last year.<\/a><\/p>\nSOS founder David Downs, who is still involved with the organisation, said people were still eager to support small businesses with vouchers.<\/p>\n
“Since the beginning of lockdown, I think we’ve now passed about $250,000 in those transactions. When you think about the average size is about $10, it’s a lot of transactions.<\/p>\n
“And then we have worked with some partners and others to throw in another $50,000 as well, so we’re probably at around the $300,000 mark. All of that money is going out the door to small businesses,” he said.<\/p>\n
Downs said SOS had about 2500 businesses registered.<\/p>\n
He said in many instances, businesses were helping other businesses stay afloat.<\/p>\n
“Some of them aren’t that large. [For example] an electrician bought some vouchers for his customers to say thank you. We had a university buy them for their staff.<\/p>\n
“It’s a great way to thank people who are working from home, who are feeling a little bit forgotten and at the same time helping businesses in real time.”<\/p>\n
Downs also said teaming up with inKind had opened up avenues to take the SOS Business platform overseas.<\/p>\n
“We hooked up with six different other similar initiatives around the world, a couple of them in Australia, one in the United Kingdom and one in Estonia.<\/p>\n
“In Israel, we gave them our whole template and everything and they translated it into Hebrew … it’s actually been really cool.”<\/p>\n
-RNZ<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The not-for-profit voucher website SOS Business is seeing a surge in demand from people wanting to support small businesses during lockdown. Photo:\u00a0123RF The website was set up when the country first went into lockdown last year, to help keep businesses afloat by allowing customers to buy vouchers that could be cashed-in later. It was handed […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":1351,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,222,174],"tags":[28,223],"class_list":["post-1350","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-business","category-latest-news","category-nz-news","tag-business","tag-nz-news"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1350","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1350"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1350\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1352,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1350\/revisions\/1352"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1351"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1350"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1350"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1350"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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