ok one week late 
but here are the rest of my thoughts
Now that we’ve had some time to digest and articulate our experiences at DevConnect, some of the things here aren’t necessarily new points and some have even been brought up in other threads but I wanted to lay them out to articulate some nuanced thoughts.
RPGF & Funding Impact
- One of the major cruxes of funding innovation is actually knowing where the money is going. Round managers and their communities want to have confidence that their funding is going to the highest value levers to support growth goals.
- I believe that this is why there is so much fire under the RPGF narrative as well. We’re actually funding impact…and we’re doing it retroactively with confidence.
- But there is a large gap that incurs by only funding projects retroactively. This is something that people in the PG space are pretty aware of and consider it the space that Gitcoin plays in wrt the PG funding landscape: Gitcoin funds and seeds ideas so that they can test and grow* (more on this later)
- How do ideas get seeded and grow in a way that builders feel safe to innovate while putting food on the table while also supporting confident decision making by grantors?
- This surfaces a need for better impact reporting to support the funding of returning grantees for proactive funding
- I think that Gitcoin shouldn’t necessarily resource to solve this but should be working in lockstep with others who are thinking about this and integrating their tech into our stack. (which I think we’re exploring with hypercerts)
- I do believe that our inability to clearly articulate impact has impacted the amount of funding we are securing for our program. I have a whole tangent of thoughts around the purpose of the program and how it ladders into the purpose of Gitcoin and how all of that is amorphous and unclear atm but I will create another document about this.
Evolving the grants program
Ok so back to the “we fund and seed ideas so that they can test and grow” – Gitcoin’s historical position in the grants landscape is tied to this. The grantee journey goes something like:
Seed funding (Gitcoin) → other programs/funding ops → RPGF (OP)
*This is actually articulated in much more detail in @ccerv1’s post here and one could debate on Gitcoin’s role in each of the stages.
The tl;dr is due to the amounts we distribute to a respective project, funding from Gitcoin doesn’t carry a whole team for an entire season but, rather, typically funds new initiatives within an existing project or seed funds net new ideas. AND there should be funding at each stage of the PG builder’s journey.
Knowing this, is this where does Gitcoin Grants want to continue to play?
In a similar vein, it feels like there’s an opportunity to inject some more energy into the program. We have run 19 QF rounds. We are having a difficult time funding and keeping audiences engaged in quarterly donations. My proposition is to not completely abandon QF but instead continue to experiment, document and share best practices for QF and different funding mechanisms. This positions us as experts in grants and creates a space and market for Allo to play in.
Gitcoin as a grants program incubator
- If we can get really good at educating and consulting projects serious about building programs to fund innovation in their ecosystems, this would be a HUGE unlock for us. People often look to us for this information and we should be considering their desire for consultation as a signal of market needs.
- How might this take shape?
- Learning & reporting: Retros retros retros
- We need to learn from our initiatives and publish those learnings. We are operating a double-sided marketplace (sometimes 3 if we’re running democratic funding rounds) – we can glean insights from all audiences and codify/publish best practices. This knowledgebase would allow us to consult on the nuances faced by new customers.
- Synthesis of learnings and knowledge sharing at scale
- We are already testing a round operator training program this season. There’s an opportunity to support new round operators with best practices through different educational materials and experiences to support grants programs at scale.
- Also, as an aside, I love the kinds of content OP is creating to have more transparency for the mechanics of their program: https://twitter.com/retropgf/status/1729884268485312559
- Working with existing round operators both inside the Gitcoin ecosystem and beyond to knowledge share, learn from each other and co-create public goods that detail best practices.