[S14 Proposal - AMENDED] Memes, Merch, Marketing - Budget request

MMM Workstream

:tada: Season 14 Budget Proposal, Revised as of 5 May 2022 :tada:

This is a renewal proposal for the MMM workstream requesting budgetary funds for Season 14 (1 May 2022 through 31 July 2022).

tl;dr

The efforts of the Memes, Merch, & Marketing workstream continue! For the first season, all Gitcoin marketing contributors & efforts will be unified under this DAO workstream. Our highest priority of Season 14 will be to maximize the impact of Grants 2.0 and marketing GR14.

The MMM workstream is requesting a total of 152,912 GTC for Season 14.
( Update: This is a decrease of 9% from the original S14 proposal. See detailed request and changes below.)

Our focus this season is on the following four objectives:

  • Lay the foundation to reposition Gitcoin as the premier ecosystem building & funding protocol
  • Increase awareness & affinity for public goods funding & Gitcoin’s role in it
  • Elevate the Gitcoin brand experience
  • Establish systems, processes and practices to shape a thriving MMM and GitcoinDAO community

Season 13 Recap

The MMM workstream made extensive progress in Season 13 in our effort to establish Gitcoin as the world’s preeminent community of web3 builders, building for the public good. We outlined this progress initially in the April workstream accountability report. Here is the full list of key highlights & learnings from Season 13.

Objective 1: Build Gitcoin’s lean, mean web3 marketing machine

  • Led awareness & marketing efforts for Grants Round 13, our second biggest round yet with over $1.4M raised from 16k contributors with 300k contributions by the community
  • Planned, designed, and executed email marketing plan during GR13 and across the rest of S13, achieving a record-breaking 9 email campaigns, 6500 clicks to grants and over 9000 grants added to carts
  • Drove over 3M impressions, 1.3M profile visits, and added 10k new followers on main Twitter handle
  • Created web analytics tracking for GR13 to track conversions and track our impact

Objective 2: Shape and grow a leading web3 brand

  • Planned and executed a sold-out Schelling Point public goods conference at DevConnect Amsterdam
  • Selected and onboarded a PR partner to shape Gitcoin’s external perception & grow global media presence
  • Established cross-DAO partnerships and ran two successful community events (Memepalooza); the most recent one had 200 attendees in partnership with 1Hive & KlimaDAO
  • Major improvements to content archiving tool, memes.party, over 700 memes uploaded
  • Launched the first version of Regen vs Degen card game during Schelling Point Denver
  • Ongoing delivery of great regen vibes through GitcoinDAO Twitter

Objective 3: Support GitcoinDAO & workstream initiatives

  • Launched steward Health Cards 2.0 with new features and a complete revamp of the backend
  • Launched the Gitcoin Primer to assist with onboarding of new contributors to the DAO
  • Published two Dune Dashboards (Governance & Financials, Governor Alpha & Timelock) to increase transparency and accountability of our community of stewards and workstreams
  • Posted weekly GitcoinDAO Digest-newsletter on the forum & email with over 400 weekly readers
  • Supported DAO workstream & group events with marketing and designs
  • Launched and hosted 3 unique ‘Can Devs Do Something?!’ developer meet-ups (Lisbon, Denver & Amsterdam)
  • Created a dozen header images for Notion and Discord, minted POAPs for events and created visuals for onboarding and navigation. Created new logos and branding for Builderband and FDD.
  • Supported Moonshot Collective comms via a partnership-raid

Objective 4: Grow & support team health and accountability

  • Empowered workstream contributors by soliciting and integrating feedback on WS structure (received from our RadicalxChange Voice event)
  • Developed and shared updated workstream OS including contributor levels, substreams, project processes need to be evolved and documented in the upcoming season
  • Began exploring Dework as an onboarding tool for contributors curious about MMM and Gitcoin
  • Collaboration with DAO Ops to improve and streamline our contributor compensation

Continuing Activities and Proposed Budget

This Season, we are continuing to use OKRs for workstream priority setting and planning, with 4 key objectives laid out below:

1. Lay the foundation to reposition Gitcoin as the premier ecosystem building & funding protocol

Key results:

  • Drive customer & audience research on identity, sybil protection & broader ecosystem funding solutions
  • Create product positioning, packaging, and promotional marketing materials to support protocol vision
  • Steer Gitcoin toward a protocol future through effective and timely launch of identity module
  • Prepare comprehensive SEO audit of all website assets & recommend actions to drive growth for Grants 2.0 vision

2. Increase awareness & affinity for public goods funding & Gitcoin’s role in it

Key results:

  • Grow awareness and comprehension of grants and public goods among funders & grantees in Grants Round 14
  • Increase diversity and frequency of Gitcoin representatives at industry events
  • Elevate Gitcoin’s profile within the global media narrative through proactive media outreach & reactive media opportunities from PR/Comms initiative
  • Build the profiles of Gitcoin leadership, positioning us as key commentators and reliable and trustworthy thought-leaders in crypto, DAO, open source & fundraising ecosystems
  • Reinforce Gitcoin as a leader in the Web3 ecosystem, and help Gitcoin transition from an Ethereum funding solution to an internet-native protocol for building & funding ecosystems via a comprehensive content strategy
  • Support Holdings team in marketing virtual events business
  • Upgrade and democratize our email marketing platform & migrate to a comprehensive marketing automation suite

3. Elevate the Gitcoin brand experience

Key results:

  • Support all marketing campaigns, including GR14, with top-notch marketing assets, creative and copywriting
  • Complete analysis and scoping of visual identity refresh
  • Full audit & clean up for gitcoin.co website & other marketing assets
  • Update existing schwag store & innovate using token-gating plug-ins
  • Drive alignment on overall IRL event strategy & begin planning for S15 IRL events
  • Develop visuals for workstream to help onboarding, navigation and proposals

4. Establish systems, processes and practices to shape a thriving MMM and GitcoinDAO community

Key results:

  • Build OS framework to revamp a minimum of 3 quadrants (Workflow, Information, Authority, Measurement)
  • Define and communicate a clear onboarding process for new contributors & implement contributor health measurements
  • Define and implement bottoms-up OKR processes with the MMM contributors by July 10th
  • Expand connections and collaborations with workstreams; designate an MMM point of contact for each workstream
  • Build Gitcoin community & shape community-first vibes via hosting and promoting virtual events such as Weekly Syncs, Memepalooza, and other events
  • Increase transparency & awareness of key DAO activities via the GitcoinDAO Digest

Season 14 Budget Requirements

Budget Category Description & Assumptions Amt USD Amt GTC Decrease Amt USD
Content Social media, blog, newsletters, copywriting $72,400 13,125 $16,740
Brand & creative Production & brand design, IRL event marketing, web development, brand strategy $131,050 23,825 $6,500
Community experience Gitcoin community events, artist relations, DAO transparency $86,100 14,900 $4,100
Growth Email, SEO, marketing campaign management, website migration, analytics and reporting $46,725 8,500
Product marketing Market research, product positioning, packaging, launch support for grants protocol $30,000 5,500
PR/Comms In partnership with YAP Global: comms strategy, DAO reputation management, leadership reputation building $30,000 5,500
Ops, Strategy & Governance OS facilitation & design, stream goals & strategy, recruitment & onboarding, workstream project management, cross-stream relations $108,360 19,700 $22,218
Holdings & virtual events Marketing support for virtual events business including content strategy, email marketing, social media support $0 0 $30,000
Totals $504,635 91,751 $79,558

Budget Ask

USD GTC
Season 14 original ask $584,193 106,216
Reduction $79,558 14,465
Season 14 updated ask $504,635 91,751
60 day reserves (=⅔ of the S14 need) $336,389 61,161
Current treasury balance $12,000 2180
Amount Requested from Treasury $841,024 152,912

Note: A denomination in dollar amount will be prioritized in budget proposals over GTC - if the spot price assumed at the time of posting ($5.50) this document on the forum changes between then and when the budget gets proposed on-chain, the GTC amount will be readjusted to reflect the dollar amount above. GTC are rounded values.

Current signers of the MMMultisig are: Brittney, Fred, Sean, Jonas, Ceres, ChrisDean & Simona.
( Update: ChrisDean and Simona were added to the MMM multisig after the original S14 proposal. )

Amendments from original S14 proposal

  1. Lowered budget by approximately 3% (by eliminating a 5% buffer applied to most substream detailed budgets). We will use workstream reserves to account for any unexpected budget overages.
  2. Decreased budget in Content by 23% to account for time-to-hire and a slightly slower team ramp-up given MMM-steward responsibilities
  3. Decreased budget in Ops, Strategy & Governance by xxx to to account for more realistic time-to-hire and a slightly slower team ramp-up given current MMM-steward responsibilities
  4. Removed virtual events marketing support budget (negotiating for Holdings to cover this expense as part of asset transfer).

Clarifications based on Steward feedback

  1. In response to feedback from @kyle re: “Community Experience doesn’t feel like a fit when DAO Ops currently claims to support community experience”, we’d like to clarify that the work MMM sets out to do differs from the work DAOOps is working on. Our focus is on building a stronger and more engaged community through events, bounties, visuals, explainers and videos. We are also actively working on creating spaces for cross-DAO activities to take place in an effort to unite communities surrounding GitcoinDAO. We are in active communication with @krrisis regarding intersections between our efforts and will work to keep efforts properly aligned in this and future seasons.
  2. In response to feedback from @kyle re: “Brand & Creative feels large for a single season ($137k), but there are few details shared on how this number was amassed”, we’d like to clarify that the proposed brand budget includes the following components: absorbing the F/T salary of bringing over Holdings’ marketing designer, covering additional F/T and project-based designers, salary for substream lead, outside design studio to assist with brand analysis and scope to inform website refresh, and a supply for bounties and project requests from other workstreams. As outlined in Amendment #1 above, we have reduced budget for this substream by removing the 5% buffer.
  3. In response to feedback from @DisruptionJoe re: “the lack of clear metrics”, we’d like to clarify that a primary objective for our Growth substream is to improve data visibility, tracking & analytics for campaigns & projects within the MMM workstream. For Season 14, we’re unfortunately not able to make our goals as quantitative as we’d like, but we believe this will continue to improve meaningfully with each season. We hope that progress will be accelerated by moving to a comprehensive, unified marketing automation suite in S14.

Team

The MMM workstream will consist of MMM Stewards, Seeders and Peers. Our ambition is to create a welcoming environment into MMM with mobility for talented contributors that want to be more involved.

You can read more about our initial thoughts on DBI and contributor tiers in this governance post.

Conclusion

We’ve come a long way since MMM was first initiated in GR10. Season 14 will be our most ambitious season yet and we’ve worked hard on getting the structures and processes in place to accommodate our larger mandate.

We are incredibly excited and humbled by the continued support and look forward to scaling up dramatically to fulfill the tasks we set out to do in this budget over the coming 3 months. We’ve got the momentum going and are ~coordinating~ with our amazing contributors and other workstreams to further Gitcoin’s mission of funding Public Goods!

Signed,
:sparkles: Your MMM Stewards :sparkles:

13 Likes

Thank you for putting this together and I enjoyed having MMM join in and collaborate on Schelling Point.

A few things I also highlighted on the call:

I think this needs to be evaluated to determine what our return was from YAP - a lot of the documentary crews present came via the EF and myself, not Yap. I actually am yet to see any evidence of the work they did covering the event. Happy to review when we have it but may not be needed for S14?

It would also be useful to know how many FT and PT contributors this is covering (core and adjacent).

I think we can discuss this re potentially sponsoring any upcoming ecosystem events and having a presence that way - but this might involve a bigger conversation re where sponsorship funds for ecosystem activations comes from.

3 Likes

Looking forward to working closely with MMM! Admire how you try to balance keeping things fluid + open (better for creativity) and structured + predicable (better for ops)

I’m curious if there’s any plan for memes.party in S14 and the card game (go on the schwag store?)

5 Likes

I appreciate the clear detailed budget description MMM folks. I fully support the proposal and look forward to Memeapalooza 6.

Curious about the vesting strategy mentioned in the team diagram. Can you share more details about this please?

4 Likes

I have been compiling my Voter’s guide and I want to offer some of my questions and observations ahead of posting the voter guide. I do intend to update my voter guide as we discuss here, but hopefully we can keep the MMM relevant convo in this thread.

tl;dr on my current sentiment:

MMM - Requesting a reduction (from 167.7K to 132.5K GTC), the goal is to cut out some of the nice to haves here. PR is likely not necessary at this time, we have a strong narrative and brand but no protocol to announce. Community Experience doesn’t feel like a fit when DAO Ops currently claims to support community experience (lets not double pay, BUT if we are taking this over from PGF, I am supportive of the budget). Holdings and Virtual events can pay for their own marketing, not the DAO. Brand & Creative feels large for a single season ($137k), but there are few details shared on how this number was amassed (I think the new front end website for Gitcoin is in here?). This new number (132K GTC) still honors the reserves that were ratified. One final note, I would like to see diversity in your multisig. All of your signers are core MMM contributors and you are missing your customer’s feedback. FDD has done a good job of shifting how to think about multi signer responsibility (DAO Ops a bit too). These are big budgets that should have more accountability with signers of the funds IMO.

It is clear MMM is really starting to hit its stride and I am inclined to offer funding to really enable them to spread their wings. Memeapoloozas are always great fun (and on par with Public Goods Library calls). The approach to contributor type, and the RFP process we are trialing with a Product Marketer are also great ways for us to explore project based work that keeps the monthly recurring burn low. Overall, I loved seeing the progress in aligning the team, and really delivering on some great events (Schelling point x 2!). As with all other WS proposals, I will just call out that I would for these budgets to be smaller where possible. I want to ensure our burn rate is considered going into S14 and S15.

I would love some thoughts from the MMM team on - how might we cut this budget down? Are there areas that can be slowed. To reiterate, this request and feedback is going out to all workstreams.

4 Likes

I agree with the conclusion (although I haven’t been around for too long) of coming a long way! I think this proposal is well structured, kudos to the team for doing the work. :raised_hands:t4:

I think we should improve further upon the key results section & make it more succinct. Looking forward to this new structure rollout in S14.

2 Likes

Memes.party got improved substantially throughout Season 13 and we are now on the final stretch of giving the site a bit off a face lift and merging some optimizations. The Discord integration is also ready and will be stress tested during the upcoming Memepalooza, this Friday :tada:

The Regen vs Degen card game received quite a bit of praise from the folks who’ve played it so far. The game hasn’t been developed further since ETHDenver though and it isn’t included in our Season 14 budget. We’ll definitely look into ways to add it to the store!

4 Likes

We are exploring token vesting grants for full-time DAO contributors in order to align incentives for long-term contribution, similar to equity grants for tech/startup employees. Many of us who are coming from Gitcoin Holdings have these in place and we’d like to see if we can make a uniform policy within the MMM workstream to enable these for select full-time contributors. No more details on this time to announce, but hope that helps!

3 Likes

I love the direction you are going with this stream. The work MMM has done and the vibes it has cultivated have been great. I am supportive of this budget.

My complaint: The lack of clear metrics

This section is all output not outcome. In marketing and growth depts I expect to see the levers you intend to hit and the potential gains in activations, visits, loops, or something similar.

How will we know that the foundation as been laid to reposition Gitcoin as the premier…

What will this look like? How much awareness do we have now? What metric changes if you are successful?

How will I know if this was successful at the end of the season?

What will this achieve? How was this prioritized of discovery of natural frequencies and incentivized engagement loops as a where to focus? I’m assuming the outcome would be more something, but what is that something?

Supporting or driving?

I love this. We all should stop trying so hard to have the DAO adopt policies and let great models emerge. I think this is one that we all attached to because it resonates as addressing the root issues we need to solve. This framework is becoming a norm across workstreams for a reason. Now we might codify it only to agree on the shared terminology we use.

I’d love to talk with your leadership group about our learnings at FDD. The bottom up process for goal setting has some limitations we ran into and it would be great to help you skip learning the same things the hard way… if possible!

In conclusion

I am very supportive. This is a large ask, but the stream is moving in the right direction. I’d love to see more “increase x metric from y to z” type goals next season. I may be a little more picky then after seeing what is done with this seasons budget, but I’m excited to see what you do!

7 Likes

MMM Workstream

:tada: Season 14 Budget Proposal, Revised as of 5 May 2022 :tada:

This is a renewal proposal for the MMM workstream requesting budgetary funds for Season 14 (1 May 2022 through 31 July 2022).

tl;dr

The efforts of the Memes, Merch, & Marketing workstream continue! We are gearing up for our biggest season yet, with the absorption of Gitcoin holdings’ marketing. Our highest priority of Season 14 will be to maximize the impact of Grants 2.0 and marketing GR14.

The MMM workstream is requesting a total of 152,912 GTC for Season 14.
(Update: This is a decrease of 9% from the original S14 proposal. See detailed request and changes below.)

Our focus this season is on the following four objectives:

  • Lay the foundation to reposition Gitcoin as the premier ecosystem building & funding protocol
  • Increase awareness & affinity for public goods funding & Gitcoin’s role in it
  • Elevate the Gitcoin brand experience
  • Establish systems, processes and practices to shape a thriving MMM and GitcoinDAO community

Season 13 Recap

The MMM workstream made extensive progress in Season 13 in our effort to establish Gitcoin as the world’s preeminent community of web3 builders, building for the public good. We outlined this progress initially in the April workstream accountability report. Here is the full list of key highlights & learnings from Season 13.

Objective 1: Build Gitcoin’s lean, mean web3 marketing machine

  • Led awareness & marketing efforts for Grants Round 13, our second biggest round yet with over $1.4M raised from 16k contributors with 300k contributions by the community
  • Planned, designed, and executed email marketing plan during GR13 and across the rest of S13, achieving a record-breaking 9 email campaigns, 6500 clicks to grants and over 9000 grants added to carts
  • Drove over 3M impressions, 1.3M profile visits, and added 10k new followers on main Twitter handle
  • Created web analytics tracking for GR13 to track conversions and track our impact

Objective 2: Shape and grow a leading web3 brand

  • Planned and executed a sold-out Schelling Point public goods conference at DevConnect Amsterdam
  • Selected and onboarded a PR partner to shape Gitcoin’s external perception & grow global media presence
  • Established cross-DAO partnerships and ran two successful community events (Memepalooza); the most recent one had 200 attendees in partnership with 1Hive & KlimaDAO
  • Major improvements to content archiving tool, memes.party, over 700 memes uploaded
  • Launched the first version of Regen vs Degen card game during Schelling Point Denver
  • Ongoing delivery of great regen vibes through GitcoinDAO Twitter

Objective 3: Support GitcoinDAO & workstream initiatives

  • Launched steward Health Cards 2.0 with new features and a complete revamp of the backend
  • Launched the Gitcoin Primer to assist with onboarding of new contributors to the DAO
  • Published two Dune Dashboards (Governance & Financials, Governor Alpha & Timelock) to increase transparency and accountability of our community of stewards and workstreams
  • Posted weekly GitcoinDAO Digest-newsletter on the forum & email with over 400 weekly readers
  • Supported DAO workstream & group events with marketing and designs
  • Launched and hosted 3 unique ‘Can Devs Do Something?!’ developer meet-ups (Lisbon, Denver & Amsterdam)
  • Created a dozen header images for Notion and Discord, minted POAPs for events and created visuals for onboarding and navigation. Created new logos and branding for Builderband and FDD.
  • Supported Moonshot Collective comms via a partnership-raid

Objective 4: Grow & support team health and accountability

  • Empowered workstream contributors by soliciting and integrating feedback on WS structure (received from our RadicalxChange Voice event)
  • Developed and shared updated workstream OS including contributor levels, substreams, project processes need to be evolved and documented in the upcoming season
  • Began exploring Dework as an onboarding tool for contributors curious about MMM and Gitcoin
  • Collaboration with DAO Ops to improve and streamline our contributor compensation

Continuing Activities and Proposed Budget

This Season, we are continuing to use OKRs for workstream priority setting and planning, with 4 key objectives laid out below:

1. Lay the foundation to reposition Gitcoin as the premier ecosystem building & funding protocol

Key results:

  • Drive customer & audience research on identity, sybil protection & broader ecosystem funding solutions
  • Create product positioning, packaging, and promotional marketing materials to support protocol vision
  • Steer Gitcoin toward a protocol future through effective and timely launch of identity module
  • Prepare comprehensive SEO audit of all website assets & recommend actions to drive growth for Grants 2.0 vision

2. Increase awareness & affinity for public goods funding & Gitcoin’s role in it

Key results:

  • Grow awareness and comprehension of grants and public goods among funders & grantees in Grants Round 14
  • Increase diversity and frequency of Gitcoin representatives at industry events
  • Elevate Gitcoin’s profile within the global media narrative through proactive media outreach & reactive media opportunities from PR/Comms initiative
  • Build the profiles of Gitcoin leadership, positioning us as key commentators and reliable and trustworthy thought-leaders in crypto, DAO, open source & fundraising ecosystems
  • Reinforce Gitcoin as a leader in the Web3 ecosystem, and help Gitcoin transition from an Ethereum funding solution to an internet-native protocol for building & funding ecosystems via a comprehensive content strategy
  • Support Holdings team in marketing virtual events business
  • Upgrade and democratize our email marketing platform & migrate to a comprehensive marketing automation suite

3. Elevate the Gitcoin brand experience

Key results:

  • Support all marketing campaigns, including GR14, with top-notch marketing assets, creative and copywriting
  • Complete analysis and scoping of visual identity refresh
  • Full audit & clean up for gitcoin.co website & other marketing assets
  • Update existing schwag store & innovate using token-gating plug-ins
  • Drive alignment on overall IRL event strategy & begin planning for S15 IRL events
  • Develop visuals for workstream to help onboarding, navigation and proposals

4. Establish systems, processes and practices to shape a thriving MMM and GitcoinDAO community

Key results:

  • Build OS framework to revamp a minimum of 3 quadrants (Workflow, Information, Authority, Measurement)
  • Define and communicate a clear onboarding process for new contributors & implement contributor health measurements
  • Define and implement bottoms-up OKR processes with the MMM contributors by July 10th
  • Expand connections and collaborations with workstreams; designate an MMM point of contact for each workstream
  • Build Gitcoin community & shape community-first vibes via hosting and promoting virtual events such as Weekly Syncs, Memepalooza, and other events
  • Increase transparency & awareness of key DAO activities via the GitcoinDAO Digest

Season 14 Budget Requirements

Budget Category Description & Assumptions Amt USD Amt GTC Decrease Amt USD
Content Social media, blog, newsletters, copywriting $72,400 13,125 $16,740
Brand & creative Production & brand design, IRL event marketing, web development, brand strategy $131,050 23,825 $6,500
Community experience Gitcoin community events, artist relations, DAO transparency $86,100 14,900 $4,100
Growth Email, SEO, marketing campaign management, website migration, analytics and reporting $46,725 8,500
Product marketing Market research, product positioning, packaging, launch support for grants protocol $30,000 5,500
PR/Comms In partnership with YAP Global: comms strategy, DAO reputation management, leadership reputation building $30,000 5,500
Ops, Strategy & Governance OS facilitation & design, stream goals & strategy, recruitment & onboarding, workstream project management, cross-stream relations $108,360 19,700 $22,218
Holdings & virtual events Marketing support for virtual events business including content strategy, email marketing, social media support $0 0 $30,000
Totals $504,635 91,751 $79,558

Budget Ask

USD GTC
Season 14 original ask $584,193 106,216
Reduction $79,558 14,465
Season 14 updated ask $504,635 91,751
60 day reserves (=⅔ of the S14 need) $336,389 61,161
Current treasury balance $12,000 2180
Amount Requested from Treasury $841,024 152,912

Note: A denomination in dollar amount will be prioritized in budget proposals over GTC - if the spot price assumed at the time of posting ($5.50) this document on the forum changes between then and when the budget gets proposed on-chain, the GTC amount will be readjusted to reflect the dollar amount above. GTC are rounded values.

Current signers of the MMMultisig are: Brittney, Fred, Sean, Jonas, Ceres, ChrisDean & Simona.
(Update: ChrisDean and Simona were added to the MMM multisig after the original S14 proposal.)

Amendments from original S14 proposal

  1. Lowered budget by approximately 3% (by eliminating a 5% buffer applied to most substream detailed budgets). We will use workstream reserves to account for any unexpected budget overages.
  2. Decreased budget in Content by 23% to account for time-to-hire and a slightly slower team ramp-up given MMM-steward responsibilities
  3. Decreased budget in Ops, Strategy & Governance by xxx to to account for more realistic time-to-hire and a slightly slower team ramp-up given current MMM-steward responsibilities
  4. Removed virtual events marketing support budget (negotiating for Holdings to cover this expense as part of asset transfer).

Clarifications based on Steward feedback

  1. In response to feedback from @kyle re: “Community Experience doesn’t feel like a fit when DAO Ops currently claims to support community experience”, we’d like to clarify that the work MMM sets out to do differs from the work DAOOps is working on. Our focus is on building a stronger and more engaged community through events, bounties, visuals, explainers and videos. We are also actively working on creating spaces for cross-DAO activities to take place in an effort to unite communities surrounding GitcoinDAO. We are in active communication with @krrisis regarding intersections between our efforts and will work to keep efforts properly aligned in this and future seasons.
  2. In response to feedback from @kyle re: “Brand & Creative feels large for a single season ($137k), but there are few details shared on how this number was amassed”, we’d like to clarify that the proposed brand budget includes the following components: absorbing the F/T salary of bringing over Holdings’ marketing designer, covering additional F/T and project-based designers, salary for substream lead, outside design studio to assist with brand analysis and scope to inform website refresh, and a supply for bounties and project requests from other workstreams. As outlined in Amendment #1 above, we have reduced budget for this substream by removing the 5% buffer.
  3. In response to feedback from @DisruptionJoe re: “the lack of clear metrics”, we’d like to clarify that a primary objective for our Growth substream is to improve data visibility, tracking & analytics for campaigns & projects within the MMM workstream. For Season 14, we’re unfortunately not able to make our goals as quantitative as we’d like, but we believe this will continue to improve meaningfully with each season. We hope that progress will be accelerated by moving to a comprehensive, unified marketing automation suite in S14.

Team

The MMM workstream will consist of MMM Stewards, Seeders and Peers. Our ambition is to create a welcoming environment into MMM with mobility for talented contributors that want to be more involved.

You can read more about our initial thoughts on DBI and contributor tiers in this governance post.

Conclusion

We’ve come a long way since MMM was first initiated in GR10. Season 14 will be our most ambitious season yet and we’ve worked hard on getting the structures and processes in place to accommodate our larger mandate.

We are incredibly excited and humbled by the continued support and look forward to scaling up dramatically to fulfill the tasks we set out to do in this budget over the coming 3 months. We’ve got the momentum going and are ~coordinating~ with our amazing contributors and other workstreams to further Gitcoin’s mission of funding Public Goods!

Signed,
:sparkles: Your MMM Stewards :sparkles:

5 Likes

I would support MMM workstream for S14, and they did great previously.

Here are 2 advices (not questions)

  1. recall there is community experience in DAOOps (@krrisis ) so what’s the different?
  2. let’s have coordinations between MMM and user support, e.g the user questions (complaints) on twitter could be routed to support team.
3 Likes

This is one of the most important workstreams! But… I am missing the “Buy GTC” messaging… Is that not allowed?

I feel like if that were the message… it would be much easier to justify this kind of spending…

If it’s not allowed, then well… I have to vote no on this proposal as is… this is just too much money for 3 months sadly given the current market conditions :-/

1 Like

I will support this budget as is. It’s been great to see MMM evolve and see it find a balance between being strategic and objective-driven and still leaving enough room for creativity & bottom-up initiative emergence. For me S13 was a transition season and I hope S14 will be the season MMM truly shows its leadership on all things memes, merchandise & especially marketing.

A few random thoughts that pop up:

  1. I hope in the near future we can find some further alignment on terms used (especially you guys being MMM), let’s avoid any and all confusion. Eg the use of the term ‘community experience’ clearly is confusing. I’m down to let MMM own that term for outward facing events, but then you need to help me come up with a better term for our internal facing community experience. :wink: As you see - even while updated, seeing Bob’s comment - this still causes confusion. Maybe just not use this term and talk about Community Events, and or merge this category with Content? Another and even more blatant example is to talk about MMM Stewards, I think there’s no doubt here that the term is claimed by well, the DAO Stewards. From the graph I understand MMM Stewards are not DAO Stewards focused on MMM but… core contributors, full time contributors? Why not just call them what they are? Same with the other terms used in that visual?

I’d say just like any other workstream you need to work on simplicity & transparency, and in a way MMM even more, as you are literally responsible for communication.

  1. I’d love to see more ownership on future events org, specifically Schelling Point, and hope we can have a full-time in-house events coordinator, so we can handle this less in ‘crisis mode’. On virtual events: I think Memepalooza is ‘fun’ but here as well there should be some more focused output focusing on the Public Goods cause and specifically Gitcoin’s mission. When I see what the Gitcoin Vibes account tweeted as a demonstration of created content I mainly hoped that there was other content that was not tweeted that was … better. And more value & mission aligned.

  2. I hope more compensation alignment will happen with people ops in DAO Ops. You guys have been running some fantastic experiments but not sure if a lot of these learnings have been shared with the people ops team. We were also severely understaffed here, so that did not help. I hope future experiments, like eg. the mentioned token vesting experiment will happen in coordination with people ops (@loie or someone in her team).

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Jumping in to provide my two cents as I go through all the proposals.

I support this budget as is and will be voting ‘yes’ - I think the amount requested, though slightly higher than I’d hope for, is within the realm of reasonable, and I believe the work MMM does is mission-critical to the DAO. That said, I strongly echo @krrisis’ feedback:

In short, I think this budget strives to do too much. Seeing the plethora of “Support GitcoinDAO & Workstream Initiatives” outcomes from S13 gives me anxiety - these are pretty scattershot, and while I don’t doubt a lot of them have value, I worry about their prioritization and how some of them might be pulling away from other initiatives. I am reminded of the feedback I shared with DAO Ops around customer focus with respect to ‘other workstream stuff’; I would love for the CSDO group (or similar forum) to be more involved in prioritization here.

I wonder if the S14 list-of-things could be pared down even more. Seeing projects from a complete gitcoin.co website audit, to schwag store updates, to holistic PR strategy make me a bit concerned that the workstream is trying to do too many things at the expense of doing a few important things really well.

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Thank you all for continuing to provide feedback on this budget proposal. Would like to respond here to some of the most recent comments.

We have deliberately stayed away from this type of messaging - your initial thought is correct that this type of messaging is a non-goal. To be clear, this does not mean that the marketing workstream has nothing to do with driving value for the DAO… on the contrary, there is no way for Gitcoin DAO to be successful without market awareness, consideration and usage of our products & services… this is true both in a world where we have a protocol and in a world where we do not. GTC owners are explicitly “not a target audience for our marketing team” - we’ve had several internal discussions (including at CSDO) and this is where we landed. IMO, it would be highly unfortunate for a steward to vote against the marketing budget proposal based on this rationale.

I agree 100%. This is an area I dove into when I joined Gitcoin in the fall but have stayed away from lately. Standardization of terms, even for internal use, will be even more critical as we launch a protocol. More to come here.

Appreciate this feedback. The core marketing team members went with this terminology for S14 bc they felt it more closely aligned with steward leadership - the role we see ourselves playing in shepherding the contributor-led, fully decentralized team we’re seeking to build (rather than terms like “core”, “leads” or the like). Of course, if it’s confusing for others, we’re happy to revisit for future seasons.

We agree and are actively working on this. @gloria and I discussed today, and @Pop & I are discussing tomorrow. More info to come here.

Agree here as well. There’s still work to be done to align our community-building initiatives with our core mission. That being said, we’re proud to be leading the way in creating events that bring in new community members such as this one. Focusing on the output that comes out of them is, in a sense, a good problem to have, because it means we’re involving them in co-creating our work.

We’d love this! We’re tackling a lot in this season, however, so we may be crunched for time, but as always we will do our best to work in public and share learnings so that we as workstream leads can learn from each others wins and challenges as much as possible.

We appreciate this and are grateful for your vote of confidence, @annika!

This is prescient feedback and also something that I have been thinking about pretty much every single day. We’re really trying to strike a balance in achieving all of the ambitious things that the DAO wants us to do, and doing the things that really matter. We expect to get better each season at prioritizing the things that are working and cutting the things that are not, using data as much as possible to make these decisions, and making the decisions as publicly and collaboratively as we can. It’s no easy feat, but we’re up for the challenge!

In closing
One thing I’d like to emphasize (but left out of the official proposal request) is that we are specifically focused on moving decision-making, context, production, and process from the core MMM team to the newly formed marketing substreams.

In addition, we’re looking to bring on trusted part-time contributors - not full-time hires - to run important marketing disciplines like content and product marketing. They’ll be expected to deliver top quality work & also build systems & processes that allow us to onboard, retain, and manage flexible, lean teams of regular contributors. This will take some time to get humming, but I believe strongly that it will ultimately lead to better results with more efficiencies than traditional marketing orgs.

Thank you for your careful consideration of this budget & for all the work you do as stewards of the DAO. We notice it, it is appreciated, and it’s an essential part of fulfilling the incredible mission to which we all are dedicating our precious time. Onward!

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Thanks Sean and others who went back through this budget to see where items could be trimmed. I wonder if we could this down even further? ^^ Do we have any IRL events planned this quarter? I know we have talked about Schelling point only happening once or twice a year (and we now have had two of them). I also wonder if we can table some of the other projects that were once planned? ie, can the website stay the same until the price stabilizes? are there other consulting engagements we can pause (perhaps we only chose one large project like this - new email marketing - and then table the other larger initiatives?)

Overall, I am supportive of the budget allocation but would encourage you to come back with a second pass on a reduction to pause some of the larger projects.

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Hey Kyle, thanks for your additional feedback. We do not have any major IRL events planned this season - there is no budget specifically allocated for that work here, except for some of Brittney’s time as we’ll likely start planning toward the end of this season.

Update from 5-10: We are actually no longer planning on doing the branding work that this proposal had budgeted, so we are likely going to underspend in this substream. However, given the late timing and move to Snapshot tomorrow, we’re not planning to change the budget request from this (we’ll just likely underspend in this area and request less next season).

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Thanks okay. I am supportive of the proposal given the actions in good faith here.

thank you so much for the time to really review this and evaluate what is absolutely essential. As mentioned previously, we are on war time footing and growth can wait - survival cannot.

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Work on a new batch already in progress…will take some time but will try to get it on the shop as well

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