VolunteerMatch.org
Lessons Learned
- You can't scale a business by making exceptions. To be the largest at any endeavor, including volunteer matching, requires standardization. When forming internet partnerships, avoid the urge to routinely make exceptions or to reinvent services and deal terms each time a new partnership is negotiated. To be cost effective, VolunteerMatch discovered that it needed to offer standardized services that offered personalization but not full customization.
- Be ready to implement partnerships quickly. After successful prototyping and testing, quickly standardize and automate. When Yahoo, the most popular website in the world, offered an attractive marketing partnership to VolunteerMatch, they were able to launch almost immediately, because VolunteerMatch had already developed standardized processes, tools, and data-feeds for that kind of partnership.
- Develop a scorecard for evaluating potential internet partnerships. For objectivity and emotional distance, the executives that use the scorecard to evaluate a proposed internet partnership should be separate from the team that did the business development and negotiation.
- Be wary when competing for a partnership against an organization that can afford to lose money on the deal. Your competitor may be "buying marketshare" or selling your niche service as a loss leader. Unless you enjoy limitless funding, you can't afford to "win" many of these partnerships.
- For an internet website, traffic is power. VolunteerMatch.org earns 3.4 million unique visitors per year through link-building and search engine optimization. More than 65,000 external webpages link to VolunteerMatch.org, and it enjoys the number 1 ranking on Google and Yahoo for the search terms "volunteer" and "volunteer opportunities." This puts VolunteerMatch in the enviable position of having potential partners beating a path to their door, at a pace of 25 per week. Greg Baldwin adds: "If we have a secret sauce, it's our search engine ranking. We now have the luxury of not needing to reach out to partners, because we're #1 for the terms that matter to them."
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