Despite numerous economic challenges, the Cowra Business Chamber has a reason to celebrate with $200,000 being loaded onto Cowra Cash Cards.
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The milestone marks another successful 12 months for the "shop local" initiative, after hitting the $150,000 mark in June last year and $100,000 in 2018.
Cowra Business Chamber President, Jordan Core said events such as the Cowra Christmas Street Festival and end of financial year saw large sums loaded onto the cards.
"This has been something in the making for over five, six years now," he said.
"A few of the main contributing factors to us getting to this $200,000 was the Cowra Christmas Street Festival, which we saw about $25,000 loaded in that December month and then we also had just June, financial year end, people were giving bonuses to their employees and stuff like that in the way of Cowra Cash Cards so that's what got us over the line there.
"A couple of really strong months of in the teens of thousands."
The card's popularity has grown substantially in the last two years.
833 cards had money loaded onto them between July 2019 and June 2020, up from 622 in the previous 12 months.
During this time, the Australian economy has taken a hit from drought, bushfires and COVID-19 and Mr Core believes its made consumers change their spending habits.
"I think people understand that COVID had played a massive role in the closure of some businesses around Australia, around the world and they understand a greater emphasis on shopping locally and supporting their locals even more.
"It's been really cool to see recently where some people would normally shop online, a shift has changed back to supporting locally and Cowra does it just as good if not better than anyone else."
"When the chips are down, they are always there to help out and I think this is just one way that they know that the money will stay local and they're getting behind it."
While the Chamber has been heavily promoting the card, Mr Core believes they are yet to see the initiative's full potential.
"We've done a great job lately as far as we've changed the design again, we've made backers for them as well so you can put a card around it that says "congratulations" or "happy birthday"... we do have those available now which we didn't have before," he said.
"We spent a lot of money on getting the brand out there as well, a lot of social media, a lot of radio ads... There's so much more still to go and we're not using the card to its full capacity as yet."
Mr Core believes the next phase of the card will be getting businesses to use them as alternatives to petty cash, while still advertising around special events such as Mother's Day, Father's Day and Christmas.
"A business to business option where they can use as their petty cash rather than carrying cash," Mr Core said.
"They can load up one of these cards and you'll start to see that people are going to be spending it locally, there's so many suppliers on board for this program that there's no excuse not to use it.
"We are going to be advertising it more... just putting a greater emphasis on those big events coming up throughout the year and just targeting people when it's that time."
To see a full list of participating businesses, visit the Chamber's website.