Day was when if your charity had access to hundreds of thousands of members, you could arrange a pretty sweet affinity credit card program with one of the big credit card providers. Now the BBVA Compass, a consumer-facing bank with 700 branches in many of the Sunbelt states, has structured an affinity card that doesn’t require huge numbers to make economic sense. Those credit card affinity programs didn’t work for every charity. I don’t remember ever seeing one for any of the big health charities, for instance, although I’ve seen them for many of the big environmental groups. The sponsoring companies were looking for lots of members, and a favorable demographic. If yours was a smaller charity, you were probably out of luck. But BBVA seems to have found a way to workaround the old rules of thumb, and it involves a check card rather than a credit card. Called Compass for Your Cause , here’s how it works: BBVA offers a 0.25 percent donation of all the money run through the chec...
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