MWG Update and Initial Project Pipeline

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Hi PT! I wanted to take the time to provide an update onto how the MWG is structured and what we are working on for the next 6 months. At the request of the grants committee, we will ask for an endorsement that you agree with our initiatives and what the deliverables should be.

It is important to note that this update WILL NOT touch on compensation for either the leadership or members of the MWG, I will put up a separate post on our thoughts about this. However, the entire MWG believes that determining our compensation model is paramount. it is something that we will need to solve to ensure that we can build consistency in our team and execution.

I will breakdown this post into 5 sections, I will do my best not to write a novel, but there are many moving parts to breakdown and discuss.

SECTION 1- MISSION

on our last gov post, the community agreed that the mission and mandate of the PT MWG is ā€œto be the central hub for all PT communication around depositor acquisition and deliver profitable and sustainable growth to the platform and protocol.ā€

What that means more directly is that depositors in PT are not growing fast enough. The protocolā€™s solution to address this is twofold:

  1. Find partners that can integrate with the protocol and build their own lines of businesses that they can sell to their users which facilitate them depositing funds into the protocol.

  2. Find new groups of depositors who will deposit directly into the protocol via app.pooltogether.com

The MWGā€™s mandate is to ultimately help facilitate both of these goals by developing programs, campaigns and assets that deliver both of these missions. Furthermore, to ensure that all efforts to achieve growth by working through these two objectives, the MWG is to have at a minimum oversight and at a maximum a lead position in any initiative put forward by the DAO to achieve either of these initiatives.

SECTION 2- STRUCTURE

The MWG is not an exclusive club, it is open for any community member to join and it welcomes a diverse set of skillsets and ideas. However, it is important to realize that ā€˜marketingā€™ is a vast and wide ranging term. To ensure that the MWG addresses this, it has organized into four groups. The idea is that each of these four groups are to become the unquestioned experts on their specific area of focus. Each group has a leader who has experience in the field and is accountable to ensure that their team is motivated and continualy learning and thinking about ways in which their expertise can be best applied to help PT achieve itā€™s objectives.

These four groups are:

Branding/Steering: This group is responsible for overall marketing strategy and the wholistic performance of the MWG. It is this groups accountability to manage how much money is spent by each of the other groups and ensure that PT is receiving maximum value for every $$ spent.

Paid Media: This group is responsible for understanding how to best spend money to get messages in front of audiences. This includes everything from digital media, to influencer sponsorship, to events and everything in between. If we have a specific project or objective in mind, it is this group who will either have the expertise, or will source the expertise to make the recommendation on how to achieve that objective.

Earned Media/Partnerships: This group is responsible for getting every day people to talk and advocate for PoolTogether. This includes generating media coverage of PoolTogether and telling stories about the life changing events that PoolTogether is enabling. It also includes projects like launching and continually optimizing a referral program. Finally, the scope of this group is to also source, build a pipeline for and negotiate partnerships with other DAOs and organizations that can drive value to PT.

Owned Assets: This group is really responsible for two things- conversion and engagement. Their expertise is in continually creating content and the websites/assets that are accountable for the distribution of that content. This includes the content team from the PT Community Substack and Podcast, but it is so much more than that. It includes creating a PT charity website to allow organizations to source delegations from their members, it includes building microsites that can increase the reach of PT beyond itā€™s existing audience and in includes expanding PTā€™s communication vehicles into new spaces like TikTok and Instagram .

None of these four groups work in a vacuum. In fact, it most cases, these groups will likely collaborate on projects as they will require cross-team expertise. However, it is extremely important for these groups to exist so that they can continue to refine and optimize their domain expertise.

SECTION 3- TEAM MEMBERS

Here is the breakdown of the current members of each team:

Branding/Steering:
Leader: Loitering_Gorilla
Members: Leighton , DeFi.Donut , Gonbatfire , Taliskye , StarTreeTV and our newest member as of Tuesday underthesea

Paid Media Group:
Leader: tim
Members: noxe, Major

Earned/Partnerships Group:
Leader: brodarious
Members: Gonbatfire, StarTreeTV, Mon, AndyKaufman (Adjunct :)), rliriano

Owned Asset Group:
Leader: Folgsta
Members: Tjark , Gustavo , liviuc as well as the content team behind the PT Community Substack and the PodCast

If I left your name off one of these groups- 1. I am very sorry, please message me and I will correct it. But this is the latest group lists that I have based on previous conversations.

SECTION 4: WORKFLOW

The MWG has been starting to generate A LOT of activity and discussions for projects and we have started to get inbound requests from media agencies and DAOs. This is amazing! It is important that everyone outline how the MWG operates and how the flow of inbound requests and ideas should be managed so that we can help these ideas grow and ultimately be launched.

MWG lead ideas: @mon, @noxe and @Major have already submitted amazing community-lead projects. To ensure these ideas are properly supported, the idea creator should start with a post in the MWG channel that is most relevant to the idea- Paid, Earned or Owned channels. Those ideas will then be discussed, ideated upon and prioritized by the group and itā€™s leader. When the group feels the idea is aligned with the strategy of the MWG, they then submit it to the Branding/Steering committee for review. The Branding/Steering committee will then ensure the timing is right relative to other projects in market, act as a cheque and balance on the budget and ensure the proper tracking KPIs are in place to ensure we can measure how well the project is doing, it will approve the project and send it to grants for funding.

Grants will review the proposal as elected representatives of the community to ensure it is something that the community as a whole wants to invest in and decide whether to fund or not fund the project. If the project is funded, the execution team, which will be built into the project proposal will be given the necessary budget to execute the project.

When the project is complete, we will do a post-mortem to determine not just how amazing the project was, but to also see if there are any learnings we can take away to any future projects that we can do.

Inbound Proposals: The MWG is starting to get inbound proposals for partnerships, media properties and agencies. For now, these inbound proposals are not at a volume that are overwhelming. As a result, the MWG will review and evaluate each on a case by case basis. When the request comes in, I @Loitering_Gorilla will review the request and then engage the necessary leader and domain experts from the MWG. We will then meet with the party and determine if they are someone we want to work with, if they can be part of an active project or if this is something we want to pass on. As the level of inbound proposals increases, we will need to revisit this process, but for now, it is how we will operate.

Community Led Requests It is very exciting that we are starting to receive community led requests from members outside of the MWG. We are extremely happy to support this. When these requests come in, they should be sent directly to the Branding/Steering group. We will then meet and ensure that the MWG has the resources to support the request and turn the request into a proper brief. This brief will outline the stated objective, target audience, recommended spend, previous campaigns that were completed and can be referenced and ways in which we will measure the effectiveness of any idea. We will then send that brief to each of the other three MWGs and ask them to come up with proposals/ideas from their domains of expertise. The Branding/Steering will then work with the ideas put forward by the MWG committees into an overall proposal and submit it to grants for approval and funding.

This is the process we are going to follow for the launch of the multi-delegator tool. We will make changes to the process as we learn from this initial campaign.

SECTION 5- CURRENT PROJECT PIPELINE

A small note on compensation. As I previously referenced, compensation for the MWG Leadership and Team members will be the subject of another governance post. However, for any active project, compensation for any contractor/community member/third party will be clearly articulated in any project proposal. That compensation will not only be matched to market rate for the given skillset/task at hand and reviewed by both the Branding/Steering group and the Grants committee, but will also include a clear description of the task being performed and the expected deliverable for the specific compensation.

That being said, the MWG currently has a series of projects in the pipeline that it is excited about launching and delivering over the next six months (note not all of these projects will be approved, but we are giving you a full look at everything that is in consideration):

Branding/Steering (1 Project):

Our primary project is to build a very clear understanding of two groups:

  1. What type of people are currently deposited in PoolTogether and where can we find more people like them who have no idea what PoolTogether is

and

  1. What other groups of crypto-native people who would be interested in PoolTogether, but doesnā€™t know it exists, and how do we reach them and properly communicate with them.

The first part of this project is going to start with work from @underthesea and he is going to engage some additional people to pull as much data from the blockchain as he can. We are also going to work with PT Inc. as much as we can to get additional data generated from PT.com assets. Once we have this data, we will engage in interviews with depositors and community members to augment what the quantitative data has told us and build a really nice picture of who we can target.

The second part of this project involves purchasing a ā€˜panelā€™ of approximately 1,000 users from a third party company. It is important that we use an unbiased set of users (a group that anyone from PT is not involved in recruiting) so that we do not bias the data. We will then as this panel a series of questions to understand how they think, where they get their information, how they like to be communicated with and most importantly, how likely they are to be interested in PoolTogether. We will augment that data with one-on-one interviews and the net result will be a in depth look at the type of people who have no idea PoolTogether exists but are interested, how we can reach them and what we can say to them.

The result of this work will set up PoolTogether and itā€™s marketing/growth efforts up for an extremely effective growth path in the future.

Approximate Budget: $40,000 USDC

Paid Media (2 Projects)

Paid media is looking at two projects in the pipeline:

  1. An experimentation in paid digital media: Led by @Major (@noxe is also reaching out to integrate some potential French expansion). The idea is start building the muscle and expertise internally on spending on media targeting and understand how these systems work.

Approximate Budget: $10,000-$20,000

  1. Gnars NFTNYC Colab

Tim has been working with Nouns/Gnars about a co-marketing promotion to launch the PT Multi-Delegator tool at NFT NYC. This will ultimately be part of the larger Multi-delegator launch campaign, but is already in development.

Budget- unknown at this point (too many moving parts) but could be upwards of $40,000

Earned/Partnerships

There are three projects in the pipeline from this group:

  1. DAO/Partnership outreach program

Led by @Brodarious, this group is building a team that will be accountable for cold outreach to potential DAO/Protocols and negotiating ways in when they can promote PT. This will ultimately in conjunction with and complimentary the sales/parnerships efforts currently being led by PT Inc.

Estimated budget for the next six months: $5,000-$10,000 (proposal to come)

  1. Referral program

Led by @StarTreeTV, this group is building proposal to launch, manage and optimize a referral program that incentivizes existing depositors to refer their network to deposit in PoolTogether and receive compensation for it.

Estimated budget for the next six months: Currently unknown

  1. Valentines Day NFT review/recommendations

@underthesea and @Gonbatfire have done fantastic work in pulling all the data from the Valentineā€™s Day NFT campaign. Now @Mon and @Gonbatfire are looking at how they can use that data to update the campaign so that they can increase the appeal of PT for small fish.

Estimated budget: Unknown

Earned Marketing Group

The earned marketing group has a series of projects that they are considering:

  1. Led by Folgsta, they are looking at extending the budget to operate the content group for the next three months.

Estimated Budget: $10,000

There are three additional projects that the earned group is in the early stages of exploring:

  1. The building of a charity site that encourages different charities to list their causes and solicit delegations

  2. The building of ā€˜templatesā€™ so that we can launch custom microsites that can better support our other marketing initiatives. Example: If we launch a campaign to acquire new French depositors, we have the ability to create a French microsite that delivers specific messaging to the people we are targeting. It also gives us the ability to a/b test different landing pages and optimize conversion.

  3. The expansion of PTā€™s community assets to new platforms like TikTok and Instagram.

There is currently no budget assigned to any of these projects at this time.

POLL TIME

Ok, I know that was long. Thanks for hanging in. Now two questions:

Are you supporting of the operating structure and mission of the MWG
  • Yes
  • No

0 voters

Are you comfortable with the projects that MWG has in the pipeline and working via the grants committee to fund these first set of projects
  • Yes
  • No

0 voters

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Thanks for the detailed writeup @Loitering_Gorilla. Itā€™s clear that a lot of energy has gone into the ideation and organization of all this.
It all makes sense to me!

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This is awesome. Iā€™m especially interested in the ā€œDAO/Partnership outreach programā€ as I see that as one of our biggest potential growth avenues. Also marketing the Multi-Delegator tool will be super helpful, as will the other projects listed! :ok_hand:

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Iā€™m finally getting caught up on gov posts. Thank you for taking the time to articulate where the MWG is at!

The proposed organization feels both streamlined and flexible; the separate working groups have freedom but are guided by the steering committee. It makes a ton of sense to me!

The one redundancy I see is that projects need to jump through two bureaucratic hoops for funding:

  1. They are evaluated by the MWG for approval. If approved, the MWG defines clear budget, deliverables and KPIs for the project.
  2. The project is then sent to the Pool Grants committee for approval.

It seems to me that due diligence for a project will have been already been performed by the MWG, so a review by Pool Grants is just a formality.

So, all that being said I think eventually the MWG should manage its own budget. It would streamline the process further, I believe.

Thanks for the write-up and the insight into the group @Loitering_Gorilla ! Iā€™m excited by the work youā€™re all doing.

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