Gitcoin Partner Marketing Runbook & Toolkit
This marketing runbook and guide was designed to help you make sense of all the marketing pieces you need supports a successful Quadratic Funding grants round!
👈👈 Expand to learn how best to use this resource
Participating in this season’s Gitcoin Grants 21? (August 7 - 21). Find MARKETING ASSETS HERE: [COMING SOON]
✨Find design asset templates for Twitter posts, email banners and more to promote your round in our marketing design package [each community round for GG21 will receive their own canva kit of assets to use].
THE BASICS: Hot tips for your round marketing strategy
Whether you’re a big team or a team of one, there are some things you need to know in order to make your QF round a success. In marketing your round, you need to keep one thing (and one thing only) top of mind: DONOR (i.e., community) ENGAGEMENT!
Your goal for the round is to attract as many people as possible to participate in your round. You can do this through:
- Leveraging your most reliable communications channels. Twitter? Absolutely. Lens? Why not? Email? No brainer. Bonus: Do a bit of analytics research to learn where you usually get the most traction with your community and go to town.
- Asking for community support to amplify your messages. What’s better than a couple of RTs? A community of people spreading the word and inviting their frens to donate! The trick is to make it simple. We recommend creating and circulating a doc or an email outlining how your community can amplify your message. Get detailed, create a helpful launch doc like this one by Giveth that gives people a clear picture of what and how they should be communicating.
- Support grantees with promoting their own grants. At Gitcoin, we’ve learned that Grantees are at the heart of donor engagement. When you support your grantees you support your ecosystem. The most effective grantees in a round know how to activate their networks and invite all of their frens to support them. That’s why during every round we tool our grantees with up-to-date marketing assets [COMING SOON] & engagement guide that tools them to better engage with their own communities. We also recommend that you give Grantees spaces to connect both sync and async. A Gitcoin, we run a few Grantee Twitter Spaces that give grantees a chance to pitch their project to the wider community and get more exposure during a round.
- Make sure you are up to speed with security best practices to protect yourself and your community:
WHY PEOPLE DONATE
For a more detailed analysis on the following, check out our Donor Audience Profile that compiles Gitcoin’s research on Donors to Quadratic Funding Rounds
Gitcoin is still undergoing donor audience research but our preliminary findings show that donors typically donate to a grants round for a mix of the following reasons:
- They are friends with a grantee in the round
- They care/are invested in the given ecosystem’s growth
- They care about a specific cause being worked on by a specific grantee or entire ecosystem
- They want to get involved with promising projects at its early stages as they see a potential investment opportunity
- They want a public record/signal of support/make a general impact
- Airdrop farming*
*Take special care with making promises to donors around potential airdrops (this includes NFTs, POAPs, etc.). This marketing tactic can increase the chance of Sybil attacks (fake accounts run by the same person to reap more rewards) and will detract from the main objective of a QF round: having real community members contribute and decide on how to best allocate your funds to incentivize ecosystem growth
GETTING TACTICAL: Marketing tactics to consider for your plan
With your strategic fundamentals in place, let’s get to the actual tactics.
Note: We’ve designed this tactics list to support Gitcoin Grants partners but there are still some helpful suggestions and templates that will support any ecosystem leader to effectively market their grants round.
We recommend that you think about your marketing plan in three separate phases:
[PHASE 1] Pre-Round - 4 weeks out
[PHASE 2] In-Round - First day & beyond
[PHASE 3] Post-Round - 1 week post-round
Phase 1: Pre-Round
4 Weeks Out - Awareness
Objective: Increase awareness of your round within your ecosystem’s audience and the broader Gitcoin Grants audience.
Master
External Marketing Plan
Task
Phase
Timeline
Channel
Example Content
Status
Target Audience
3 Weeks Out - Awareness
Objective: Increase awareness of your round within your ecosystem’s audience and the broader Gitcoin Grants audience.
Table
External Marketing Plan
Task
Phase
Timeline
Channel
Example Content
Status
Target Audience
2 Weeks Out - Discovery
Objective: Promote more widely to gain community interest (& beyond!)
Table
External Marketing Plan
Task
Phase
Timeline
Channel
Example Content
Status
Target Audience
1 Week Out - Discovery
Objective: Build hype and get participants ready to donate.
Table
External Marketing Plan
Task
Phase
Timeline
Channel
Example Content
Status
Target Audience
2 Days Before - Discovery
Objective: Building anticipation and getting participants ready to donate.
Table
External Marketing Plan
Task
Phase
Timeline
Channel
Example Content
Status
Target Audience
Phase 2: In-Round
Objective: To increase the number of unique donations to the round.
First Day of Grants Round
Table
External Marketing Plan
Task
Phase
Timeline
Channel
Example Content
Status
Target Audience
Ongoing throughout the Grants Round
Table
External Marketing Plan
Task
Phase
Timeline
Channel
Example Content
Status
Target Audience
Last Day of Grants Round
Table
External Marketing Plan
Task
Phase
Timeline
Channel
Example Content
Status
Target Audience
Phase 3: Post-Round
Week after Grants Round
Table
External Marketing Plan
Task
Phase
Timeline
Channel
Example Content
Status
Target Audience
Full Marketing Plan Database
AWESOME Partner content
Example Posts
Case Studies
Partner Blog Posts
Example Tweets
Grantee Marketing
MEMESPIRATION
