A School of Emergent Priorities paper sorts 9,406 dormant shopping-centre gift cards into six kinds of what actually happened to the money, and finds a finance office has adopted the taxonomy's population shares as a fixed recognition rule applied to every card alike.
A six-kind audit of 9,406 dormant gift cards found most were still spendable, and the office has since applied the finding as one fixed rule for every future card
Dormancy, it turns out, is not the same thing as abandonment. A School of Emergent Priorities audit of 9,406 gift cards a shopping-centre program had already written off as dormant sorts each one into six kinds of what actually happened to it, and finds that only a minority were genuinely spent for. The program’s finance office, briefed on the results partway through the audit, has since folded the taxonomy’s population-level shares directly into how it recognises the money as its own.
A card doesn’t stop being worth something just because nobody’s rung it up in a while. It just stops telling anybody.
— Postdoctoral Fellow Petra Umbile, School of Emergent Priorities
“Six kinds is not an easy sell when the schedule only ever wanted one,” said Lecturer Lindiwe Achterberg. “But a balance stuck behind a terminal’s minimum floor is not the same story as a balance nobody remembers loading, and the finance office asked us to find that out properly.”
The audit cross-referenced the program’s card ledger against point-of-sale decline logs, service-desk enquiry records, and a secondary resale platform’s own listings, tracing each dormant balance to one of six outcomes rather than treating every untouched card the same way. The University regards the project as a working demonstration of what its evaluation-ecosystem agenda can do once it is let inside a ledger rather than kept to a dashboard.
The full paper is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.la5cqu.