Oct 6th, 2023 we officially announced our first pilot cohort of Round Managers Training. As we are approaching the end of the cohort, we are happy to share our learnings on how the training went and future plans.
Before that, I want to express my gratitude to @lanzdingz who has been the pillar of support in facilitating the cohort and has co-authored this post with me.
A big thanks to all the trainers who came in and volunteered their time and resources to help get this cohort off the ground.
Finally thank you to all the cohort participants who have been giving us feedback, actively participating in the round, and helping us make this meaningful and impactful for future trainees.
TLDR; on why we are doing this - With Grant Stack being something any community can leverage to help fund what matters to them, the need for round operators/managers is quickly outpacing the amount of people trained to run rounds.
This is why we decided to build out this Round Mangers Cohort.
Cohort’s curriculum was supposed to be 8 weeks long, with 8 live trainings, followed by lots of additional learning resources and weekly assignments. We had 54 people register and 38 were selected to participate.
The dropout rate was surprisingly low and we had 3-4 people who dropped, and this was mostly due to time constraints.
While we have to work on the flow and cadence of the cohort training, below is a basic outline of what people learned and what work was completed. All assignments were meant to help the trainees build out the resource and knowledge needed to not only run rounds themselves but educate communities on what QF is, how it works and why participating has such a large impact.
Curriculum + assignments
Module 1: Become a Public Goods Maxi | Assignment: Create your Round Manager member page on charmverse | Trainer: @owocki
Module 2: QF and QV 101 | Assignment: Send a 2-3 min video explaining QF in your language or write up a 1-2 page summary explaining QF Bonus: Donate to the Citizens Round (32 submitted projects) | Trainer: @M0nkeyFl0wer
Module 3: Create a QF round | Assignment: Create a test round on any available chain (29 submitted test rounds) | Trainer: @meglister
Module 4: Grantee Recruitment and Onboarding | Assignment: Create a sprint round with $100 matching pool as a group and run it (34 total participants in 5 groups) | Trainers: @carlosjmelgar + @jon-spark-eco
Module 5. During the Round Marketing | Assignment: Create a sprint round with $100 matching pool as a group and run it (34 total participants in 5 groups) Trainers: @carlosjmelgar + @jon-spark-eco
Module 6. Post Round Analysis | Assignment: Providing feedback and insights from the sprint round Trainers: @umarkhaneth
Module 7: Fundraising @azeem
Module 8: Growing your program | Assignment: Submit the feedback form
The Mini QF round assignment: We assigned all participants a team and gave them $100 in matching funds to run a round end-end. The goal with this was to help test run what running a round feels like, using real funds and real grantees. Teams were given instruction and deadlines (it was a quick turn around because GG19 was about to start), but otherwise were able to pick what they wanted the round to be about, what the criteria was etc. From there 5 teams collectively ran 5 separate rounds.
Group 1 : Gitcoin Round Cohort Flywheel - Manager Training Pilot Cohort and attempt to Initiate a flywheel of efforts towards enriching current/future curriculum, empowering more communities by round manager training
Group 2: Climate Underdogs - Supporting lesser-known projects from GG18 Climate Round
Group 3:GP Round Runners - A QF round for allocating the small matching pool among this cohort trainers and organizers.
Group 4: Mini QF Round Trainers Cohort. This a test round for round managers to be able to navigate how the Gitcoin QF works
Group 5: Peaceful Public Goods - A round for young innovators in the blockchain space.
What we learned: We did mini rounds but it was fast, but however overall it went well and was a great learning opportunity. Based on feedback it helped trainees learn the importance that marketing and community engagement has on a successful round. It also let them work through the technical kinks of round settings, timelines and deadlines. We even had a group increase their matching pool size.
The biggest barrier that groups encountered were having individuals donate to the grants. This can also be chaulked up to them only having about 10 days to create, run and closeout their rounds, as we didn’t want to overlap with GG19.
We need to work on creating a more structured cadence for the sessions. We tried to do this, but it was sometimes hard to schedule in certain times with trainers and we bumped into GG19 starting and Devconnect which also threw our cadence out the window.
We have two more sessions left and we wrap up the cohort this week.
What’s next?
We have started the work on turning this training into an online course, with small bite sized videos of the sessions. It will be available to anyone interested in learning how to run QF rounds on Gitcoin, on any chain. This will also include writing a series of Round Manager guides to help assist people in running rounds. Our goal is to have this completed by year end.
However the live sessions have its own charm as you can’t really do much without a cohort and assignments, so we are elated to announce our next cohort in Feb 2024. This cohort will have new experiments in QF, RPGF and more in-depth sessions. If you are interested in becoming a round operator for Gitcoin and your local community, register here today – Round Manager Training Cohort 2
We will also be launching QF guidebooks with a small curated cohort of people who went through the training that will be launched during EthDenver. As more people run rounds, there are more skills, knowledge and resources available and we hope these guides help capture some of that, so that we can continue to decentralize this system and help more communities fund what matters to them.