Introducing new donation option: Project Linus

A long time Quickrewards member is the area coordinator for Project Linus.

“Project Linus is a 100% volunteer non-profit organization. Our Mission is to provide love, a sense of security, warmth and comfort to children who are seriously ill, traumatized, or otherwise in need through the gifts of NEW HOMEMADE WASHABLE blankets and quilts lovingly created by volunteer blanketeers. We also provide a rewarding and fun service opportunity for interested individuals and groups to make blankets for hurting children. Many of our blanketeers cannot afford the costs of materials (fleece, yarn, fabric etc) so we provide this free to them through contributions to the San Jose Chapter of Project Linus.”

WEBSITE
http://sjlinus.org/

QuickRewards members can help Project Linus by donating their tokens (100,000 stacks) or cash balance ($1 stacks). Hopefully with everything we collect will allow Project Linus to give away a lot more blankets then they do now.

Scavenger Hunt is back!

We are going to repeat the scavenger hunt from two weeks again this coming Wednesday. Two weeks ago our database was not able to handle the huge amount of traffic, but now since we tweaked the database a bit we are ready to give it a try. We want to see if it will work well now. Please remember that the site might be slow again during that day and this scavenger hunt will be a very good indicator of if we fixed our database issue or not.

For those that don’t remember what it is here are all the details: Through the day we will randomly select 10+ offers in the SIGNUPS section. Each offer will give you a reward if you locate it ($0.01-$0.05) a click and up to 200% rate boost if you do it.

Let’s hope it works this time!

Good & Bad News

Bad News: We ended David’s cookies contest. The reason why we had to end it is because the MID offers just don’t credit as good as they used to in the good old days which means less people had the ability to participate in the contest. Did you enjoy the David’s cookies raffle? If I get a positive response we will bring it back.

Here is the last set of winners. Email support@quickrewards.net to claim the prizes:

QuickyPot total: 87,162 tokens. The winners are:
Curlymmv 43,581 tokens
Sharcj 26,149 tokens
Amyk 17,433 tokens

Davids Cookie Tin winner: rames316

Good News:
The QuickyPot will now be progressive. Instead of 3 winners every few weeks we will change the offer and divide the Quickypot among everyone. This way everyone wins! We also want to introduce: Wacky Rate Boost and Wacky Shopping Rate Boost. We will randomly boost rates of various offers and shopping merchants. Some boosts will be as high as 25-200%. The thing is that no one knows when these rates will end. We will keep changing them often.
Please let me know if you like the new idea or the old idea better. We will change it so that everyone is happy!

4 updates

1) We had another instant creditor jam so we are restarting it. All today's offers and yesterday's daily survey should be uploaded in a few hours
UPDATE: The instnat creditor is still not back to normal so it's ok that you are not seeing 3/17 surveys and 3/18 signups yet

2) Our click advertiser wants us to double the volume. 6 hour clicks will go back to hourly later today. Also look out for a new $0.01 Spiral Frog click.

3) We didn't double last month tokens yet. I hope we will this week. It's a long manual process so we are trying to make it automatic.

4) Why did my balance drop a bit today (this is only for about 100 members)
You saw a large unexpected increase to your account yesterday noon right? That is because some of the daily surveys you did on Friday or over the weekend credited multiple times for some reason. We ran a program to remove the duplicates.

Response to a QR complaint

I was reading one of the rewards program boards today and found a complaint about QR saying what’s going on with QR and if it’s going down the drain because today there is no Guess my number, no trivia, no emails and yesterday/today no one responded to their emails. I said this before so let me explain it again:

QuickRewards has been around since 2002 and we only have 4 employees. 2 out of the 4 are really very active (programmer and myself) while other two help out with the Paypal and gift cards. Putting up daily trivia, guess my number game and emails is my task. Others don’t know how to do it. If I am sick or am away one day (Sunday/Monday I went away with my family and unfortunately we had no internet access) and don’t put up the trivia/game/send paid email that DOES NOT MEAN that QR is going down the drain. QuickRewards has gained over 25,000 new members within the last few months because of advertising. This was a huge surprise to us that we didn’t expect and now we have twice the emails to answer daily then before while once again I am doing all the emails myself with no one helping me. We don’t have the money to hire more employees at this time and basic things like this (no game or trivia or late response to emails) can happen from time to time. Most other rewards programs don’t respond to emails for days so if you don’t get your response within a few hours I always tell our members to just resend it again. Not seeing a game up, not seeing a response to an email within minutes/hours is not something that should be a large concern or mean that QR is going downhill.

Just writing this to let you all know that you should consider that we are still a tiny company even though we might look big because of the brand loyaly we gained over the years. We are growing daily, but until we have the financial resources to hire more people please be patient with us about things like one day the trivia is put up late or the game is late and so on. QuickRewards is not going downhill and we are growing stronger and stronger everyday.
We got a huge contract today with an advertiser that no one else has and I can't wait until we announce them to you soon. It will be a new weekly activity for everyone to participate in.

Let me know if you have any questions.

Your opinion needed (we need as much feedback as we can get)

As you may know there is more and more fraud happening in the rewards program industry because of all the new sites showing up daily and they attract International members from countries advertisers don’t want traffic from. As a result a lot of new clients don’t want to deal with incentive sites because they all assume incentive sites have bad traffic. Since QuickRewards has been around since 2002 we already established a lot of relationships with advertisers so all these industry changes are not really effecting us. The thing is that I have a bunch of new clients who are skeptical about incentive traffic and they want to try QR out, but are afraid that because we have no minimum policy people will take advantage of their offers (no rewards program has these) specifically those who don’t live in US/CA and use a proxy.

I found a solution to please them and many other future advertisers, but wanted to ask for your opinion. If a majority of you think it’s a bad idea we will not do it since QuickRewards cares about your opinions. The best way to keep no minimum is to require that everyone redeeming for Paypal has a VERIFIED Paypal account. Verified account means that a real person (US or CA) owns the account because Paypal confirmed all the details with the bank or credit card company. QR does not allow international members to join (only US, CA, UK) and some international members who are not in these countries are using proxy to make us think that they are in US and redeem with a unverified Paypal account. We have been in this industry for 6 years now and know almost every trick in the book. We catch them and close their accounts right away, but if we had this rule they would not even bother joining. We always allowed members to redeem with unverified status, but I wanted to know if it will be a major issue if we no longer allowed that and required members to have a verified account?

I can even make a rule that if you don’t want to verify your paypal account (since it requires credit card or bank account connected to Paypal) you must redeem for a shipped gift certificate at least once. This way we know you have a physical US address. If you also were a long time QR member (over one year OR those that are less then one year and do more then just signups and trials (surveys and shopping)) and still have an unverified paypal we will not require you to verify it.

Why would this be a good change? It would allow us to get more advertisers (those who are afraid to advertise on incentive sites) and it would allow us to process payments faster too since we don’t need to check verified accounts as much as we would check unverified.

I would really appreciate your feedback on this. I don’t want to make a major decision without hearing what you all think about it.

Feb Token Doubling

We didn’t double Feb tokens yet for those who reached 100% or are a frequent shopper. We expect this to happen later in the week.

UPDATE 3/10 WE DID NOT DOUBLE THEM YET.