Blackhawk Network Joins the Kin Ecosystem to Provide ‘Spend’ Offers to Users in the Digital Sharing Economy
Hawk Incentives, a Blackhawk Network business, is a global leader in helping companies inspire engagement among customers. The company develops innovative solutions for “branded value” rewards — including gift cards, e-gifts, and ecodes — designed to incentivize engagement.
Hawk Incentives inspires better engagement with industry-leading insights, technology and corporate incentive solutions designed to bring out the best in the people. Now, Hawk Incentives is carrying its innovation forward by providing services to the Kin Ecosystem.
The Kin Ecosystem Foundation is thrilled to announce that Hawk Incentives will be providing gift cards to certain users in the ecosystem via an integrated order API.
This creates an automated, customizable way for certain apps in the Kin Ecosystem to provide broadly appealing Kin “spend” offers to users directly through those applications. Users of those apps will be able to spend their Kin on ecodes from a host of desirable brands.
Balance & Value
Engaging a major player like Hawk Incentives will help drive transaction activity with Kin. The deal will equip certain apps in the Kin Ecosystem with data-driven access to a number of established gift card brands, which its users will access directly through those apps, with Kin.
The partnership supports the “spend” side of our digital sharing economy. Here’s how it will work:
● Authorized apps building with Kin will be able to select 3–5 brands from Hawk Incentives’ lineup of brands that it expects will appeal to its users.
● Hawk Incentives’ API will deliver the predetermined $5 to $10 spending offers (from well-known brands) directly to authorized apps.
● Users will be able to click an offer of their choosing to receive an ecode, which they can copy and redeem on the brand’s site.
● Authorized apps will receive transparent data on Kin transaction activity, spending rates, and offer demand — which they can use to revise the offer lineup as they go.
To help spark adoption and use, for a limited time, each offer will be seeded with a custom discount. In this initial phase, Kin users will a given percentage off each $5 to $10 offer. These exclusive saving are a unique, added benefit for ecosystem participation.
Hawk Incentives’ large network provides the scalability we sought from an initial e-gift provider. With a broad portfolio of brands, Hawk Incentives has the potential to provide more than enough variety to appeal to authorized apps in the Kin Ecosystem.
These desirable opportunities for digital consumption with Kin will provide a valuable balance of benefits to our forthcoming digital services partners. As we’ve said before, many apps that join the Kin Ecosystem will be more earn-driven than spend-driven. But in any healthy economy, people must be empowered to actually use the value they receive (not just acquire it).
Hawk Incentives will help make that possible. Limiting offer amounts to $5 to $10 will also help incentivize continual earning and spending among participating app users (rather than hoarding of Kin). Ultimately, this will help the partnership deliver adoption, retention, and engagement benefits to partner apps.
Adaptability & Transparency
As a cycle of user-driven earning, spending, and redeeming accelerates, all parties will learn and adapt together — user, app, and Hawk Incentives — based on real transaction volume.
● Transparency on the backend of our ecosystem (powered by the core blockchain SDK) will provide partner apps with insights on how in-app engagement translates to the holding or spending of Kin by users.
● Authorized apps can use that information to iterate their user experience, develop new retention or engagement tactics, or swap new brands into their offer lineup.
● As authorized apps iterate Kin experiences and curate spending offers, Hawk Incentives’ technology will provide them with data on offer demand across brands, helping them learn what appeals to their user base.
Along the way, we will be learning from users, too. We designed the partnership to benefit developers as much as possible. The unique discount model — in which Kin Foundation passes all savings directly to the user — is just the first way our collaboration supports apps and communities.
For now, we’re thrilled to welcome Hawk Incentives to the ecosystem. As a longtime innovator in the evolution of branded value, Hawk Incentives is enthusiastic about working with us in the crypto space.
And as we continue to seed our partner ecosystem, we look forward to sparking new ways of earning, spending and redeeming value in a fairer digital economy.
