Rotten America

Put a tap in the thing they already carry.

An NFC chip in a keychain, a wristband, a shirt or a sign. Tap it with a phone and a page opens — no app, no account needed to start. Every item carries its own factory serial, so each one is individually identifiable and every tap is attributed to it.

Under your brand, your colours, your rewards. We do not market to your list and we do not resell it.

The Civic Tap app showing a member's points and rewards
A phone tapped against a Rotten America keychain, showing a point earned

Anything you already hand out.

Keychains

The workhorse. Pocketable, re-taps daily, survives a keyring.

Wristbands

Events and venues. One per attendee, tapped at entry or at a stand.

Apparel

A chip in the hem. The shirt keeps working long after the sale.

Signage & badges

Static placement — a table, a stand, a door, a lanyard.

A reason to tap it again tomorrow.

Merchandise normally stops working the moment it is handed over. A tap turns it into a channel: the page it opens is yours to control, and the points behind it give someone a reason to come back.

Opens where you point it

A campaign, a petition, a sign-up, a drop. Re-pointable at any time without reprinting anything.

Earns points

Taps, shares and whatever else you decide counts, accumulating toward rewards you set.

Reports back

Taps by item, by day and by region, so you can see which placements actually worked.

A venue full of people, taps registering across the crowd

A tool you configure, not a programme you join.

Nothing below is fixed. You decide what an action is worth, what it leads to, and what the whole thing looks like — we supply the plumbing and the tags.

The item

  • Keychains, wristbands, apparel, badges, signage or stickers
  • Your artwork; the tag is invisible inside it
  • Each unit carries its own factory serial, so it is individually identifiable
  • Quantities from a single event run upward

The destination

  • A tap opens a page you control — campaign, petition, sign-up, drop
  • Re-pointable at any time, without reprinting or recalling anything
  • Your brand, your colours, your domain
  • Different items can point to different places

The rewards

  • You define what earns points and how many
  • You define what points unlock, and at what thresholds
  • Draws, tiers, streaks, or a straight redemption — your call
  • Or skip rewards entirely and use it purely to measure

What comes with it

  • Abuse controls running on every tap by default
  • Reporting by item, day and region
  • Supporter records that stay yours, exportable at any time
  • A sandbox to test a run before a single tag is printed

Rewards are whatever motivates your people. A gym membership, match or gig tickets, merchandise, early access, a donation unlocked at a threshold, or nothing at all if the count is the point.

Built in, not bolted on.

Any system that hands out rewards gets gamed. These run on every tap by default, and nothing is silently discarded — a tap that earns nothing is still recorded, with the reason.

  • Per-phone daily limits

    One device cannot farm a tag all afternoon.

  • Per-minute caps

    Bursts are throttled before they reach a count.

  • Rapid-repeat flagging

    Suspicious patterns are marked for review, not silently dropped.

  • Item-level suspension

    A single tag can be switched off without touching the rest.

  • Permanent logging

    Every tap is recorded — including the ones that earn nothing.

What a serial proves, and what it does not.

Every chip carries a factory serial that cannot be altered, so each item is genuinely unique and every tap is attributed to a specific object. That is real, and it is more than a web form gives you.

It is not, on its own, cryptographic proof that a physical tap happened — a standard tag resolves to a URL, and a URL can be revisited. Secure dynamic NFC closes that gap: a fresh cryptographic message and a tamper-proof counter on every tap, neither replayable nor clonable.

If proof-of-presence is what your programme needs, say so early — it is a hardware choice made at order time, not a setting.

Tell us what you hand out.

Roughly how many items, what they are, and what you want a tap to do. We will come back with a format, a quantity and what the first run looks like.

Events, campuses, venues and member drives are the usual shape, but a tag is a tag — if you hand something out, it can carry one.