Published August 2026 · Shawndell N. Dawson, Founder & CEO, Dawson Visionary Enterprises

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I opened the Advocates Paying Advocates Marketplace in February 2026 through an amazing partnership with ReloShare, with an audience of 154 advocates. I upgraded the marketplace platform to Shopify in March 2026. 

Here is everything that has happened since. I believe that backing your own mission is incredibly important, and that leveraging advocacy experience to build solutions that empower advocates, mentor them, and provide leadership development is critically important.  I launched the APA marketplace to be a source of visibility, support, financial empowerment, and knowledge preservation. 

The numbers

Between March 17 and August 3 — four and a half months:

• 2,299 unique visitors

• 29 orders placed by 18 customers

• 22% of those customers came back and ordered again

• 3 creators listing, with 2 more preparing to publish

First sale came thirty days after launch.

Now let me tell you what those numbers mean, because the headline ones and the important ones are not the same.

The number I did not expect

The APA Marketplace has a 22% repeat customer return rate in four and a half months, in a store where almost everything is free and there are only a few dozen items. People are not downloading one thing and forgetting the site exists. They are returning to look for other resources.

I have thought about that number more than any other, because repeat customers are the thing you cannot manufacture. It is the difference between a store people found once, and a store people remember.

Why I built the free side first

A marketplace has a problem no other business has: you need supply and demand at the same time. Buyers will not come to an empty store. Creators will not list on a platform with no buyers. Most marketplaces fail in that gap.

I decided to solve supply first.

The free products were not a giveaway strategy. They were a recruitment strategy. Every free resource on that site was there to show an advocate what listing her own work would look like — what the page looks like, how delivery works, what the customer sees, what it feels like to have something of yours out in the world with your name on it.

It worked. Eighteen customers became two published creators. Two more are finishing their documents to publish on the marketplace right now.

For a two-sided marketplace at four and a half months, roughly one in four buyers converting to sellers is a real result. It is the number I would point to before any other.

And the three items that were not free? They sold for about forty dollars each. So this is a story about rising opportunity and an emerging market with warm customers.

What the field reached for

The product data is the most useful thing I have, because it tells me what to build next without asking anyone to fill out a survey.

Three things I take from this.

Self-care and sustainability content is the strongest pull by a wide margin. The Reset cards were claimed nearly twice as often as anything else. That tracks with what 154 advocates told us in our ReloShare survey, where sustainability and multiple income streams were the top things advocates wanted to explore next. The field is tired, and it is looking for something.

Advocates are downloading resources about becoming creators. 5 Things Advocates Already Have That Could Become a Product tied for second. Nobody downloads that by accident. That is intent.

Templates travel. The Partnership Visibility Template Pack performed because a template is a thing you can use on Monday. Organizations buy templates. That is a paid category and I was giving it away.

What changes now

The free catalog stays. It is what brings creators in, and it serves as a boost for advocates and survivor-leaders who have knowledge to share. The self-care series will continue to offer at least one free product every month through the rest of this year.

What changes is an infusion of more digital products for sale. Including products built in the exact three categories the marketplace’s product data already proved: sustainability and self-care, creator readiness, and templates organizations can use immediately.

We will be expanding the offerings on the marketplace to include survivor-centered experts and access to their amazing services. 

I’m also expanding opportunities for advocates and survivor-leaders to learn more about making digital products and selling them on the APA marketplace. 

The thing I keep noticing

I have spent twenty-nine years in the movement to end violence against women, children, and people. Thirteen years as an advocate. Sixteen years at the federal level, ending as a Senior Executive Service Director, where I directed more than a billion dollars to organizations serving survivors.

Across all of it, I watched something that never stopped bothering me. The people who wrote the curricula, built the training, designed the protocols that keep people safe;  they had exactly one way to get paid. A grant that funded services. If the grant moved, the pay moved with it. 

Forty years of public investment built extraordinary expertise in this field. It never built a supportive market to celebrate and invest in that expertise.

THIS is why I built the APA Marketplace and launched it with free resources. 

I am not saying that to be self-deprecating. I am saying it because it is the most honest evidence I have that this instinct runs deeper than strategy, deeper than knowing better. 

We need to continue to back our mission, support our own, and invest in each other.  Our mission and our financial future need it all. 

If you have something in a folder

Three advocates have work for sale right now that did not exist in March. Not one of them started with a finished product. They started with something already sitting in a folder — a template, a curriculum, a handout, a workshop they had run more than twice.

If you have that, you already have what they had.

Gett started today! https://sellers.advocatespayingadvocatesmarketplace.com/ — free to start, creators keep 85%, digital delivery and watermarking provided to protect your work when sold.

If you have questions and want support, there is a free email course you can sign up for or follow Dawson Visionary Enterprises on Instagram, TikTok, or Facebook.  

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Shawndell N. Dawson is Founder & CEO of Dawson Visionary Enterprises, LLC and the Advocates Paying Advocates Marketplace. She spent 29 years in the movement to end violence against women, children, and people, including 16 years at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.