Newsletter Team S6 Budget Proposal

Grants/Funding
1

Project Team:

Project Champion: siddhearta
Weekly Rollup Lead: HiroKennelly
State of the DAOs Lead: siddhearta
DeFi Download Lead: Jake and Stake
Treasurer: EthHunter
Lead Staff Editor: HiroKennelly

Project Summary:

The Newsletter Team currently has three newsletters that require ongoing resources and funding:

  1. Weekly Rollup (internal)
  2. State of the DAOs (external)
  3. DeFi Download (external)

The Newsletter Team manages the weekly operations, organizes and moderates weekly meetings, and ships content at regularly scheduled intervals. Each of these newsletters require formal roles and compensation in order to ensure quality, accountability, and timely execution.

Newsletter Team Multi-sig:

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TL;DR

  • Requesting 1,569,000 BANK for Season 6
  • Decentralized Arts decided to become its own project in order to pursue other funding
  • Changes to role salaries and bounty compensation
  • Requesting 90% of sponsorship revenue for Newsletter Team multi-sig
    • Remaining 10% to DAO treasury
    • Additional 10% may go to other guilds/ members for referrals
  • Roles and bounties created:
    • 6 salaried roles
    • over 100 writer bounties
    • 78 editor bounties
    • 26 designer bounties

Project KPIs:

Season 5 Goals:

Subscriber count:

  • Season 5 Goal: +20%
  • Start of Season 4: 12,200
  • Goal End of Season: 14,500
  • Current Subscribers: 18,000 (+47%)
    Open rate: average >40%
    Projected Revenue (End of Season Goal): $24,000
    Actual Revenue: $11,000
    Total Expenses: 1,485,500 BANK/ 13 week Season

Season 6 Goals:

Subscriber Count:

  • Season 6 Goal: +20%
  • Start of Season 6: 18,000
  • Goal End of Season: 21,600
    Open rate: average >40%
    Projected Revenue (End of Season Goal): $8,000
    Total Expenses: 1,569,000 BANK/ 13 week Season

Revenue-Generating Activities:

Direct revenue (sponsorships):

  • Each newsletter base rate: $8,000/ season or $3,000/month allocated in 90/10 split (Newsletter/DAO)
  • Rook referral program

Indirect revenue:

  • Driving sales for other DAO initiatives and partnerships.

Partnership with more DAOs and organizations, preserving:

  • BanklessDAO ethos
  • Focus on BanklessDAO
  • Serve BanklessDAO interest to attract more members and revenues to BanklessDAO
  • Distribution with BanklessDAO Newsletters

Budget Summary

Total Budget Request: 1,569,000 BANK

Salaried Roles: Total 614,000 BANK

  • Project Coordinator: 70,000 BANK
  • Weekly Rollup Lead: 140,000 BANK
  • State of the DAOs Lead: 136,000 BANK
  • Defi Newsletter Lead: 136,000 BANK
  • Treasurer: 39,000 BANK
  • Lead Staff Editor: 78,000 BANK
  • Bounty jar: 15,000 BANK

Newsletter Bounty Compensation: 955,000 BANK

  • Weekly Rollup: 416,000 BANK
  • State of the DAOs: 224,000 BANK
  • Defi Newsletter: 315,000 BANK

Project Team:

The newsletter project team consists of various roles, including project coordinator, newsletter leads, authors, and editors responsible for consistently delivering high-quality content, efficient operations, management, and distribution. Multiple roles may be held by a single person. We propose the following roles be funded through both salaried positions and bounties.

Detailed Budget Spec

Salaried Roles

Role Weekly Salary Bounty Bucket Season Total (13wk)
Newsletter Team Project Coordinator 5,000 BANK 5,000 BANK 70,000 BANK
Weekly Rollup Newsletter Lead 10,000 BANK 10,000 BANK 140,000 BANK
State of the DAOs Newsletter Lead 10,000 BANK 5,000 BANK 136,000 BANK
DeFi Download Newsletter Lead 10,000 BANK 5,000 BANK 136,000 BANK
Lead Staff Editor 6,000 BANK 78,000 BANK
Treasurer 3,000 BANK 39,000 BANK
Total 614,000 BANK

Writer and Editor Bounties

Weekly Rollup (ships weekly):

  • Content Curation- responsible for Community Highlights, What’s New, Get Involved, Action Items, and Proposals
    • 12,000 BANK/week
  • Headline piece author- responsible for weekly featured editorial
    • 6,000 BANK/week
  • Copy Editor
    • 3,000 BANK/week
  • Editorial Developmental Review
    • 6,000 BANK (3,000 x 2 editors)
  • Design (Header)
    • 5,000 BANK/week
  • TOTAL 32,000 BANK/ week = 416,000 BANK/Season (13 weeks)

DAO Newsletter (biweekly):

  • Content creation- responsible for DAO summaries and spotlight
    • 12,000 BANK/publication
  • Headline piece- responsible for weekly featured editorial
    • 6,000 BANK
  • Editor
    • 3,000 BANK/publication
  • Editorial Developmental Review
    • 6,000 BANK (3000 x 2 editors)
  • Design (Header)
    • 5,000 BANK/week
  • TOTAL 32,000 BANK/ publication = 224,000 BANK/Season (7 publications/13 weeks)

DeFi Newsletter (monthly):

  • Author- responsible for curating DAO content
    • 12,000 BANK/publication
  • Headline pieces- responsible for featured editorials
    • 18,000 BANK
  • Editor
    • 4,000 BANK/publication
  • Editorial Developmental Review
    • 6,000 BANK (3,000 x 2 editors)
  • Design (Header)
    • 5,000 BANK/week
  • TOTAL 45,000 BANK/ publication = 315,000 BANK/Season (7 publications/13 weeks)

TOTAL BOUNTY BUDGET: 955,000 BANK/Season

TOTAL NEWSLETTER PROJECT BUDGET: 1,569,000 BANK/ 13 week Season

Newsletter Team Governance

Project funds will be custodied by a (3 of 5) Gnosis Safe multi-sig wallet with seasonally nominated members according to the Newsletter Team Governance. Gnosis Safe positions must be held by Newsletter Team Project Roles OR L1/L2 Newsletter Team members if there are not enough Role holders to fill the five positions.

4 Likes
2

Don’t proposals need polls. According to the Handbook proposals have quorum requirements and thugs need polls to determine quorum.

3 Likes
3

I maintain that the polls are for funding new projects, not existing projects that have already passed the quorum requirements and received funding from the GC in past seasons. The community handbook is not clear to the funding process employed by the GC for ongoing projects, so in the absense of clear guidelines I am choosing to forego polls for two reasons:

  1. It is a waste of my time and energy to chase down enough poll votes to reach the >1M bank quorum of 63 votes when few forum proposals have passed 30 votes recently.
  2. In the situation where we do not receive the 63 votes within the 7 days window, is a project that has demonstrated consistent value really going to be defunded?

In either case, this calls for clarification and likely a bDIP to clarify the process.

4 Likes
4

I maintain that the definition of “Proposal” implies an ask for something, thus it need polls, a post with no poll is not asking for anything it is just simply submitting a budget.

1 Like
5

Hello Newsletter Team! Loving the progress you make every season.

I’m your Grants Committee Reviewer, and I have a few questions:

  • You have a budget increase even while Decentralized Arts moves to its own project. Why have the individual newsletter bounty compensations gone up so much?
  • You’re one of the few projects with semi-steady income via sponsorships - what is sponsorship revenue being used for?
    • Do you see a path to self-sovereignty with this revenue stream?
  • Who are the role holders?
  • Do you have an accounting of how much has gone to each contributor for S5? Is the majority of this budget going to a few contributors, or is is spread evenly amongst the large amount of contributors you have?

In general I am ok with this budget, but want to understand more your plans towards self-sovereignty. I don’t think a project like this should be requesting more and more BANK every season, especially since you are one of the few who have consistent external revenue.

2 Likes
6

Great questions links!

A couple significant changes to Newsletter Team this season that lead to the increased budget request:

  1. S5 budget included a 262k bank buyback with sponsorship revenue at $0.18/bank. That turned out not to be the best use of revenue given the continued decline in BANK, so we are not doing a bank buyback this season until this is an agreed practice among all revenue generating projects.
  2. Defi Download moved from monthly to biweekly, which doubles the ask for that project.
  3. We discontinued using Dework for payments this season, so in S6 we are adding a Secretary role to manage payouts.
  4. We did increase bounties for writers on Rollup and DAOs, as well as bumping the editor bounties to stay in line with Bankless Publishing. Role holder salaries are staying the same as S5.
  5. We have not used revenue to date to pay contributors, and have instead been buying ETH to diversify our multisig. We will be exploring supplementing with DAI for editorials and role holders in S6, but have not reached consensus on what that looks like yet.
  6. Path to self-sovereignty: sponsorship revenue has dropped significantly this past season. As market stabilizes and recovers I do see us bringing in consistent revenue again and becoming closer to self-sovereign.
  7. Newsletter alone has paid out to over 60 contributors this past season, with many one-time contributors and a core of about 15-20 regular contributors.

Any more questions please let me know!

3 Likes
7

Thanks for the deep-dive @siddhearta ! I think the newsletters are one of the DAOs greatest assets so I am glad they are in your capable hands!

3 Likes