Over the next few weeks I’ll be featuring our top engagement practices through the Abenity Insider so that you can learn how to maximize the use of our program to better engage your group.

• Social Networks: Abenity offers are integrated and announced through Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIN and more

• Abenity Spotlight Email: We create and send a monthly email featuring new and limited time offers
• Abenity Exclusive Email: Occasionally we will send feature emails highlighting one fantastic offer from on vendor
• Abenity Tuesday Feature: Members can subscribe to a weekly feature where we focus on a current favorite offer

• Welcome Email: A note is sent to each member after registration with account information, tips and helpful info
• Monthly Email Performance Report: A monthly recap is sent to program administrators with insightful information on engagement with the Abenity program specific to their organization

• Vendor Alerts: Members can opt-in to alerts from vendors they are interested in
• Favorite Offers: Members can save their favorite offers for quick reference right inside the Abenity program
• “How To” Videos: We walk you through the intricacies of the Abenity program with “how-to” videos for both Clients and Members.
• Abenity Deals: We make sure your members know about the best public offers in addition to ours.
• User-friendly: Abenity members spend an average of 7 minutes, 10 seconds browsing for discounts – an industry high!

• Vanity URL’s
• Custom Home Page Banner Image
• Customized Welcome Email
• Private Label our Monthly Spotlight Email
• Abenity Email & Survey Center
• API Access for Single Sign-On (SSO)
• JavaScript to Allow Remote Login from Your Site
• Member Import
• Advanced Member Export
• Access to Reporting through our Client Admin

• Membership Cards
• Annual Savings Guides
• Custom Flyers

This email report highlights your employee discount program participation over the last 30 days and includes a list of the most popular offers.

We hope that this will help you measure your discount program performance and provide you with the resources you need to better engage your members.

SAMPLE PERFORMANCE REPORT

If you find that the performance of your Abenity program is not where you’d like for it to be, then we’ve provided you with several links within this email to help you better engage your group.

Here is a short list of our best engagement practices. How many of these are you doing now? Which of these could you start doing to increase your member engagement?

TOP 5 ENGAGEMENT PRACTICES

1) Sign up to receive and distribute our weekly Tuesday Feature discount to your group

2) Use our Member Import feature to pre-register your members and send a welcome email with their username and a temporary password. Learn More

3) Forward our monthly Spotlight email, featuring new and limited time discount offers, to your members each month.

4) Login to your Client Admin and use our marketing materials to create and send proactive communications about the discount program at least quarterly. Use our resources to create emails, newletters, distribute flyers and our Savings Guide, post our videos and more.

5) Intranet Listing – Within your client admin, under marketing materials, you can post our CODE to ensure that your discount program listing is always up to date. This allows us to update content as new discounts happen without involving your IT department or requiring you to make routine updates.

Employee Discount Programs, sometimes called corporate perks or employee perks, are sponsored by employers as a function of their greater Health & Wellness initiatives. Each company designs their Health & Wellness programs to benefit their employees across 5 general categories; Physical Health, Social Health, Financial Health, Emotional Health and sometimes Spiritual Health.

Employee discount programs are provided to expand an employee’s Financial Health by stretching their payroll dollars through unique savings opportunities locally, nationally, and internationally. The company employee discount program is generally communicate to employees through email, newsletters and posting about the program on their internal intranet or HR site.

Abenity is proud to serve many of today’s top employers and we continue to launch new benefit solutions and features to meet the growing needs of our clients.

Please visit our pricing page or download our presentation for more information about Abenity Employee Discount Programs.

An employee discount program is generally part of a larger work-life benefit offering included in an employee’s total compensation package. Companies who offer employee discount programs and other work-life oriented benefits seek to increase worker satisfaction, corporate loyalty, and worker retention by providing valuable benefits that go beyond a simple salary figure.

Specifically, employee discount programs grant workers access to exclusive offerings from local and regional vendors. These offerings can vary widely, including percentage discounts from the vendor, monetary reductions in price off select products, and special member access to organizations and events.

Often times employee discount programs (or employee perks programs) are hosted and managed by the employer themselves, listing unique discounts on a corporate intranet or other internal source. However, many companies are increasingly outsourcing the management of their employee discount program to third party providers that negotiate discounts on behalf of client companies, and facilitate secure access to the program via online portals.

Can’t view this video? Click here to watch.

Editor’s Note: Abenity is proud to manage the employee discount program for MD Anderson, one of the top medical facilities in the world leading the fight to beat cancer. This guest post outlines some of the challenges MD Anderson faced running their own employee discount program prior to switching to Abenity.

I work for MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston and coordinate employee recognition and work-life programs. We have 18,000 employees as well as an active retirees association. Our goal is to be an Employer of Choice so that we can attract the best and brightest people and remain consistently at the top of the list of cancer hospitals. In order to reach that goal we need to provide our employees and their family members with a comprehensive set of programs that addresses their work-life needs.

Setting up a corporate discount program was a priority for us but also a major challenge because, as a member institution of the University of Texas System, we fall under state regulations. One of the regulations is a “no solicitation” policy. After years of consideration, the University of Texas System created a new policy that specifically stated that each member could create an employee discount program as long as it was approved by our President. Even with that permission, we still faced internal hurdles such as questions from our legal and compliance department as well as an ethics review. The UT System policy had other guidelines; one of which was that we could not hire a third party provider to coordinate our discounts program.

Without a vendor to advise us or provide examples based on their expertise, our staff had to do all the research and groundwork to get the program underway. Our legal department, which was already stretched thin with cooperative agreements and contracts, had to budget time for interpretation of the policy, and our IT department had to develop the forms and database for the vendor information from scratch.

On the marketing side, we also needed to create a memorable name for the program, which we called the iDEAL Discount and Services program. We wanted to stress that this was an online program that was available 24 hours a day. We also made sure that it resided on our internet rather than our intranet so that family members and retirees could easily check the website for the latest discounts. However, this prevents the site from seeming “exclusive” to our employees, which can damage the perception of the value of the program.

A third-party provider would have been able to write the disclaimers, research best practices with other institutions, create and maintain the website, create, as well as collect and review forms from potential vendors. More importantly, a third party vendor would be able to contact vendors to ask them for a discount. This is something, as a state institution, that we cannot do. Because we can’t solicit vendors, we rely on them to stumble upon our site which is both inefficient and impractical.

Regardless of who is in charge of the employee discount program, employees should not perceive a vendor’s inclusion in the program as an endorsement, safeguard or guarantee on the quality of the workmanship or any other consumer protection by the employer.

In this climate of tight budgets and shrinking salary merit pools an effective discount program can truly add value for our employees. Third party vendors can do this much more efficiently and quickly than in-house programs as well as minimize exposure or the perception of a conflict of interest between the employer and any contract vendors. Having said all this, we were allowed to include a third party discount vendor, Abenity, on our list of discount providers. This allows our employees to have access to major discounts while we still run the overall program as required.

Editor’s Note: In 2006 Belmont University, a private liberal arts college in Nashville, TN, asked Abenity to manage their employee discount program. This is their story about how they transitioned from a self-managed program to a full service employee discount program run by Abenity.

Belmont University’s old employee discount program was anything but efficient. We had a home-grown system which consisted of contacting local vendors and asking if they would be interested in offering Belmont employees a discount. Once Human Resources verified the offer, the discount was placed on our internal Employee Discount List.

This process seemed to work initially. However, we soon noticed that vendors often discontinued offers without notice, and employees would become frustrated when they tried to use an advertised discount and it wouldn’t be accepted. It appeared to employees that Human Resources didn’t know what they were doing and the entire employee discount program was a constant form of irritation for our team.

Our employee discount offering got a whole lot simpler once we outsourced our program. By using an external provider our employees have access to a much wider offering of discounts numbering into the thousands for both local and national vendors. Our employee discount provider takes care of contacting vendors and arranging for discounts and they also handle the communication of offers to our employees. Human Resources’ involvement is minimal but the benefit to our employees is great.

Human Resources does not have to worry about keeping an updated employee discount listing anymore – Abenity does that for us! When employees call asking about employee discounts we send them straight to the Abenity website and I never have to worry about it being outdated. Employees like having the regular e-mail notifications from Abenity of new offerings and highlighted discounts. Having Abenity is a win-win proposition for us.

When you decide to manage an employee discount program in-house, there are some challenges you will face, the biggest of which is the time it will take to create and administer the program. You’ll want to think about the following as you consider the “do it yourself” route.

First, you’ll need to determine how to design your employee discount program. This will be based upon the goal and purpose of the program within your organization. It’s a good idea to create a policy that will establish the basic ground rules for the program. Consider the following questions to define the scope of your program: What types of discounts will be included? What products or services will be restricted or prohibited? How will discount offers be obtained? Will you solicit businesses directly for discounts or obtain them through employee referrals or business interest? How will discounts be evaluated for inclusion in the program?

A business application and review process is necessary to ensure that your employee discount program includes discounts that are appropriate in nature and provide value for your employees. You will need a way to obtain pertinent information on discount offers, including contact information for the business, the discount being offered, ordering/purchasing instructions, any limits or exclusions, expiration dates, proof of employment requirements, etc. If you plan to offer a large number of discounts, you may want to implement an online application form to assist with collecting this information.

Once the discount information is obtained, it will need to be reviewed for approval or disapproval into your program. This may include confirming that the discount complies with your policy and that the nature of the business, products, and services are appropriate. It may also include conducting an initial screening of the business, such as a Better Business Bureau search, regarding the reliability/reputation of the organization. In addition, you may need to follow up with the business if there is missing or incomplete information. After the discount has been reviewed, the business will need to be notified of approval or disapproval into your program.

Once discounts are approved, they need to be made available to your employees. One way to do this is to create a website where all discount offers will be posted. You will need to decide what information to post and in what format (e.g., discount flyer, website link, short description). You may require the business providing the discount to submit information in your required format.

Regardless of what method is chosen, all information posted will need to be checked for accuracy. A point person will need to be assigned to maintain the website and ensure that all discount links are working and are up-to-date. New discounts will need to be added, expired discounts will need to be removed, and existing discounts will need to be updated as offers change.

Bottom line – all of these things take time. To some extent, you can control how much time it will take to manage your program by limiting the design and administration of your discount program. Keep the things above in mind as you decide how to best implement an employee discount program in your organization.