Publisher Spotlight: Blue Light Card

We sat down with Blue Light Card to discuss how they are connecting brands with a valued community of first responders, essential workers, and teachers. With a world-class digital platform, they help brand partners extend exclusive offers as a token of appreciation.

Since launching in Australia in October 2022, Blue Light Card has already grown to 70K members—with bold ambitions to reach 100K by April 2025.

1. Can you tell us about Blue Light Card and what you do?  

We provide a world-class digital web and app platform for brand partners to extend their offers to a closed group of first responders, essential workers, and teachers in appreciation for all they do. We’ve been established for 16 years in the UK where we have 5.3 million members, and we launched in Australia in October 2022 where we currently have 70K members. We have aggressive plans in place to grow our member base to 100K by the end of April 2025. 

Blue Light Card was founded by Steve, an ex-policeman, and his best friend, Tom. Steve was consistently offered discounts from retailers as a policeman, but due to ethical reasons, he couldn’t accept them. As he knew both he and his colleagues desperately needed them, he and Tom decided to set up Blue Light Card as a way to legitimately facilitate discounts for first responders from brand partners and retailers. 

During COVID, our natural disasters made international news, and when Steve and Tom saw how awesome our first responders and essential workers handled them, particularly our emergency volunteers, they decided to open our platform to Australian members. 

We aren’t the largest publisher so we can really focus on the brands that care about our members in a more meaningful way. Our discounts are instant, 71% of our members have opted into marketing comms and we send 7 eDMs, 7 push notifications, and 7 in-app notifications a week.

We’re data-led, can target certain sectors and demographics within our member base, and work together with our partners to achieve their business objectives. 

Giving back to essential workers is at the heart of Blue Light Card

We can facilitate evergreen and boosted discounts via unique codes and landing pages to help our members access retail offers seamlessly. We communicate these offers daily via our marketing channels and provide over 90 tenancy slots on our site for extra visibility.

Commission Factory and Awin have been amazing at helping us to position in front of all brand partners regardless of our stage of growth. The events and knowledge sharing that has been provided by the team are so appreciated as they help us to increase sales for partners and raise awareness for our awesome member base in thanks for all they do. 

In the last two months, we’ve just welcomed teachers as a new sector of which there are around 600K in Australia. Teachers are six times more active on our site and their preferences centre around travel, fashion, and beauty brands predominantly. There’s a huge opportunity to help retail partners grow with us in these categories. We have also just re-platformed to make it even easier for our brands to position in front of our members while also making the redemption process seamless. Re-platforming will be complete by the end of February 2025 so we encourage new and lapsed brands to work with us now to ensure they can benefit immediately.