TBR-Q2-2023 - Community Team

Governance PT Budget Requests
1

[RFC] TBR-Q2-2023 - Community Team
Team Name Community Team
Quarter and Year Q2 2023
Payout Address 0xF69898B40F0908537a9e93b9f5368C8cf19a23a7
Total USD Value Requested $57,366.32 USD

Purpose

The community team is responsible for stewarding, instilling, and nurturing the culture and contributors around the protocol. Its work ensures the ethos of PoolTogether stays strong as the protocol grows. The team’s areas of focus are:

  • Identity: Facilitate and foster events, vibes & values
  • Spaces: Manage & maintain community spaces
  • Content: Create & promote content such as newsletters, guides, articles, and user documentation
  • Engagement: Empower community members to take ownership & help grow PoolTogether
  • Relationships: Cultivate trust, coordinate actions, and collaborate for change

Objective
PoolTogether is perceived as the most wholesome, welcoming, and secure community in DeFi.

Reflection

During the last quarter we over-obsessed over maintaining a qualitative community. Instead of issuing top-down work, the main focus has been to help contributors to help themselves through community programs and highlighting their voices.

As a Community Builder I am dedicated to value to our community member’s time.
Community members should be drawn to PoolTogether because of the value the protocol and community provides at a base level and not because they can earn XP or NFTs. We are here to build real trust instead of farming engagement.

Metrics:

Notable achievements in Q2:

Again, all of our community spaces remain a safe place. There were no major security incidents on any of our moderated spaces, such as Discord, Telegram, or Reddit. All these spaces have undergone two or more security checks during the last quarter.

Goals

Double-down on what has been done, but focus on:

  • Spearheading the marketing and educational efforts for the next version of PoolTogether.
  • Fostering the on-chain identity of our community
    • PoolTogether is a web3 brand: Continue distributing PoolTogether’s values and brand to thousand of wallets through Mirror, Lens, POAPs, Guild, NFT drops, our constitution, Optimism attestations and other collectible on-chain memories.
  • Continuing to persue ecosystem partnerships such as Optimism and Lens
  1. Maintain a strong and engaged community.
    – Shape community-first vibes through events, bounties & other fun activities
    – Promote the PoolTogether values and nurture our community identity
    – Ensure the community is a safe space for its members

Milestones: 0 incidents on Discord, build out our shared on-chain identity
Performance Metrics: Grow community sustainably by 2%, number of on-chain proofs

  1. Increase the level of ownership taken by protocol contributors through Community Experience.
    – Increase transparency & awareness of key community activities
    – Create entry points for contributors to play a role in growing the protocol
    – Spotlight contributors and their work

Milestones: Set up a translator program, expand community-led events and content booster programs
Performance Metrics: # of facilitated events

  1. Increase awareness & affinity for savings, the no loss spirit, and PoolTogether’s role in Decentralized Finance.
    – Be a reliable news source around the PoolTogether protocol and its closer ecosystem
    – Create educational content around PoolTogether: visuals, explainers, or videos
    – Actively work on creating spaces for cross-community activities in an effort to unite communities

Milestones: Create a content campaign for the hyperstructure launch, Publish a bi-weekly newsletter
Performance Metrics: Grow content reach by 3+%, maintain an open rate of 18-20%

  1. Improve coordination, mutual learning, and flow of resources and information.
    – Host meetings & workshops to share and apply our learnings
    – Create playbooks to garner and share best practices
    – Maintain spaces for knowledge exchange

Milestones: Expand the Community Dashboard & Wiki, Facilitate weekly Community Calls & bi-weekly Contributor Meetings

Metrics

The following metrics will be used to measure the team’s success:

Baseline Data (as of March 15, 2023)
Discord members 12,251
Token holders (>1 POOL) 7,703
# (%) of holders verified on Discord 495 (6.42%)
Twitter followers 52,237
Lens followers 2,195
Mirror subscribers 71
Substack subscribers 2285
Events (quarter avg./month) 12
Coordinape Contributors (#) 59

Budget for Quarter

Budget Surplus

Description Amount
Coordinape* 9,000 POOL
Bounties & Contests 850 POOL
Merch & Incentives 2,450 USDC
Open Role Comp. 1,770 USDC + 341.84 POOL
Total 4,220.00 USDC + 10,191.84 POOL

*Coordinape is distributing uGMI options. These options require locking the max amount of potentially distributed POOL to fulfill them. The exact amount of POOL that is returned for the current quarter is still to be determined.

Team Members

Role Yearly USD Compensation Commitment Percentage Quarterly USDC Quarterly POOL Contributor Contributor Discord
Community Builder $120,000 100% 23,850.00 6,029.41 Tjark Tjark#0815
Events & Contributors $90,000 30% 5,670.00 1058.82 Noxe Noxe#1780

Team Expenses

The Community Team expects the following expenses to incur during the quarter:

Description Amount
Coordinape 30,600 POOL
Bounties & Contests 1,000 POOL
Incentives & Merch 3,000 USDC
Delegation Budget 100,000 PTaOptUSDC

The Coordinape budget is capped at $10,000 worth of POOL per month. $400 per active circle member is being distributed per month.

The Executive Team will continue to hold custody of the Delegation budget. This budget is not intended to be spent but to be used as contributor incentives and contest rewards via the PoolTogether delegation feature.

All the funds not used at the end of the quarter will be rolled over to the next quarter in case the team gets approved. If it is not, all unused funds will be returned to the PoolTogether treasury.

Summary

The requested funds in summary:

Token Amount USD
USDC 32,520.00 $32,520.00
POOL 38,688.23 $39,461.99
Total – $71,981.99

After deduction of the surplus:

Token Amount USD
USDC 28,300.00 $28,300.00
POOL 28,495.39 $29,066.32
Total – $57,366.32

Appendix

Note: Token prices at time of budget request are used for standardization. For simplicity the relevant token prices are provided below.

Token USD
USDC $1
POOL $1.02

The team member compensation is based on the compensation formula spreadsheet.

8 Likes
2

A few disjointed questions/thoughts:

  • What’s the mandate of the community team? I ask because it feels like there might be some overlap with the growth team. Things like spearheading marketing efforts feels like growth to me.
  • Your goals seem like…a LOT for two people to take on in 3 months. In my fiat job, I will generally ask teams to have no more than 2 focus areas, and you have twice that for a much smaller team. A strong purpose/mandate might help you focus this list.
  • In the same vein, your metrics list is long. If you try to optimize everything, you’ll end up optimizing not much at all.
  • For instance, do you really want to optimize something like Discord members? What does it help you if people join and never engage?

Thanks for writing this proposal and for all the hard work you put into PoolTogether!

6 Likes
3

Excuse the late reply - I was out for an extended weekend but wanted to get this TBR in front of others early enough. Thanks you for the great feedback and questions, @links!

This originates from my full-time contract work for PoolTogether Inc in for the past 16 months.

I’ve worked closely with Tim since he came on and supported the growth team wherever possible. Tim, Leighton and myself are getting together for stand ups on a daily basis since our beginning days.

While growth has been focussing on integrations and business development efforts, my role has been leaning more toward ecosystem relationship work and communication.

The mandate reflects here:

  • Identity: Facilitate and foster events, vibes & values
  • Spaces: Manage & maintain community spaces
  • Content: Create & promote content such as newsletters, guides, articles, and user documentation
  • Engagement: Empower community members to take ownership & help grow PoolTogether
  • Relationships: Cultivate trust, coordinate actions, and collaborate for change

Good call to work out a more clear mandate going from that!

This is good feedback and probably very true. A lot of these goals try to focus on “maintaining” and a lot of my work has historically focussed on supporting community members to execute on their ideas.

Having a broad set of responsibilities is not unusual for a community builder position. I’m trying to mirror our community’s needs in the team’s TBRs and hoping foster a community that helps to help execute on our goals.

The community is the extended arm of the Community Team, which is why the general Coordinape circle has been a part of the CT TBRs. Through this circle anyone can get involved and rewarded for their contributions to the PoolTogether protocol & community. The circle currently has 59 members.

I do agree - on top of that it’s mostly manual work. Do you have any direct suggestions?

:100: totally agree and very good point.
Some of these metrics are mainly a signal for ourselves. The goal is to keep the community healthy and genuine.

We’re building a true community without the fuzz of engagement farming or cult-like MLM agendas.

I do personally believe though that “lurkers” are an essential part of a community, too. They’re the foundation. It’s good to have a strong group of believers. Not everyone needs to be actively participating at all times.

Thanks for the questions! Very helpful feedback!

5 Likes
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Happy to see @Noxe on the team

I appreciate the thoroughness of the proposal @Tjark which I also see you employing every-day around the protocol. I think your role extends well beyond your title.

I approve of this proposal.

6 Likes
5

I am in support of this TBR

– Increase transparency & awareness of key community activities
– Create entry points for contributors to play a role in growing the protocol
– Spotlight contributors and their work

The first point is very important to me and hope it can be achieved to a degree.

Overall this proposal and team has a good list of goals and completed tasks from a previous quarter.

The amount of time & effort that has been committed so far can be seen in the previous quarter achievements!

Keep up the amazing work you do and commitment. Excited to see the efforts of @Noxe as well!

3 Likes
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The TBR is live for voting
Onchain: PoolTogether Governance
Gasless voting: Snapshot