20 May 2020
Phase 2: how to support the return to normal. The restart initiatives communicated by Theoria
After two months of lockdown, Italy reopens and restarts, albeit with great attention to security. There are many projects put in place by brands and companies and also at Theoria we have communicated several virtuous initiatives launched by some of our customers to give a boost to the long-awaited restart.
Facebook: support for SMEs and fundraising
To support small businesses and keep them in touch with their customers, Facebook has launched merchant gift vouchers: people can thus support small businesses in their city participating in the initiative, through the announcement “Support local businesses” that appears in their Facebook feed. Payment of gift vouchers and vouchers will be made through partner sites.
The personal fundraising tool have been expanded to also allow businesses to start fundraising on Facebook – which can also be shared on Instagram – to support their activities and ask for support from their most loyal customers.
Instagram for home food deliveries
Instagram has launched the Home Food Orders. The purchase can be made via the “Order food” button in the restaurant profiles or the “Food orders” sticker in Stories. The person is then directed to the site of external partners (Deliveroo and UberEats for Italy) who deal with payments and deliveries.
TheFork supports restaurants
According to Nomisma’s Lockdown Observatory, going to dinner at the restaurant is one of the main wishes to be fulfilled after the quarantine. For this reason, TheFork has launched the campaign “Save the restaurants”, thanks to which users can buy “dining bonds” – also known as prepaid vouchers – at hundreds of restaurants on the platform who have decided to offer them directly from the application and from the TheFork website.
Loyaltek and Paynovate Unity Card
To offer citizens the necessary and rapid financial support, Loyaltek and Paynovate have joined together in a proposal aimed at political leaders, developing the Unity Card. A debit card limited for use in a specific geographical area (for example a Municipality), as well as a certain type of pre-established shops or activities, in this case those that were forced to close during the health crisis: hotels, restaurants, bars, hairdressers, do-it-yourself shops, clothing stores. The Unity Card can have a variable value established by each municipality and works like a normal debit card. This solution thus provides for the needs of the community, allowing citizens to make purchases from local merchants who have suffered the most from the impact of the health emergency.
Houses and holidays: the point of the situation of Casa.it and Pitchup
In this period of life inside our houses, living at home every day has brought out new needs. According to research conducted by Casa.it, Coronavirus did not change the intention of most people to look for a home. Indeed, after this lockdown period and after the initial shock and concern due to great uncertainty about the future, as many as 17% of people are even more convinced of buying a house.
However, methods are changing: requests for visits to homes online, virtually, are increasing. And above all, the characteristics of the house change: garden, terrace and brightness win over the need to have a bigger house and to have a balcony. Also rediscovered the importance of having 2 or more bathrooms, a kitchen, proximity to the supermarket, the presence of spaces for remote working, a study up to the soundproofing.
The desire to be outdoors is clear: a desire always confirmed by Casa.it data. The requests for rental houses with swimming pools for summer have even quadrupled. At the top of the list of places: Palermo, Santa Margherita Ligure and Forte dei Marmi in Tuscany. Houses with gardens are also very popular and user searches on Casa.it have doubled in Veneto, Campania and Lazio.
Same trend for camping holidays. This is confirmed by the data of Pitchup – the main portal in Europe for booking outdoor holidays – which, among other things, see a 138% growth in demand for new memberships to the network from Italian structures.
Sea, mountain or lake? In the first place of the research there are camping sites located on the sea or a short distance away (45.1%), followed by the lake (31.7%), the mountain (13.3%) and finally by cities of art such as Florence, Pisa and Rome (9.9%).
