During a few Twitter spaces the topic of fundraising for the matching pools has come up and I know few people including myself would love to help expand the already great matching pools by trying to bring in more sponsors.
What do you think is the best way to accomplish this goal?
I know of some pretty great LinkedIn tools, which would help with outreach. Happy to help in that area for free.
Who should we refer potential sponsors to?
Maybe creating new marketing benefits for the sponsors would help?
What if we set up commission bounties for this type of thing? I bet this would motivate people to make calls & would encourage sponsors at the events we attend to sponsor to the pools.
I think @M0nkeyFl0wer might be the best person to refer sponsors to.
I definitely agree that matching pool sponsors need greater visibility, in the beta round they were hardly provided any coverage. In one of the twitter spaces, a gitcoin staff member said “there are too many sponsors so we can’t list them out here”
Curious to know if you or anyone else has any ideas for how to provide marketing benefits to sponsors. Getting more followers for the twitter accounts of matching pool sponsors from round participant seems like a low hanging but obvious fruit to pluck.
You’ve got a good point there! Two quick points I can think of based on our engagement with Beta round this time. We were not the sponsor but we encouraged one of our portfolios to become the sponsor.
First off, let’s talk about Gitcoin getting more involved with round sponsors. It’s awesome to see a lot of grassroots marketing movements popping up from sponsors, and big props to the Gitcoin main Twitter account for showing them support. I’m from OKX Ventures, and before the beta round deadline, we organized this cool AMA session. We had two sponsors, DMC and GoPlus, and we also had Bob Jiang and Anymose (also thank you @juanna for representing Gitcoin!), who are community stewards from the Greater China community, joining us. We hyped up the event in all our communities, and had around 300 folks tuning in live. But here’s the thing, we still had a bunch of unanswered questions during the AMA, showing how important decentralized grassroots marketing efforts are to fill in the gaps. So, it would be awesome if Gitcoin can give more endorsement and recognition to these grassroots movements moving forward.
Also, when it comes to broadening the types of sponsors we have, here’re some quick perspectives. As the Allo Protocol starts taking off, it’s not just about the web3 community helping each other out. We can use blockchain to make a bigger impact in society. And to make that happen, we gotta get more non-crypto folks involved who understand the power of quadratic funding. To attract these players, we might need to do a couple of things.
Rigorous KYC/AML/Risks measures for traditional players.
If we take a look at what traditional corporations are doing, they always want to see specific goals being met (KPIs), and they’re all about co-marketing. So, if we can offer clear targets and strong co-marketing opportunities, we can get sponsors from big corporations, tech companies, and even traditional charities. To start off, an impact report/brochure of how we are a new way of doing charity can be extremely helpful for traditional corporations.
I hope these ideas can stir up some meaningful conversations. More engagement and endorsement from Gitcoin, more diversification and materials to attract non-crypto sponsors might make the rounds more sustainable. s
Indeed, not only Gitcoin but also projects participating in a round should support such grassroots movements. When a person votes for my project, the least amount of courtesy I can show is following their account on twitter. A similar norm needs to take hold so projects follow and engage with the matching pool funders they are getting money from.
Gitcoin has made some remarkable strides in engaging with traditional players, here’s a twitter thread they recently wrote on their collaboration with UNICEFs office of innovation - https://twitter.com/gitcoin/status/1664386503051714561?s=20
Great idea @Jimi ! I like the ideas of decentralizing sponsorship for a few reasons:
Incentivizing community members to pursue these sponsorships will definitely have an impact on the number of sponsorship referrals.
I also think that this would create a win/win situation in which we will see a more DIVERSE sponsor list (location/industry/etc.) while also expanding Gitcoins reach which may results in attracting more sponsors.
In addition, creating a sponsorship steward onboarding kit and minimum requirement to ensure these stewards are active in the community and not just here to extract value (although its still beneficial to both parties).
Maybe could integrate advertisements into the rounds. So similar to how receiving “full match” is gated by the passport score, you could make whatever proportion of full match gated on watching a short advertisement from the sponsors. Users can choose whether or not to engage, but the incentive to engage is additional amplification of their donation from the sponsor if they watch their ad.
Another way to do it is maybe put all the ads on a separate page and the advertisers pay extra to the matching pool for each user that clicks/watches their ad. Could potentially incentivize users with a raffle or limited edition NFT mint or something for engaging with the ads. Gamify it somehow. This would keep it fully opt in and non intrusive for those that wish not to engage with additional individual and collective incentive for those that do.
So happy to see grantees being more active on the forum. Thanks for starting this thread @Jimi.
One thing to consider is the ability to run your own independent rounds (anytime) using Grants Stack or raising for featured rounds (during GG seasons). Independent rounds don’t have a minimum matching pool requirement and can be tailored to your (of funder) needs. This could be a great opportunity for projects/ protocols to fund their ecosystem’s public goods. Examples of the can look like solarpunk guild pitching in for a round, Kyoto funding builders in their ecosystem or the web3beach pool I mentioned earlier today.
You can use the Palau conference as an opportunity to raise for a featured, independent, or even bring on a funding partner for the core rounds.
I share the sentiment about finding ways to create more visibility or benefits for funding partners. It’s something the team is continuously exploring. I think featured rounds are a great opportunity to not only benefit from the GG season hype, but also allow featured round funding partners to establish their own eligibility criteria. Please refer to the GG18 LatAm Round for an example MetaPool using as an opportunity to grow their own ecosystem by funding public goods. It’s also important to consider that Gitcoin.
I don’t see this being applicable to core rounds because they are more neutral. This can be something that featured round funding partners can try to capitalize on. They could even embed this into their eligibility criteria if they wanted. IMO opinion it makes sense for smaller projects to try and benefit from funding featured rounds because “impact” is difficult to capture. This could also help them identify and retain value creators.
Thanks for bringing this up. Huge props to the MMM team for making this connection happen for funding partners. It’s lots of additional work in the middle of the busiest of times and they still pull up for it. Gitcoin has done lots of crossover marketing with MetaPool, Arbitrum Grants, and other partners this round - in addition to the programmed marketing initiatives that help make every season a success.
This is a valid point and something I am personally trying to address and iterate on. I plan on creating a better structure for offering this support moving forward. This round I’ve joined Meta Pool on several of their spaces to promote the LatAm round, will join a KudasaiJP on an AMA translated to Japanese and trying to put together a spaces to feature African based grantees. Gitcoin is also a supporter of what @Jimi@hbesso31 and the Solarpunk Guild is doing with Gitcoin Radio. Again, shout out to MMM and PGF team members for making the time to join and support when possible.
This is a great point as well. To me “decentralized sponsorship” = Grants Stack. It’s a great way to tap into your network and raise funds for a cause that’s important to you. I would love to see a Blu3DAO raised and managed QF round to fund women led projects for example. Potential funders can include sponsors of hackathons that Blu3DAO has participated in or projects that have previously sponsored hacker houses, scholarships, or events organized by Blu3DAO.
Not a fan of this idea for various reasons. Vibes/ aesthetics/ user experience being one. I don’t want to be in a public goods funding mindset and have to watch a 20 second video about the next atomic swapping, account extracting, yield generating, nft searching wallet or whatever killer app people want promoted. Then we have to get into the discussion about how those ads are chosen and who gets to call the shots? I expect this would increased abandoned carts. Research shows that 69% (nice) of online shopping carts are abandoned. This would not be conducive to the checkout process.
I’m really excited about the potential for community members and projects looking to grow their ecosystem to use Gitcoin products to fund, build and protect what matters to them.
Thank you for all of your input & participation in this thread everyone
UPDATE:
I added the decision makers on telegram at every sponsor booth of ETH CC this year & would love to pass these leads on to the biz dev team + I’m happy to help with fundraising through LinkedIn outreach as well.
Let’s make GG19 the most funded + most ethically funded round yet!
My motivation: if Gitcoin increases its sponsorship funding, it will become a lot easier for the DAO to say no to blood money
Thanks @carlosjmelgar for the detailed comments! I second your sentiment that integrating advertisements could destroy the vibe of gitcoin that the community knows and loves.
An idea I was discussing on twitter with @meglister was having matching funds of each round also participate in the round. For example, climate round would have a project saying “Matching Funds - Climate Round” that can collect community contributions for future rounds and also get the QF match
It would be fully compatible with the grants stack as the gitcoin team would only need to approve its entry into the round. If we have 4 rounds and a project in each round collecting matching funds, community contributions could be upwards of $20k.
The biggest risk is optics, having Gitcoin participate in the round its hosting (even if it is to collect matching funds for future rounds) could lead some to allege we are tilting the scale in some fashion
three considerations: Crowdfunding the matching-pool:
I liked the way it was before regarding one choosing the % of extra funding going towards the matching pool. Even if cents go from each contributor, when thousands or dozens of thousands chime in, then a bigger pot is collected.
semi-permeable membranes:
Also, regarding “bloodmoney”. I don’t really care about where does the money come from ONLY WHEN there are no strings attached AND Gitcoin also do not make the money collection as an ads sale.
Why? bcs we as grantees are not making any contract with the “patreon” or “matching-pool donor”. Instead, we grantees are taking that money into things that do good. And eventually, become also donors of the matching-pool.
If you wanna know more about where do I come from with my perspective, you can read Read it – Free, Fair and Alive. The insurgent power of the Commons which is a book collecting a 25 years-long research on thriving commons. The linked section talks about the pattern “semi-permeable membrane” that allows a group, like a commons to prevent markets from colonizing and destroying them. An example of a semi-permeable membrane is Gitcoin or a Foundation. They are the ones making the agreements and taking the shit of talking and convincing corrupted sources to get their resources. IF these membranes do not ask the activists they serve anything in exchange but commitment on doing impact, then it works. That is the transition we need.
The big corps and the ultra rich are the ones that have the world’s resources by the hand. We need to do a judo technique of flipping the holding of those resources by the people and the orgs actually doing good.
incubator/accelerator:
There’s the need to help many of the already funded projects to turn from money asking orgs into money giver orgs. We need to see more cases like Uniswap hatching from Gitcoin. In fact, we need to turn the Uniswaps as one of the main goals to have when funding initiatives.
Why? Bcs donating to the same org for years feels like being a parent that keeps paying the food, rent, and live to their 45-years old children, when it should be the other way around, those children should be the ones taking care of their parents.
Re-Reading this post a few months later after the launch of Grants Stack gives me some new ideas.
1 What if the ability to fundraise for a round was baked formally into the product. eg instead of having to rely on a human to intake a round funder, the product intook the money, and after it received the funds auto-increased the round sizes + added the contributor’s ENS to the list of matching sponsnors.
By not having to rely on a human, we reduce the overhead of funding the round to self-service ($near 0). Which means we can accept more donations.
2 Another idea is: what if we had referral rewards baked into the product? Eg I disribute a link like https://crowdfund-matchingpool.vercel.app/?referred=owocki.eth and I receive 5% of the funds that are generated by the referral link, up to some amount. This would make the twitter spaces more revenue-generative to run + reward people who fundraise on top of the rounds.
Many of us have networks of potential funders! If we can generate affiliate links, everyone would be incentivised to tap into those networks to fund what matters.
Not sure how long that would take to set up, for now maybe people should just refer folks over to @azeem & we retroactively reward them in future Citizens rounds?
