomorrow, and help our local cafes, pubs, restaurants and music venues with cashflow today.”
The early response has been fantastic with Melbourne’s famous Caravan Music Club in Bentleigh east coming onboard as a launch customer – venues simply have to share their ‘gift voucher’ page to their communities across social media to begin selling vouchers.
All voucher management and sales are taken care by the Shout Your Local! platform who have partnered with two of the biggest names in the business with payments powered and secured by Stripe and vouchers provided by ‘GiftUp!’.
They are currently negotiating the best rate possible with partners but intend to pass on 100% of the cash (minus the payment and voucher partner fees).
The platform pays out every day helping with cashflow whilst creating a healthy customer list that can redeem once things reopen.
Voucher information and sales can be managed on the website, downloaded as a spreadsheet for manual redemption or integrated with Shopify, Square and Vend point of sale systems.
The team are currently volunteering their time for this project but think Shout Your Local! could be a great opportunity for the right local business or corporate partners, and welcome conversation with potential sponsors who are in a position to support this initiative.
Venue operators can get involved with Shout Your Local! here.