BanklessDAO Writers Cohort S8 Funding Proposal

Project Champion: HiroKennellyᵍᵐ🏴#0001

Squad: HiroKennellyᵍᵐ🏴#0001, grant#2959

Affiliation: Writers Guild, Bankless Publishing

Purpose: Public Good

Authors; Editors: grant#2959; HiroKennellyᵍᵐ🏴#0001, Trewkat#1933

Date Created: May 3, 2023

Date Posted: May 8, 2023

Funds requested: 260,000 BANK

Project wallet: 0xE77C2D32129473Ee5fa1DE427C5D1189D16cb9E2

Own subDAO/Discord server: bDAO Writers Guild bDAO Writers Guild

Table of Contents

  1. PROJECT TEASER
  2. SUMMARY
  3. RETROSPECTIVE
  4. FINANCIAL IMPLICATIONS
  5. SEASONAL KPI
  6. COMMITMENTS
  7. BRANDING
  8. FURTHER PROJECT CHANNELS

PROJECT TEASER

BanklessDAO to partner with Taptive to run the 5th BanklessDAO Writers Cohort.

SUMMARY

Project Description

BanklessDAO Writers Guild has a continuing partnership with Taptive, an organization which helps communities grow through the power of writing-focused, cohort-based courses.

To date, Taptive and BanklessDAO have partnered to run four BanklessDAO Writers Cohorts. Each Cohort has helped supercharge bDAO community engagement, enhanced connections between bDAO members and other web3 writers and thinkers, and provided a valuable learning experience to members of the DAO and the greater web3 ecosystem.

Through the Cohort, first-time DAO authors have been published by Bankless Publishing, which makes special allowances for Cohort participants by waiving the original content policy. Bankless Publishing shipped six Cohort articles in Season 7.

The goal of the partnership is to have Taptive run its 5th Cohort for BanklessDAO that will, as discussed in the Commitments section, achieve three main objectives:

  • Supercharge community engagement
  • Provide a valuable learning experience for community members
  • Boost the online presence of the DAO

Past/preparatory activities

Taptive and BanklessDAO have already run four successful cohorts. We’ve made improvements to the model and are building upon the momentum of the last Cohort — our most successful yet in terms of published articles (72) — to run another Cohort in Season 8.

RETROSPECTIVE

Taptive has run four cohort-based writing programs with BanklessDAO, through which the community has published more than 225 essays. These essays have led to thousands of impressions for the DAO on Twitter and elsewhere, facilitating the sharing of BanklessDAO-aligned content with an audience that may not have otherwise been exposed to it.

  1. The Cohort is popular and engages the DAO. 110 people enrolled in the Season 7 Cohort. This provides a simple, action-oriented way for interested people to get involved in the DAO.
  2. The Cohort provides a valuable learning experience to bDAO community members and delivers on its stated goals. The most recent Cohort resulted in 72 published posts and at least 59 social media posts. Each published post is evidence of deep, thoughtful engagement in the DAO as it leads to robust conversations and connections between DAO members.

Through these Cohorts, we’ve also built an email list of more than 300 potentially interested Cohort participants. We send announcements of new Cohorts to this list. The beauty of the Cohort model is that authors can participate many times and gain something new with each experience.

During each of these Cohorts, we host weekly Zoom writing workshops that further DAO relationships through feedback and discussion. The kind of supportive environment created by each Cohort is an excellent way to encourage writers’ development.

FINANCIAL IMPLICATIONS

Project Breakdown

This proposal requests 260,000 BANK. An additional 140,000 BANK will be paid to Taptive by the Writers Guild, as provided for in its Season 8 Budget. A total of 400,000 BANK will be paid to Taptive for this current Cohort. The increase in payment is a direct result of depressed BANK prices. Taptive gives BanklessDAO a discounted rate of $2,000 per Cohort.

The funds will be allocated to Taptive to run the Cohort, provide course materials, manage the onboarding processes, and coordinate the Cohort from end to end.

Compensation Breakdown

Funds will be sent to grant#2959 for organizing the program end-to-end.

This funding compensates for the following:

  • Creating the marketing content and materials to attract people into the Cohort (including the landing page and social media marketing copy).
  • Creating the onboarding materials to bring people into the program (including an onboarding survey, Cohort directory, and introduction template to start the program).
  • Designing the Learning Home to create the proper incentives to write (including a Leaderboard to track and gamify the experience).
  • Organizing, planning, and leading the Kickoff meeting along with 3 additional live meetings.
  • Delivering educational content to members (over 20 pages of frameworks, guides, and resources).
  • Monitoring the Discord channel and sending reminders to incentivize writing.

SEASONAL KPI

The core metric for success will be the number of essays BanklessDAO members publish. More published essays are indicators of other positive impacts — more participants, more learning, more relationships built, more impressions for BanklessDAO, and more potential for word-of-mouth growth.

Additional metrics include:

  • Net Promoter Score is in an offboarding survey to determine if Taptive is able to deliver a high-quality experience to BanklessDAO members. We shoot for an NPS of around 80.
  • Number of feedback messages sent following Taptive’s feedback format.
  • Number of 1:1 discussions held in breakout rooms.

COMMITMENTS

The utility this project provides for BanklessDAO revolves around three core outcomes:

  • Supercharging community engagement: the cohort-based experience prioritizes peer-to-peer interaction, feedback, and support. Also, by focusing on the vulnerable act of publishing writing online, this Cohort will create the opportunity for deeper connections.
  • Providing a valuable learning experience for BanklessDAO members: we will offer a polished, tested, and highly-rated learning experience that makes bDAO the best place for people to spend their time.
  • Boost the online presence of the DAO: each Cohort we run produces dozens of community-generated articles. BanklessDAO can elevate these posts in its newsletters, through Bankless Publishing, and on social media to share the authentic voice of your community.

In addition to these outcomes, it’s important to note that funding this Cohort is in line with the DAO’s mission of creating user friendly onramps for people to discover web3, as the Cohort articles touch on a broad range of web3 educational content. The process of writing educates both writer and audience.

Based on past Cohorts, we will:

  • market the Cohort to the community leading to over 100 sign-ups.
  • onboard these sign-ups into the community and the Cohort.
  • encourage the publication of more than 60 BanklessDAO-aligned pieces of written content through our onboarding process, live meetings, library of writing resources, and group accountability.
  • encourage the social media sharing of over 50 of these pieces of content.
  • generate thousands of impressions for BanklessDAO.

BRANDING

Taptive will use the BanklessDAO brand in the name of the Cohort. For example, “BanklessDAO Writers Cohort”.

  1. Taptive will create a short landing page that will give interested participants a place to input their emails to join the Cohort. The landing page will use the Cohort name and BanklessDAO branding.
  2. Taptive will also create the “BanklessDAO Writer’s Cohort Notion Home” as noted above. This will include BanklessDAO branding.
  3. Taptive will send email reminders that will include the name of the cohort “BanklessDAO Writers Cohort” in the communications.

FURTHER PROJECT CHANNELS

https://twitter.com/BanklessWriters

Should the Grants Committee fund the BanklessDAO Writers Cohort for Season 8?
  • Yes
  • No
  • Abstain

0 voters

2 Likes

fully support this proposal - the writers cohort has brought such value to the DAO and members

5 Likes

i was a part of the last cohort, and looking forward to participating in the next one. Such a cool initiative for a MediaDAO to fund, giving people the option to become the supplier side!

5 Likes

Bullish all things bDAO Writers Guild

4 Likes

I have heard great things about the writers cohort, glad to see it continuing!

Some questions:

  • of the 110 enrolled in S7, how many completed the cohort?
  • for the 72 published essays, are they typically used on the participant’s personal blog or do they somehow get rolled into Newsletter/Bankless Publishing?
  • You mention below we get ‘thousands of impressions’ from these articles…can you tell me a bit more about how these articles fit into your funnel? How do these impressions help BanklessDAO ?
  • how many repeat participants do you have?

While I can understand why this may be the case, I’m a bit hesistant to give 400k BANK/season to a single contributor who I’m assuming is going to sell all of it. Is there any way we can align incentives to reduce this sell pressure?

3 Likes

Thanks @links. Great questions — here are answers along with explanations.

  1. 34 participants published at least 1 post during the cohort. That’s around 30% — when considering the delta in effort between entering your name into a landing page and publishing an essay, it’s a reasonable drop-off rate. If you consider “completion” publishing all 4 posts, it’s closer to 7%. However, we intentionally structure the program as an ambitious challenge and expect drop-off.

  2. They are all first published on the writer’s personal blog. This aligns incentives as the writer is personally incentivized to publish. However, during and after the cohort, we can roll up the best content into Bankless Publishing — from my last count we published 3 cohort articles last season in Bankless Publishing. @hirokennelly may be able to comment further. We’ve created a cohort tag here: Cohort - Bankless Publishing

  3. The marketing funnel is not extremely sophisticated as we’re not able to track how a specific post leads back to BanklessDAO. However, the cohort forwards a “decentralized media” ethos where each person in the cohort is writing and sharing bDAO-aligned content. Each of these writers is able to reach new people that may otherwise may have not heard about bDAO. BanklessDAO is able to resurface this content as evidence of the high-caliber people BanklessDAO attracts.

  4. We’ve had 385 sign ups across the 4 cohorts. 290 of those are unique emails — so 95 people have signed up for more than 1 cohort. I recognize this isn’t perfect math, but it gives you an idea.

5 Likes

gm gm @links! And thank you for the response @Grant. One correction re: shipping - Bankless Publishing actually published six cohort articles in Season 7 (admittedly three were mine), and we’re shipping another one on 5/17 from the Season 7 cohort. So four total from the S7 Cohort, not including me.

As for:

I don’t see this as simply a request to give 400K BANK to one contributor (to again clarify for readers, it’s actually 260K from the GC project fund and 140K from the Writers Guild), but remunerating a trusted contributor at below-market rates to provide a public good for the ecosystem and an opportunity for deeper connection with current DAO members. I can’t even tell you how many amazing 1-1 conversations I’ve had during breakout sessions, both with DAO members and others. These connections continue long past the time when the cohort is over. It’s literally helping people to build their own onramps into some of the deeper highways of web3.

As for selling the token, this is an actual payment for services rendered, but more importantly, grant is already a long-standing L1 member, so I’m a bit less concerned about long-term alignment than I would be if this wasn’t the fifth cohort that he has run with the DAO.

Also, tbh, as long as we remunerate in BANK, we’re going to have sell pressure when we engage services of third parties. Another option would be to ask for 2K USD in stables from the Treasury, but that doesn’t seem appropriate to me under the circumstances.

4 Likes