WOW - Over $3billion Raised

One of the earliest ideas when we created RetailROI was how do we standardize giving for charities at the POS? I think it was 2012 when, as part of lunch at RetailROI SuperSaturday, we had a breakout group of people that might be interested in creating such a standard under the ARTS (Association of Retail Technology Standards) banner. David Dorf , then with Oracle and now with AWS Retail took the lead from there.

At the time, my personal vision was that we might someday have a RoundUp for Orphans where transactions could be rounded up for charity and RetailROI specifically. Well, this great group of people went off and did the work and a little over a year later the standard was published and we saw the slow but steady removal of the coin jars at registers.

Now here is the crazy part....we do not know how many of these retailers listed in this report are using systems that included that standard. We don't know but maybe collectively many people in the industry...yet that is not really important.

Whether they are using the standard, built it themselves (as we had the same ideas at the same time)...doesn't matter who gets the credit.

What does matter is the impact...?are you ready?

Since 2015, POS campaigns have raised over $3 billion USD for US charities according to Engage for Good?- and they only count campaigns that raise over $1m in that total so that number is much higher. The biggest growth area - roundup to the nearest $ - up 43% since 2020!?

We don't know if this standardization?effort was 50% of this, 1% or .1% - we simply do not know...I'm pretty sure it was more than $0.... Shout out to Pennies in the UK was already doing it too back then and contributed to the ARTS standard.?

But we did want to give honor where honor is long overdue.

Thanks to David and a huge number of people listed below:

Forward this post to these people if you know them.? Thanks everyone.... one of my favorite lines is the following:?

“The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.”?- Nelson Henderson

Thanks for planting these trees, guys. Grateful.

We never know if and where it goes.

Together we can make a HUGE difference.

Tom Litchford Richard Halter Richard Mader Jerry Rightmer Ian Auerbach Tim Hood Vicki Cantrell Randy Cucerzan Greg Buzek ?? Ricardo Belmar Cathy Hotka