Whatever Deltek’s rationale, it is sad to see the GovWin community that I used to be apart of fade away and gradually die over the last year or so. And by GovWin community, I am not talking about the GovWin.com website that exists today, which is INPUT repackaged. I am talking about the large network that a small team of very talented people built over the course of a couple of years (see the screen shot below of our homepage from November 23, 2010).

From 2010 to 2012, I had the privilege to be part of an editorial team, many of whom had strong AOL roots, that breathed life into GovWin.

We did not have a great social media presence at the start, but with Elliot Volkman and the team, we rapidly grew our audience across multiple platforms.

In fact, we were not really a known commodity at the time we came on board and relaunched the site in October of 2010. Every time we mentioned we were part of Deltek, we received a less than warm response. So, we had to set out and forge our own identity. We were, after all, very different from Deltek because we were an online community, resource center, news site and networking platform and general hub for government contractors looking for opportunities, partners, employees and knowledge, and much more.

A tireless team, which included Joe Loong, Erin Bush, Sean Tucker, Micheal Mullen, Lindley Ashline, Anthony Critelli, Elliot Volkman, Deanna Glick and Charles Butler (forgive me if I am leaving people out), worked for months to create a library of content on government contracting that was impressive.

At one point in time, you could search in Google for all kinds of common govcon terms, acronyms, contract vehicles and news items and GovWin articles or blog posts would appear at the top of the search results. On a few occasions, we were ahead of the U.S. government’s own resources on the topic.

That is not the case anymore. I ran a quick search on many of those terms, and today you do not find GovWin in the first 3 pages of Google search results (I stopped at 3, because what’s the point of going farther?). There are some paid ads from Deltek, but that is it.

The GovWin community certainly was not perfect. There were horrible coding issues with the site (including misspelled words within the code), and I believe we were on Drupal 5 through most of our time there. When it came to programming content, it was not a seamless process. Our tech team and a few of us on the editorial team worked wonders to get everything together day after day, and ensure the content kept changing.

Then there was the long-term strategic vision. I often pushed with senior management that we needed to take the network to another level and allow for “friending” or “connections” similar to Facebook or LinkedIn. In fact, I thought the next logical step was for us to create a LinkedIn-styled system, so government contractors could build relationships with one another within a very niche community.

And it seemed logical to me to go beyond our existing services and create a system that could pre-screen contract proposals based on risk, similar to what contract officers use. This would help thousands of government contractors improve their proposals and increase their chances to win government contracts. From a revenue perspective – there was quite a lot of potential. But it was not part of the company’s plans.

Closing Thoughts On The GovWin I Remember

Despite the challenges we all experienced, and the ones I experienced personally, there is nothing like the GovWin community that we created currently available. Many of the hundreds of knowledge articles, resources and blog posts, are still valuable for government contractors. Especially companies seeking their first government contracts.

For two solid years, the team of people I mentioned above and I created something that was unique and highly valuable. We traveled to conferences and events together, interviewed executives from a wide variety of companies, put on virtual events and networking sessions, and with a limited budget (almost no budget), we created a strong brand where none had previously existed. If I had to do it all over again, I could not find a better group of people to do it with, or a better community to do it for.

Post Notes

Though this post focuses exclusively on the editorial team, there were great developers and coders who worked hard to clean up what they inherited, and give us graphics and technical enhancements to make our lives easier. People like Cian, Erin, Pam, Brent and more. We could not have done it without you guys either. Then there was the Match team, lead by Bridget Anderson, who was brilliant. And good crew of marketers. I remember everyone fondly. We had great times at work, and after work at Carpool and other spots.