Check Comparables Before Committing to Start-Up Costs
Before investing in nonrefundable start-up costs, try to determine whether it's realistic to achieve your volume goals based on the maximum CPA you can afford. To do so, research comparables at Commission Junction [http://cj.com].
Since you won't find many other non-profit organizations with Affiliate Programs (yet), the best proxy will be websites that pay for user registrations. Find comparables with registration forms similar to yours, both in terms of personal information requested and time to complete the form.
You will find that CPAs grow higher as registration forms get longer or as more personal information is required.
Feasibility Testing
As a supplement to your comparables research, you can also guesstimate the feasibility of an Affiliate Program by putting yourself in the mind of your potential Publishers. Even though they are website owners and newsletter producers, it's better to think of them as arbitragers. These "arbitragers" hope that your CPA payment will exceed their cost of referring internet surfers to you.
Here's an example which shows how the arbitrage works. Suppose that:
- your Affiliates pay an average of 25¢ for each teacher they refer to your lesson-plan page
- 1 in 10 teachers referred to your take-action page actually download the lesson plan that reflects your point-of-view
In that case, Affiliates paid 25¢ x 10 = $2.50 to earn the success-fee. If you could afford a CPA success-fee of $3.50, then you would likely attract many good Affiliates to help you, leading to a high volume of lesson-plan downloads. On the other hand, if you could only afford a CPA of $2.75, the margin is too thin for most arbitragers to take the risk, leading to few, if any, lesson-plan downloads.
