Communications & Marketing Pilot League

Introduction

On April 17th 2021, the first step towards nested subDAOs in Idleā€™s Governance was taken (A Step Towards Idle Leagues ā€“ Dev & Treasury). The framework started with an initial Treasury Committee to reward value creation and a Dev League that helps grow the protocol from a technical perspective.

With this proposal, the Idle community (ā€œweā€) decided to step up to its role and formally contribute to the next evolution of the initial subDAOs framework.

We would like to add more utility to $IDLE, increase the TVL of the protocol and strengthen the existing Governance process.

Here below, we propose the structure of a possible Communications & Marketing Pilot League concept, using the existing Dev and Treasury Leagues as a reference. In case details are missing, we propose to use the current Leagues model as an instruction manual.

Committee Composition

The Communication & Marketing League would be composed of 4 people:

  • Up to 2 (unpaid during the pilot) Project Managers that propose the beneficiaries of new grants.
  • Up to 2 (unpaid during the pilot) Supervisors have to accept/decline the proposals. Idle Labs might Represent a Supervisor.

Just like in the existing Treasury and Dev Leagues, this is also a semi-decentralized structure, and funds would be controlled by a MultiSig wallet. This model has been battle-tested by Idle and has provided good results by balancing execution and deployment times.

Key Parameters

We suggest allocating a small budget initially and then increasing it with Governance consensus if the team successfully reaches predefined goals.

These are some parameters of this pilot that should be discussed by the community:

  • Mandate Duration

As this is an initial trial, the timeframe should be short while allowing us to understand how to iterate and measure results (2 months might be a good compromise). In the following versions, a quarter sounds like enough time to evaluate the committeeā€™s performance.

  • Mandate budget (Managed by the existing Treasury League)

$2ā€™500 USD per month could be a good starting point. At the current time, the governance should allocate this trial budget from the Ecosystem Fund. This includes grants, activities and multisig wallet management.

  • Supervisors Role

Supervisors are empowered to accept/refuse proposals made by the Project Manager. Suppose the Project Manager does not accomplish predefined goals. In that case, Supervisors might be able to propose a replacement by launching a Snapshot Poll. Suppose any Supervisors are not able to do their job. In that case, community members have the ability to replace them via a proposal in the governance forum.

Communication & Marketing Pilot League

An initial pilot program might work on bounties, tasks, grants, and other development activities that foster the healthy and sustainable growth of Idleā€™s community and raise Idle Ģs brand and mission awareness amongst its DeFi peers and the rest of the world.

  • This Leagueā€™s team can incentivize engagement with existing users, other DAOs and promote Marketing & Public Relations initiatives.
  • Periodic social media and marketing metrics are expected, with tools, specs/results, current status, and next steps.

Suppose this ā€œgeneral-purposeā€ Communications & Marketing League pilot will have a successful outcome at the end of its mandate. In that case, it can propose to increase budget funds and/or recommend a different organizational structure.

The Idle community is excited to propose this initiative in the Governance Forum because it knows that it goes a step further in rewarding active contributors, improving processes and fostering decentralization and community-led development and growth.

Keen to hear your opinions!

13 Likes

Feels like a great time to upweight further focus behind Marketing and Comms.

Idle is still relatively unknown to many, and would be great to build awareness and engagement both within Defi Circles, but also drive awareness to further retail users and investors.

Great proposal @unicorn :fire:

7 Likes

Great proposal. Been thinking about that one for a while, and how thereā€™s a growing need for that initiative, or at least a person (or a couple) to lead that charge.

Duration of the Mandate
Agreed that it could be shorter for a test run, but 2 months is the least it could be, as usually the marketing activities (speaking from experience) need a while to bear some fruit. Usually the activities donā€™t have the immidiate or obvious effort-result correlation (like for example a CEX listing). But 2 months should also be enough to demonstrate the expertise and the effort/motivation of the PM-s/supervisors.

Budget
2.500$ might be too low if split between 4 parties (2 PM-s, 2 supervisors), depending if those are supposed to work full time. If working less, then it could be ocnsidered reasonable, especially if thatā€™s the good ā€œtest amountā€ to do the motivation check. In any case, it might be a good idea for a test run to start with the lower amount and to find the right people.

Duties
Iā€™d like to suggest the extension of the duties, and a more general and unifying term that might be used instead of ā€œcommunication & marketingā€ might be ā€œgrowth & performanceā€. As the league would be responsible not only for the above mentioned:

  • This Leagueā€™s team can incentivize engagement with existing users, other DAOs and promote Marketing & Public Relations initiatives.
  • Periodic social media and marketing metrics are expected, with tools, specs/results, current status, and next steps.

But Also:

  • Collaborating with the team and community to work out the buyer personas, customer journey maps, user flow, metrics to serve as KPI-s
  • Utilizing techniques from all the areas of: social media, SEO, CRO (conversion rate optimization), landing page optimization, content marketing, analytics setup and tracking, UX analysis, and eventually ads
  • Generally working on the digital marketing strategy, as even though there are many low-hanging fruits to be solved now and effects to be seen pretty fast, those ideas will be drained soon, and then there will be a need for the top-bottom approach and deep understanding of the hybrid marketing-defi space. And not just doing stuff ad hoc - as that might be deceptively sufficient in the short-term.

Anyway, great initiative. You have my support. :star_struck: @unicorn

1 Like

In the initial proposal, during the Pilot the PMs and Supervisors are unpaid positions.
2500usd/month is for C&M activities.
By ā€œactivitiesā€ itā€™s NOT mean internal management activities of the Pilot League (like gas fees).
The 2500usd/month would be used to execute some activities/tasks in the C&M roadmap that the Pilot League is going to create.

The reason for this is because this initiative was not planned by the Treasury League so if we want to act fast itā€™s important not to to place more stress in the Treasury League budget.

Also, itā€™s a ā€œpart-timeā€ position and during the Pilot that can mean whatever the Communications & Marketing (C&M) Pilot League wants it to be: from 1h per day, to only some hours per week or even to working a bit just on weekendsā€¦ whatever works best for the 4 ppl involved.

Lets try also to keep away shills and scammers hereā€¦ no money to start, just passion and willingness to kick ass, for now.

Duties
(ā€¦)
But Also:

  • Collaborating with the team and community to work out the buyer personas, customer journey maps, user flow, metrics to serve as KPI-s
  • Utilizing techniques from all the areas of: social media, SEO, CRO (conversion rate optimization), landing page optimization, content marketing, analytics setup and tracking, UX analysis, and eventually ads
  • Generally working on the digital marketing strategy, as even though there are many low-hanging fruits to be solved now and effects to be seen pretty fast, those ideas will be drained soon, and then there will be a need for the top-bottom approach and deep understanding of the hybrid marketing-defi space

The first duty of the C&M Pilot League (or any other name that ends up being chosen, for that matter) is exactly to establish what are the duties/mandate of the Pilot League :wink:

All the points you mention are possibilities, the initial proposal also included some ideas and EVERYONE in the ecosystem is much encouraged to voice their suggestions.

In the end, it would be the work of the C&M Pilot League to research, schedule and execute activities according to their C&M roadmap.

The 2500usd/month assumes that during the initial 2 months pilot the main focus would be to create a roadmap for 2021 and setup a definitive framework for operations and coordination with the other Idle Leagues.

With so much initial groundwork to be done, I personally feel that the budget should be used on high impact/low effort tasks/activities during the Pilot period. Some examples could be (but not limited to) to reward participation and engagement in social media/TG/Discord. I consider these all high impact and low effort because they are either 1-time ā€œrewardsā€ or because they can be set into ā€œauto-pilotā€ by using the right social media automation tools.

In the end, itā€™s up to the C&M Pilot League to get stuff done! :rocket:

By the end of the pilot mandate, imo it should be one of the main objectives of the C&M Pilot League to have come up with a C&M roadmap for 2021.

That C&M roadmap for 2021 would require a new budget and could propose any activities that target both retail (noobs) and institutional/corporate/b2b/DAO2DAO , without overlapping with the activities of the Treasury League.

The future is ours, letā€™s make the best out of it! :money_mouth_face:

2 Likes

Thanks for elaborating. It totally makes sense to do it like that at this phase. And to define duties/activities in that way. I believe itā€™s the right way IMO. Letā€™s go and get it started! :rocket:

2 Likes

I love this proposal.

I believe the idea of a ā€œpilotā€ timeframe

I would love to contribute to the community as a league manager for communications and marketing.

If you all want to read up on my experience and bona fides, please check out
http://miko.com
https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikomatsumura/

I have been working on Developer Relations and Platform Marketing for 30 years in Silicon Valley and was the original chief Evangelist for the Java Language and Platform back in 1994. I am invested in IDLE via gCC which was the lead investor in IDLEā€™s institutional round.

12 Likes

Iā€™d like to apply as a Project Manager for the pilot league.

Hereā€™s my LinkedIn profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/denis-devcic/ , and my website: https://denisdevcic.com/

About me:

I have a masterā€™s degree from the Faculty of Economics & Business in Croatia. With major in Management. My Master paper was ā€œApplying Ethics in Blockchain Technologyā€ from 2019. (link is here but itā€™s in Croatian: https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/233030525.pdf ). I first started dabbling in cryptocurrency back in 2017. And have been actively participating in some communities for about 3 months now, but have since then got pretty deep into crypto and DeFi. I see amazing growth potential for Idle. It has amazing community, team and technical specs. Now itā€™s time to show it to the world.

My experience:

5+ years of experience in marketing agencies and 1+ year freelance.

I went through being an account manager for digital products & services (and getting to know the customer), digital advertising, SEO, analytics, content marketing and conversion rate optimization. Last couple of years Iā€™ve been working mostly on marketing strategies and forming digital teams focused on performance (mostly using Lean Startup Methodology, introducing accountability to digital teams with a role of Product Owner role etc.). Iā€™m currently involved with some companies as a marketing consultant (most notably a headhunting agency for Product Managers/Engineers/Data Science as well as involvement with a couple of startups where Iā€™m a marketing director/investor). You can see my path on my LinkedIn profile.

Why me:

I firmly believe DeFi to be my next chapter, and the future of finance. And Idle represents it amazingly. Idle is a very solid protocol and it needs our help to make it grow and level-up.

5 Likes

Thanks for the post @unicorn. Itā€™s exciting to see the community pushing ideas forward!

A Communication (ā€˜C&Mā€™) League has been a part of the long-term vision for SubDAO leagues structure, focusing on helping to bolster community engagement and other content marketing initiatives.

With the success of the Pilot League and the subsequent formalisation of the Treasury and Dev League, we are now firmly setting the SubDAO patterns that we believe will be the cornerstone of building a successful protocol.

Currently, the Treasury League is splitting its focus across the core Treasury League responsibilities and partially the Communication League responsibilities.

We think there is a lot of upside potential in spinning up a Pilot Communications & Marketing League, as it will help the Treasury League focus on the business development initiatives where we see substantial TVL opportunities.

A fully mandated Communications League would require some time and attention to mobilise and hand over some of the responsibilities that should come under this League but are currently handled by Idle Labs (Treasury League). We propose that for the Pilot of a Communications and Marketing League, we focus on some key areas that would quickly provide the highest value to the community.

Out of the four key responsibilities initially laid out in the Idle League vision, we consider the community engagement campaigns to be the most logical first step for the C&M Pilot League. The Idle community is already strong and supports various newcomers. We think that opening up the new pilot league to cultivate the community officially is a positive step in the direction we are heading towards.

Proposed Pilot budget

The C&M Pilot League would have a budget of $5k in $IDLE to help achieve the goals of this mandate. As this is a low amount, we propose these funds come from the Treasury League budget.

Some ideas that could be used for this budget are things like:

  • Idle Rockstars Rewards: Rewarding top community contributors monthly that fairly distributes across the newcomers and OGs.
  • Meme competitions: Rewarding the best meme of the month or having regular Meme competitions.
  • Best Tweet award: Rewarding the community members who garner the most engagement on Twitter or who has the best Tweetstorm.

Proposed governance

As this would be a pilot run, the Idle Labs team (@Teo @Davide) would be willing to be a supervisor of the C&M Pilot league along with one additional elected Supervisor.

Proposed duration

As we are currently in flight with the first mandate of the Treasury and Dev league, we would propose that the new C&M Pilot league would align with our current mandate timelines, which ends on 4th August 2021.

Next steps

  • Wait for more candidates to show their interest - deadline 4th June 2021
  • Create a summary post of all candidates and team for the C&M League draft - 5th June 2021
  • Carry out a snapshot vote to proceed with the Pilot - 7th June 2021
  • If quorum reached, begin onboarding

We are really looking forward to hearing your thoughts and seeing how we can get this started!

9 Likes

Summary of all candidates for the C&M League

The C&M Pilot League application window is closed! We are very happy to see how the Idle community self-organized to make this community driven initiative come to life. The Treasury League congratulates everyone who applied and expressed their interest in growing the protocol.

The Treasury League can now move on to the next step and set up the poll for the candidates, length of the mandate and budget via a community Snapvote :writing_hand: :inbox_tray:

We have the following applicants for the role of Project Manager:

We have the following applicants for the role of Supervisor:

You can vote ā€œForā€ if you would like to proceed with the C&M Pilot League or ā€œAgainstā€ if you do not agree with some of the statements mentioned in the above post or the elected candidates and you would like to propose another structure.

8 Likes

The snapshot is over!

Congratulations to @DenisDevcic and @mikojava elected as Project Managers and @Teo @Davide (elected as Supervisors) :partying_face:

The next steps are members onboarding and operations setup.

We look forward to seeing you at work on all the ideas already proposed and creating new ones: letā€™s spread Idle across the main scene :rocket:

| Snapvote results |

Schermata 2021-06-11 alle 19.19.00

7 Likes