5 learnings from 2020 and next steps for 2021

Selin Yigitbasi-Ducker

Verified writer

PUBLISHED ON January 20, 2021

2020. It was the year of despair, it was the year of camaraderie. If there’s one positive to be taken from it all it’s that often crises bring opportunity to learn, reflect and grow. 

With Goodsted, we were lucky to have amazing partners who believed in us from an early stage, who volunteered to help during this difficult time, alongside a great team who worked hard to open our beta platform to the public to support in any way we could. We were also very fortunate to close our seed round of £225K just before the markets crashed in April, which gave us a strong foundation to keep developing and create as much positive social impact as we could.

There are many highlights we’re thankful for and proud of which demonstrate the hard work of our team, the support of our advisors and the trust of our early community. But we’ve also learned a lot along the way - so I hope these insights can help other early-stage startups, founders, entrepreneurs, and change-makers looking to embark on a similar journey. To our existing and potential future partners, I hope these learnings help shine some light on our progress and where we’re headed next!   

Some highlights from 2020:

• Generated our first sales and established relationships with 5 key partners
• Raising £225k SEIS seed round
• Hired our first full-time employee
• Launched our #TackleCOVID19 campaign, and Time Well Spent campaign
• Hosted virtual collaboration events to support social entrepreneurs in collaboration with Fast Forward 2030
• Reached our first 1000 members
• Matched over 170 volunteers with 50 initiatives and organisations
• Launched our first private ecosystem for one of our partners
• Organised our first virtual team building event across London, UK and Izmir, Turkey.

So what have we learned along the way? 

1. Have the courage to share your mission at an early-stage. Those who believe in you will join you in this journey, although your product or service may not yet fulfil all promises. 

By bravely sharing Goodsted on social media and speaking at events we were able to connect with individuals and organisations who genuinely connected with our core mission and identified with our long-term mission. Although we were in the early stages of our product development and there were improvements still to be made, this early outreach allowed us to  engage a strong initial group of users and partners to test and iterate with their invaluable feedback We even ended up developing an additional service offering as a result!

The product we’d built so far enabled private groups to interact and engage in one space as a community - helping them collaborate on social and environmental initiatives. The diversity of these  private groups spanned  companies and their employees, university departments and their students, non-profit organisations, and groups of neighbours simply looking to take action locally. Everyone began interacting on a common platform - sharing their needs and resources. 

What we found when we started talking to potential partners was that larger organisations had existing communities that they too were looking to engage in a similar manner, and they wanted a platform in their own brand, private to their community, instead of engaging straight away on a public platform. To solve this need, we decided to create a separate space, a private ecosystem powered by Goodsted, for our large partners to strengthen their existing community engagement programmes and activities.  This private ecosystem is a product  we can now offer as a service to organisations who prefer this approach - to bring together their existing network of colleagues, customers, and various other stakeholders. And we are working on a way to further break down silos, by connecting these partitioned ecosystems to the wider Goodsted platform and community as and when they wish.

By launching early and engaging in meaningful conversations, we were able to significantly expand our potential customer base. This was obviously a huge amount of work - and an intimidating challenge to take on - working with a company that had 2,000 employees and 90,000 community members! But our ambitions paid off and we’re hugely thankful for the trust and faith that this important first partner, Aster Foundation, invested in us to allow us to grow with them. 
 

2. Don’t hesitate to have a coffee and a chat (even virtually!) with those in the industry. It may end up helping you more than you think.

We all lead extremely busy lives, and during the pandemic it’s seemed like we were working harder than ever. But this year I learned the value of taking the time to network virtually, and utilize LinkedIn as a tool for learning from my peers. We receive dozens of messages on LinkedIn which we may not follow up on or don’t respond to as they might seem like time consuming distractions. But making the time to reply to these messages and instigating coffee chats led to opportunities I otherwise wouldn’t have imagined. 

Last February (pre-lockdown) I received a LinkedIn message from Nurture, JCDecaux’s ‘Scale Up’ programme. I wasn’t in a position to fully benefit from the programme they were offering so I could have easily ignored the message, however I decided to put time aside to meet for a coffee - just to learn more. 

It was a rich and informative conversation and I saw the value for Goodsted in joining the scale up programme once we’d launched. But it was when I mentioned we were raising our SEIS seed investment round of £150k that they offered to send my investor pitch deck to their network and see if there was any interest. I wasn’t expecting an immediate response, however to my surprise a few weeks later I had an email from JCDecaux in my inbox mentioning that Mariana Investments was keen to learn more!

After an initial pitch, and a few more meetings, we received the full SEIS seed investment offer from them of £150k, and managed to close our round at £225k far surpassing our initial target together with additional investors coming on-board after this news.

The lesson here is that we should never underestimate the power of networking and growing our network. Even when it seems like a distraction or is someone looking to market their services - take the time to engage - it might lead to an opportunity to help you reach that next milestone.

3. Be agile - it will allow you to change strategies in times of crisis, while staying true to your mission. 

Our plan once we raised funding was to grow our non-profit community who needed talent to build capacity and deliver their services at scale. We would  match them with employees looking to  engage in skilled volunteering through their corporate volunteering programmes. The plan to become financially sustainable was tied to receiving annual subscription fees from companies in return for this service we would provide. 

When the Covid-19 crisis hit, the world turned upside down and companies started cutting costs. Focussing strictly on key business operations to retain their own talent, rather than on any new investments, many companies lost clients, having to entirely close or reduce their own operations, and place their staff on furlough. 

Suddenly, individuals who were furloughed and with social distancing and isolation restrictions in place, found themselves  with  much more time on their hands. What we saw was that volunteering increased drastically. So many people sought  to extend a helping hand to their neighbours, or looked for opportunities to volunteer. And at the same time, many social enterprises, non-profits and community initiatives were struggling - critically needing support to stay afloat and progress with their goals. Recognising we were in a unique position to  help with this, we put our revenue targets to the  side and focused on opening the platform to the wider public entirely for free to match organisations seeking support with those offering support. We launched our #TackleCovid19 campaign with 9 partners. And thanks to our recent seed investment, we were able to support our community during this difficult time.

Our mission was always to enable effective collaboration for social and environmental development, bringing people who want to do good together. So although offering our service for free to everyone wasn’t going to contribute to our financial sustainability, we felt that it was the best way to help our community and create a positive impact in line  with our mission. It had the added benefit of helping us receive feedback on our beta platform to continue improving. 

4. Having strong targeted branding, creative visual content, and PR outreach is key for you to drive engagement

Although this seems like quite an obvious point, it was quite impactful for us when we experienced it first-hand. Until early 2020, we had mostly focused on designing a product that addressed the key pain points  we had identified, and hadn’t yet looked at creative branding to publicise the service we were offering. As an early stage B2B service we used networking and word-of-mouth to find our first partners and drive community growth. In the 4-6 month period following the onset of the Covid-19 crisis however, we had a chance to see how a targeted campaign with effective branding and creative visual content could successfully drive engagement. 

Given Agency, one of our early partners in  #TackleCovid19 had the great idea to create a more focused sub-campaign. One that matched furloughed creative professionals with non-profits who needed their particular skill set. Their furloughed employees offered to volunteer their skills to work on this non-profit campaign. In 2 weeks, we had a creative campaign idea, campaign name, a campaign web-page, and social media visuals ready to go. We launched the ‘Time Well Spent’ campaign as part of #TackleCovid19, and thanks to this push, we saw a 150% increase in engagement on the platform, with over 400 volunteers signing up. We matched 30 different requests with volunteers, and continue to see the creative community engage.

We learned that although it’s beneficial to have an inclusive campaign bringing together many partners, if there are limited time and resources, it’s more effective to focus on a more targeted message and to execute the campaign plan, creative content and messaging as well as possible. Also receiving support from creative professionals, strategists and reaching out to press, ensures that you’ll get the exposure and traction you deserve. We couldn’t have done this without the support of Given Agency, and it was access to their brilliant creative team and professional insight which helped make this push a successful one - and us being highly commended at The Drum Social Purpose Awards. You can read some of the stories that came out of the campaign here. 

5. Don’t be afraid to experiment - before you decide what your focus should be 

Experimenting at an early-stage will help you learn essential lessons and drive you to come up with creative solutions, just as long as you know when to focus your efforts on the most viable outcome. Once you figure out the best way to move, you can then double-down and drive growth. 

This year we had a chance to see how we could best juggle satisfying many different audience groups. From individual volunteers to nonprofits looking for support, to organisations looking for a digital solution to manage their volunteering programmes, we saw how challenging this indeed could be with the limited resources and team capacity we had. But we didn’t shy away from trying.

From the Time Well Spent campaign we learned that targeting individuals with specific skill sets was a great way to grow the community and increase our matching success, fitting the creative and business needs from our non-profit and startup community. 

While we were working hard to run this two-sided marketplace matching non-profits with individual volunteers, we were also looking to help companies run their employee volunteering programmes, sourcing opportunities and providing them with analytics on the impact and engagement of their programmes. Next to this we were offering the same solution to organisations who had existing communities, who only needed a tool to manage it all, and foster stronger collaborations. 

It was through many experiments with these different audience groups we realised that if we first focus on offering our software to existing communities, then we’ll be able to positively impact a much larger audience with our technology. 

We’re now focusing our efforts on partnering with existing communities, and providing our solution to organisations to support their matchmaking efforts, tracking the engagement and reporting on the impact of existing impact programmes and initiatives. Our platform will remain open for all individuals and organisations regardless of this focus in our growth efforts. And as a result, we look forward to enabling fruitful collaborations across many different sectors, industries and communities. 

Where do we go from here? Here are some next steps for us for 2021:

• Officially launch Goodsted (out of beta!)
• Keep improving the matchmaking and reporting capabilities of our platform
• Increase engagement with our existing partners
• Establish relationships with new partners
• Grow our community
• Raise our second seed round
• Grow our team

If any of the above sounds like something you’d like to get involved in, please get in touch! We can’t wait to continue on this journey, and look forward to welcoming you to the Goodsted community - a place where anyone and everyone can take action for social good.