Customer story
Impact Card rewards alumni on and off the card with Scrip
The Impact Card lets alumni and fans support their university with everyday spending. Card spend, game days, app engagement, and local merchant offers all earn on one balance. Impact integrated Scrip in a day and launches in Q4 2026.
About Impact Card
Impact Card is a card for alumni and fans. A share of card revenue goes to the member’s university, so ordinary spending becomes support for the school. Rewards stay close to the school too: game-day experiences, priority access, and merchandise.
Impact wanted earning to reflect the whole relationship a fan has with their school. Spending on the card earns. So does attending a university event, engaging with Impact’s app, and other activities that express affinity. A member who shows up on game day matters as much to Impact as one who swipes, and the program needed to say so.
Game day also has to work for the local businesses around campus. Merchants in Impact’s network can change their offers as the day unfolds, boosting earn rates when the stadium fills and dialing them back afterward, all without waiting on an engineering release.
Finding a rewards provider
That requirement is where the search stalled. Plenty of providers can reward a card transaction. Impact could not find one that would treat an event check-in or an app action as an earning event alongside that transaction, on the same balance, under the same rules - or let merchants reshape those offers in real time while the program stays correct.
The alternative was building it: a rules engine, a ledger that stays correct through partial settlements and refunds, expiration, an operations dashboard, and then maintaining all of it while trying to launch a card. When Impact found Scrip, the build came off the table. Scrip now runs Impact’s entire rewards stack.
We wanted members to earn for everything they do with their school, from swiping the card to showing up on game day. Nobody could do that until we found Scrip. Integration was seamless, our engineers had it up and running in a day.
Worth GregoryCo-Founder, Impact CardOne member’s Saturday on Scrip
Scrip is built around events, which is why Impact’s program fit. Follow one member through a game day.
Lunch near the stadium
They buy lunch near the stadium on the card. A merchant in Impact Card’s network is running double points for the afternoon; Impact sends the purchase to Scrip with that offer in effect. Scrip applies Impact’s earn rules and holds the reward until the charge settles - visible on the balance, not spendable yet. When it settles, the reward is released (and adjusted if the total changed, like a tip). If the charge is canceled, the hold is voided.
At the stadium
They check in at the stadium and open the app to see the lineup. Impact sends those as events too. Both earn the same balance as lunch. Card spend and showing up are the same kind of input to Scrip: something happened, and the rules decide what it’s worth.
Behind the balance
Behind that balance is Scrip’s double-entry ledger. Every reward ties back to the event that created it, which matters when finance or a bank partner needs an audit trail. Holds, releases, refunds, and expiration are built in.
Merchant offers
Meanwhile, Impact Card’s team runs the program from Scrip’s dashboard, and merchants in the network set their offers in Impact’s own portal. A double-points window on game day is an offer with a start time, an end time, and a budget cap. The merchant sets it up, it compiles to a rule underneath, and it switches off on schedule. Nobody files an engineering ticket. Adding a new way to earn means sending a new event and writing a rule for it.
Integrated in a day
Impact Card and Scrip started with a design session that mapped exactly this: which behaviors earn, how card rewards move from purchase to settlement, how non-card activity enters the program, and how merchant offers update without a release.
With that design in hand, Impact’s engineers completed the Scrip integration in one day. Scrip’s MCP server helped them build it, and it stays useful after launch. Anyone on Impact’s team working with an AI agent can ask it why an event did or didn’t earn, test and apply a rule change, or check a balance: an engineer from the editor, or an operator from chat.
What’s next
Impact Card launches to alumni and fans Q4 2026.
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