It’s no secret that Fayetteville is a military town. With that status comes an even higher number of local businesses seeking out opportunities through government contracts. MatchAwards is a platform that helps make that process easier. 

About seven months ago, Advanced Internet Technologies, Inc. (AIT), a leading technology innovator, debuted MatchAwards.com, a powerful AI-driven Social Economic Platform that aims to reshape how organizations, government entities, businesses, investors and employees connect and succeed in our changing economy. 

“It is a massive lead generation platform,” explained AIT CEO Clarence Briggs. The platform allows connections for a number of transactions such as G2B, government-to-business; B2B, business-to-business; B2E, business-to-employee; and B2I, business-to-investor. Anybody can register on the platform. 

Briggs went on to explain that there are two basic beneficiaries. One is what his team refers to as “EDOs,” economic development organizations. Those include chambers of commerce, trade associations, universities and other organizations of that nature. The second group that benefits is the members of these organizations. Businesses, both for profit and nonprofit, can find opportunities and connect with other businesses that are targeted to their field of work. 

“Most platforms measure success by ‘How long can we keep people logged into our platform, using our platform,’ right? That’s not us. It’s how short a period of time can you spend on this platform, generating meaningful leads that you can then go out and basically capture and put to use and make money. Ours is the more money you make in a shorter period of time, that is the metric for success here,” shared Briggs.

Users can sort leads by opportunities and narrow their search by using NAICS codes, zip codes and keywords. There are currently 21 signed EDOs right now that are featured on the MatchAwards homepage, and each EDO invites its community of businesses to utilize MatchAwards dynamic offerings. 

Users can utilize MatchAwards Artificial Intelligence, also referred to as MAI. MAI has four “sub-personalities” and can be used as a teambuilder, a consultant (reserved for EDOs), a recruiter and a political advocate. 

The teambuilder feature sorts through leads and analyzes whether or not opportunities are a good fit for a business. The AI political advocate gives EDOs connections to elected officials providing them with political clout and influence that they didn't have before. AI recruiter has not yet been deployed but it will be used to help grow an organization. 

“I think the recruiter, when we get that thing going it’s going to be pretty powerful. We’re going to put a dot on a map, draw a circle around it, and it will actually build a chamber. It’ll go out and recruit for a chamber or a trade association or whatever [organization] and bring members in and do it in a very non-invasive way” explained Briggs. 

One of the most recently added EDOs is Fayetteville’s very own chamber of commerce. The Greater Fayetteville Chamber has partnered with MatchAwards to help their members unlock countless opportunities tailored specifically for their business.

“When we do a partnership with an economic development organization, primarily a chamber, we create for them a co-branded link where they can direct their users to sign up and create those accounts in MatchAwards so their individual users, business users, can then have a profile and get matched to relevant leads…once they have that account created and get those relevant matches for government contracting opportunities, or say micro loans, grants, then those business users can start taking advantage of being informed and following up and pursuing those opportunities to grow their business,”  shared Chief Operations Officer at AIT Advanced Internet Technologies Mike Noble.

Through partnerships with these EDOs, MatchAwards is able to serve a greater number of businesses. The EDOs help get the word out about the platform and the MatchAwards team provides the assistance to the EDO directly. 

“We do onboarding and training. We walk them through the platform–understanding the dashboards, the reporting, the tracking and then how to actually use the platform day to day,” explained Noble. 

GovTide serves as the AI engine on the back end of the MatchAwards matching. Additionally, the team uses a patented search engine called TyBit to serve relevant ads into the MatchAwards platform based on NAICS codes. There will be a link for users and EDOs to click to create ads to be served in the MatchAwards platform. 

“That’s where our opportunity, based on our partnership, comes in to where we can monetize the platform ourselves: relevant ads to relevant businesses based on business needs,” stated Noble.

An exciting development on the horizon is the introduction of cryptocurrency into the MatchAwards platform. The team is looking at trying to add the crypto element at some point this calendar year.

“We are building our own token and we’re actually tying our token to the contract grant and financing value inside of the MatchAwards platform,” explained Briggs.

EDOs already have a crypto wallet tied to their accounts to track the organization's registered users where all registered users are counting for a one for one credit in their wallet. 

Once the Initial Coin Offering (ICO) is live and there’s monetary value that’s recognized for the organization they can share that with their partners.

“As we move forward and the crypto wallet gains value, we're basing the value of the cryptocurrency not on something arbitrary, but basically on the value of the platform itself and the economic development opportunities generated for that particular EDO,” added Noble. 

For more information about MatchAwards or to create an account visit https://matchawards.com/.