Would love to weigh in here. IMO it’s not essential that the purpose is something that is directly meme-able. Most of the time, organizations do not market (here I mostly mean “amplify”) their purpose directly. Instead, they come up other artifacts that do this for them - like a tag line. Or audience-customized versions of these. While I agree that “shared needs” is not very meme-able, I don’t think that this is a requirement for a purpose, which is primarily for internal use in my view.
That being said, I’ve crafted a vision & a mission as well based on the purpose being discussed. Perhaps these are more “opinionated” and therefore more inspiring.
First, some definitions. Purpose, Vision, Mission & Impact can all sound somewhat similar. Here’s how we can tell them apart.
- Purpose guides you.
- Mission drives you.
- Vision is where you aspire to be.
- Impact is what matters.
Gitcoin’s purpose is to empower communities to build & fund their shared needs.
^ This is what “guides” us, not what drives us. (This is what we’re ratifying in the orig post.)
Gitcoin’s mission is to help ecosystems grow & thrive by building protocols & programs that enable them to build & fund their shared needs. (my draft version)
^ Is this what drives us? It’s more narrow & opinionated than the purpose. (We could potentially add a qualifier to ecosystems such as “positive sum” if we want to be more selective in the ecosystems we support with our limited resources.)
Gitcoin’s vision is to create a world where millions of diverse, interdependent, cooperative & autonomous communities flourish, thereby enabling universal human thriving. (my draft version)
^ Is this what we aspire to create? Are these the right adjectives? Words matter!
Finally, our impact should be quantified and outlined. What we have outlined with essential intent here are close but IMO none are not nearly measurable enough.
Let’s take a look at the graphic @owocki shared:
We could adopt the following north star metrics (or something like it):
By the end of 2023, we have 69 communities that have adopted our protocols, enabling at least 69420 individual grants, funded by 6,942,000 contributors.
Imagine how the above vision, purpose, mission, and impact would help us to prioritize our daily, weekly, seasonal work and keep us aligned across workstreams?
How has our mission changed over time?
2017: Push open source forward. Gitcoin is the easiest way to monetize or incentivize work in Open Source Software
2019: Grow & sustain open source.
2021: Build & fund digital public goods.
End of 2021: Gitcoin DAO builds for human thriving (not fully adopted)
Now: Help ecosystems grow & thrive (shortened version of the above draft mission)
What type of DAO are we?
- We are a “protocol / impact” DAO - a DAO that designs, builds & deploys open protocols that create positive externalities. (Q: Is there a better name for this? I’m more focused on the definition here, which is below):
- How do we measure success? We measure our success across both utility & impact.
- Today, BOTH utility & impact are reflected in the Gitcoin DAO governance token (GTC). (Is that sustainable & scalable?)
What are we not?
- We are not a grants DAO
- We are not a protocol DAO ← a pure protocol DAO measures its value only in utility
- We are not a social DAO ← while we have many social events, these are in service of our broader purpose to empower communities to build & fund their shared needs
How do we think about our journey?
- We launched a number of experiments to support open source builders & open source ecosystems - bounties, kernel, grants
- The most successful mechanism was grants. We experimented with grants and grants rounds as a way to allocate funds to promising projects and builders. QF was the mechanism that really found PMF because of the way it harnesses voices from the community.
- We helped many incredible projects get off the ground directly by raising money from matching pool sponsors & pairing them with community donations through quarterly grants rounds & QF
- We then expanded to offer grants rounds as a service to organizations like Uniswap that are looking to efficiently allocate funds to grow their ecosystems
- The product-market fit for ecosystem rounds was so immediate and clear that we’re now decentralizing our monolithic grants product into composable grants money legos. This will allow for supercharged adoption & impact.
- We will start to deemphasize running grants rounds directly and emphasize building & scaling protocols that allow web3 projects to run their own grants rounds.
- This pivot led to the reevaluation of our mission, purpose, vision and intended impact. We go from DAO-to-individual as our primary go-to-market to a primarily DAO-to-DAO model over the coming seasons.
Would love thoughts on any/all of the above ways to describe our evolution.
Why is this important for marketing?
Our vision, purpose, mission & impact feed into our overall marketing strategy. They are what is used to create a channel & content strategy. To amplify our key messages across all of our channels - websites, Twitter, Discord, YouTube, etc. With this clarity, we can much more easily spin up new channels that all align too. We will use this clarity to speak with a unified voice to all of our audiences, thereby increasing awareness, comprehension & action.
Please reach out to me directly if you have thoughts here!
And know that we’re working on other ways to engage with the community on these topics outside of this gov forum as well!