Grantee Engagement
Background
In GR15 PGF set forth a goal to kickstart a sustained effort to engage grantees for overall grant program success and to support grantees through relationship building and knowledge-sharing opportunities.
Why are we not using Telegram or Discord groups?
While this would allow Grantees to connect, it could cause a number of challenges:
- Having many different individual groups would take a large amount of time and dedicated facilitators for each, which is inefficient and we don’t have the manpower for
- Telegram and Discord are not optimized for Grantees connecting with each other; more for one-off questions. The groups could easily turn into question groups, where the facilitators would likely be answering the same questions/sending the same resources over and over again, and Grantees would mute the group. See: Regen crypto group, Greenpill group, ImpactDAO group as examples
Objectives
What do we build community for?
Initial Framing
- Community discovery
- Conduct 10 interviews with grantees to figure out a typical grantee journey
- Community journeys
- Define community journeys and decide specific touchpoints to involve grantees
- Communicate these journeys with other members of the DAO that are also working with grantees
- Community marketing
- Define avenues to reach out to communities without necessarily promoting or selling a product
- Take an educational approach to communicating with Grantees, directing them to key information that would be helpful
- Community created content
- Create spaces to encourage grantees to create and share artefacts (collections, blog posts, ideas)
- Provide avenues for grantees to take part in the governance forums, memepalooza, host library sessions, host twitter spaces
- Community health indicators
- Develop set of indicators unique to Gitcoin Grantees
- Prepare a set of interventions if certain indicators are bad
Heartbeat
Heartbeat is a new communications platform that is ideal for managing communities. With Heartbeat, we could operate a light-weight community of Gitcoin Grantees.
What Heartbeat would allow us to do:
- Provide information to Grantees:
Perhaps the best part about Heartbeat is that information is separate from conversation. In the “Docs” tab on the left-hand side of the screen, we would be able to integrate with Notion to put all Grantee onboarding/claiming information. No more looking through the website and old Discord messages— all of information relevant to grantees will be in one place.
- Have grantees in one place:
Right now, we have no way to massively contact Grantees, and no “home” for them. Heartbeat would be the place to find and communicate with Grantees.
- Grantees connect with each other:
- Directory: Grantees can find each other based on interests, locations, etc. This is useful for Gitcoin as well!
- Matchups: Matches Grantees together on a monthly basis for an optional 1:1 meeting based on their interests
Of course we can have channels that Grantees chat in, but Heartbeat has 2 other features that would effortlessly connect Grantees:
- Provide support:
There can be a channel dedicated to questions, where grantees can ask for support of any kind!
- Host events:
We could host a Grantee community event perhaps once every other week or once per month. Perhaps we could host more during grants rounds— like info sessions on how to market your grant.
Heartbeat’s metrics
Metrics (this pilot is successful if…)
- 30% of grantees from the DeSci round sign up for Heartbeat
- Two events are held exclusively for DeSci round grantees, with at least 10 attendees at each
- 10% of grantees on platform opt into match-ups
- Grantees get responses to their questions in <12 hours
- 30% of users that sign up to Heartbeat are engaged in the platform (Heartbeat has an analytics tab)
Devcon Community hub (deprecated, changed to Gitcoin booth)
Rallying around Community Hubs and Devcon
Framing
Rough outline of your Community Hubs program and planned “opening hours” of your Community Hub
We view our plan as being highly flexible, and we will curate discussions based on the attendees. Generally, some of the topics we plan on covering:
- Informational sessions such as - what are public goods, and why do they matter? What are key examples of public goods - and how do public goods impact us and our daily lives?
- Engaging and social sessions such as - if you were a public good, what would you be and why?
- Funding public goods - models, frameworks, and innovations. Exploring the merits of retroactive public goods funding, quadratic funding, and other mechanisms.
- This topic will include demonstrations + hands-on games that allow attendees to view what quadratic funding looks like in action! We hope to ‘show rather than tell’ with live experiments!
- Education as a public good - trials and tribulations in funding public education.
- This session might include exploring web3-native education in the Ethereum ecosystem, such as Ethereum’s Learn Hub, as well as IRL educational system in people’s respective countries.
- Arts as a public good - why creating and sharing is fundamental to sustaining public goods.
- This session might include exploring decentralized social networks such as Lens Protocol.
- Core infrastructure - public goods that often get overlooked.
- This session might include diving into Protocol Guild and how we might better support the folks building out Ethereum.
- And many more!
Our community hub will be operated at all times (9am to 5pm) - a typical day might look like this:
9am-11am: Relaxed morning, chatting with attendees, creating a welcoming environment as the day gears up.
11am-1pm: Facilitating conversations that engage current hub attendees while welcoming walker-byers to the conversations.
We will use personal introductions as a launching point to divide attendees into pairs/groups for jamming. For example, we may ask attendees “Tell us your name, where you came from, and what is your favorite public good," and based on their answer create intimate discussion groups.
1pm-3pm: Workshops or jam sessions, these might be more concentrated around a problem area, and may involve collectively mapping out problems or solutions.
One idea we have is to demonstrate the power of Quadratic Funding at the hub through a hands-on demonstration! With this demonstration, we’d invite individuals or groups to share their public goods idea on a large whiteboard, and then allow other Devcon attendees to quadratically vote on the public goods they want to fund.
Experiments like this will allow us to engage attendees deeply around public goods and what funding public goods looks like.
3pm-5pm: Debriefing experiences people had at other workshops or hubs, creating a space to process public goods in the context of other topics. Generally decompressing and unwinding, welcoming any attendees to chill as the day comes to an end.
List of dedicated people that will organise, oversee and be responsible for the Community Hub
- QZ (Gitcoin)
- Maxwell (Gitcoin)
- Lani (Gitcoin)
- Vermeer (Gitcoin)
- Azeem (Gitcoin)
- And others! We will have lots of value-aligned community members around Devcon
Timeline view
Q3