MMM TL;DR
MMM’s primary purpose is to serve the marketing needs of the DAO by providing marketing strategy, coordination, content, and design support. This past season we officially expanded our scope to include stakeholder comms as part of our work (i.e., steward comms/ PR).
In our S18/S19 budgets, we set our north star as “Reposition Gitcoin as a tech-first organization”. We intend to continue orient toward this north star by managing our 4 out of 5 brands and working to serve product/program goals.
You’ll note that this budget proposal outlines plans for 3 months–a departure from the 6 month requests made by the product & program teams. This is to ensure that we are building and resourcing iterative plans that are sensing and responding to the emerging needs of our products. We found that 3 months is a time period that feels appropriate for the reassessment of marketing resourcing as we continue to learn, iterate and find PMF. We are hoping that we can return to a 6 month budgeting cadence in 2024 as resourcing needs stabilize.
S18-19 Goals
We aimed to keep this proposal as lean and readable as possible and have decided to not include a detailed breakdown of last season’s OKRs. That said, you can see what we set out to achieve and what we completed in MMM’s S18-19 OKR tracker here: https://www.notion.so/gitcoin/OKR-Tracker-ffcc6e6b3e564b069ad0be407633a0a0?pvs=4
Some major highlights from last season were:
- Completion of Allo, Grants Stack, Passport and Gitcoin brand books – also built out a design hub and canva kits to support efforts to decentralize design at Gitcoin.
- Completion of gitcoin.co – the lion’s share of design is complete & messaging is an iterative project of course.
- Supported Grants Stack in achieving their season’s goals! Launched GS & Direct Grants, built out sales collateral, 3 case studies, 6 pieces of evergreen content and a QF toolkit to support customer education.
- Lots of co-marketing wins with Passport! Notably: Launched Passport onchain and drove 12k in holders pushing onchain. Also created 6 case studies, 3 pieces of evergreen content and built out sales collateral to enable Passport BD.
- Learned a lot with Shell announcement – this was our first time dealing with a full-on crisis management situation. We performed a comms retro and have been more intentionally driving stakeholder comms since.
- Launched Schelling Point Sessions as a smaller, vibey-er and less expensive community activation. These experiments have been very successful for brand building and now we are experimenting with different formats in support of BD efforts.
Too many wins to list here but want to state how proud I am of our team for their amazing work this season.
S18 - 19 Challenges
Responding to shifting priorities and expectations
Determining what we say yes and no to continues to be a challenge. This is not surprising for a marketing team of our size managing 4 products but is worth calling out as something we will be actively working on shoring up this coming season. As strategies and marketing needs of the product evolve, so do expectations for our team. We need to both operate incredibly strategically (due to resource constraints) and with agility – which has been challenging for us. That’s why this season we’ll be working with contracted advisors to create more clarity and cross-functional alignment for our product GTMs which will inform nimble marketing strategies for our products.
Analytics Fails
This has been a weak link for the marketing team for some time. We recognize that there is an urgent need to create more understanding around marketing data so we can place better bets and dedicate our resources to what’s working. We’re still exploring cost-effective solutions to amend this gap and plan to allocate more resources towards this in S20.
Community Education
It has been challenging to educate our community and navigate Gitcoin’s evolution as an organization and as a brand. As Gitcoin leans more into its tech-oriented future, shifting our public perception from a cult-like impact DAO to a credibility neutral protocol DAO has been challenging. This season we have created more clear processes around stakeholder comms that I think will help shepherd our core audiences into this new future with us but it will take time. That said, as a DAO we need to create more intentional plans on how we’re resourcing community engagement from a more holistic perspective.
S20 EIs
In preparation for this request, we have worked with the product and program teams to align on specific focus areas that we collectively feel will support each workstream’s specific goals, you can see those plans linked below. That said, there are some overarching themes for this season that could be considered our Essential Intents for S20:
- Deepen our understanding of our markets in order to drive awareness and adoption of our products
- Take a data-driven approach to resourcing our most impactful marketing channels
- Educate our ecosystem on Gitcoin’s evolution from 1.0 → 2.0 to bolster our tech-first narrative and aid with shifts in brand perception
Read More
You can read more about our commitment to each product’s success through our various S20 marketing charters that outline our focus areas and proposed initiatives:
Grants Stack Marketing Charter
Passport Marketing Charter
Gitcoin Grants Marketing Charter
A note on Allo: due to Allo’s intention to regroup and slow down, we will be taking an ad-hoc approach to support their efforts and therefore have not created a charter. This also means we will not have dedicated resources working on Allo, but will support the team with emergent requests as needed.
S20 Budget Request
The MMM team recently went through and completed a reduction in workforce and we currently have a core team of 6 FT contributors. As we continue to restructure, our operational focus will be on bolstering resourcing around product marketing and data analysis.
To accomplish this, we are taking several key actions:
- The upcoming season will see our marketing spend remain flat
- Specifically, we will be working with a vetted consultant to help us reassess our marketing plans and identify skills gaps on the team with the intention to create performance plans and potentially make more permanent hires towards the end of the season
- The budget required for this engagement is being financed by keeping our budget flat despite having conducted a RIF this past season
- We are only requesting a budget for 3 months vs. the 6 months that all other workstreams have proposed
- We will use the next 2 months to create strategic alignment with our GTM and then identify gaps on our team to ultimately start filling these roles needed towards the end of the season.
We have already begun taking actions against this plan and have worked with @kyle, @meglister, @Jeremy and @Sov to align on an approach that everyone feels aligned with.
Amount
MMM is requesting $512,483 for S20, including reserves and rolled over amounts. We will be rolling over only a very small amount due to the incident of misdirected funds and our subsequent request for a significantly smaller portion of our budget (the full request would have left us with ± $250,000 in additional reserves). We are also expecting to pay severance to several contributors as part of our recent RIF.
Budget evolution:
| S18 | S19 | S20 | |
| MMM Budget | $349,400 (actuals) | $385,326 (projected actuals) | $385,326 (requested) |
| 33% Reserves | $184,956 | $184,956 | $127,157 |
| Past season treasury budget | $128,000 | $0 | – |
| Total Request | $560,500 | $560,500 | $512,483 |
Budget Breakdown
MMM is staffed by the following team:
Core contributors (6):
- Laura (Workstream/Marketing Lead)
- Gary (Passport marketing & Social media manager)
- Mathilda (Gitcoin Grants marketing & Content manager)
- Cici (Art Director)
- Harry (Designer)
- Caolan (Communications Lead)
Part-time, contracted and shared contributors (7):
- CoachJ (Operations, Events & Special Projects)
- Ericka (Grants Stack marketing)
- Gerrit (Technical lead)
- Rohit (Writer & researcher)
Our cost breakdown is as follows:
| S18 (Actual Spend) | S19 (Projected Actuals) | S20 (Requested) | |
| Contributor Salaries | Not tracked | $361,716 | $362,050 |
| OpEx (Software subscriptions, gas, audits, travel, professional development) | Not tracked | $23,610 | $23,176 |
| Total | $349,400 | $385,326 | $385,326 |
Closing thoughts
I am so impressed by what this team has been able to accomplish in S18 & 19. It has been nothing short of a wild ride and maybe even a little miraculous. As the needs of the DAO continue to shift, we’re excited to work to execute on plans to help us achieve our collective goals.
I’m personally excited to lean into collectively leveling us up to further support product adoption and revenue generation(!!).
You can learn more about our explorations of this last year