I located Samaritan Fundraising online at a Christian website. This should have been a blaring warning horn but instead I told myself, they are Christians and are backed by a website I use all the time for material for Group Studies, so I contacted them. I received the first email introducing
Mark Ousley - I've been in the ministry for a decade now, first as a senior pastor (for 7 years) and now as an associate pastor. I also help Christian groups fundraise here at Samaritan Fundraising. We've helped so many groups and would love to help you raise money too (it's fast and easy!). I'd love to hear about your cause or ministry. Maybe we can help! Will you let me know?
Mark Ousley
Sales Consultant
In the second email from Mark he noted that they serve mostly Christian organizations. Another Blaring Warning horn that I ignored. They advertise that they have over 100,000 merchants nationwide and very popular ones like LEGO, Walmart, AMC, Macy's, Marriott, Target, Amazon, AMC and "Many More" that you can't see unless you BUY a card a@ $20/clip. Mark implied, but not sure he actually said that all you had to do was show the card at these 100,000 places and your discount would be honored. Actually you can't use the card anywhere and you have to print out coupons from their website. I looked today at HomeDepot, which really excited me since I am a home construction diy'er. On their SAVER website and found out SamaritanSaver "Discount" is the exact duplicate advertisement that HomeDepot is running on their website. So why do I need to spend $20 for nothing? I looked up their merchants for the Colorado Springs 20 mile radius and found 50 merchants of varying products, all of them expiring within 7 days of that date. I looked up the movie ticket discount and discovered I had to purchase a MINIMUM of 8 tickets at a minimum of $6.50/ea.
Where is the savings. Grocery coupons shown on their site are the same coupons listed in the daily junk-mail delivered FREE to my door.
Now the kicker, they will only give refunds on 25% of the cards, so you buy 50, you eat $375 for product that doesn't deliver what it promises. Oh, yes, Mark buys flowers and tires and car maintenance somewhere and gets enough of a discount to pay for the card. But where are these places in Colorado Springs. I guess 99,950 of merchants are within 20 miles of Fairfax, VA. They certainly are not in Colorado.
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