International Volunteer HQ

International Volunteer HQ (IVHQ) provides safe, quality and extremely affordable volunteering placements in developing countries all over the world. IVHQ assists developing countries by providing volunteers to work in a variety of jobs such as teaching, medical work, HIV/Aids awareness and orphanage assistance.

Sparks created the site after conceptual discussions with the client in 2007. The entire business is run via the web so Sparks had to create a very functional and usable site to start generating revenue from the launch date. The online Volunteer space is very heavily contested with some large organisations, as a start-up being run from a small coastal Taranaki town, IVHQ required a full design suite including corporate branding (logo, colours and style guide) to purvey a sense of trust from prospective volunteers, many whom are under the age of 20 and travelling to the other side of the world to work in impoverished areas.

The client has seen a continual growth month on month since launch, and surpassed their first years projected volunteer numbers within 6 months, allowing them to add new countries to their offering. The current CMS allows the client to keep the site content fresh and up to date and bi-monthly meetings between Sparks and IVHQ are used to discuss current and future developments, these have included using Flickr photo sharing for online galleries and setting up a Facebook group as a community base for all volunteers. Since setting up the facebook group in December 2007 there have been over 400 members join giving the volunteers an area to communicate prior to heading off on their travels. Sparks Interactive actively encouraged IVHQ to enter into the social networking sites to add another level of trust to the brand.

Sparks Interactive has implemented a strong adwords campaign with the client to target volunteers from specific countries. Most of the volunteers are foreign (Top 5 countries in order: United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand) so Google Analytics campaigns are utilised to monitor activity from individual countries, this coupled with the tracking conversion is used to refine the search terms and country targeting every 3 months to refine keywords and phrases and get the most value from the monthly spend. IVHQ regularly appears in the top 5 general 'volunteer' search results pages, often at number 1.

Sparks is currently working with IVHQ to acquire 2 grants from New Zealand Trade and Enterprise to fund 'Online search engine advertising' and 'Natural search rankings'.