Background
Since our last community town hall meeting on 6/2, after @leecrowhurst and @MG-TT suggested building a TrueFi media buying committee, we’ve been exploring successful incentivized community engagement programs - often called bounty programs - and strategizing how to adapt the best case studies into something that’d work for TrueFi’s unique needs.
Summary: This proposal develops a way to incentive community-driven marketing via TRU rewards from the treasury.
The objective is to (a) grow TrueFi’s current network & reach through social media influencers, writers, artists, journalists and podcasters, (b) prototype the first community-driven marketing effort, and (c) reward those participating appropriately in an incentive-aligned way.
In terms of a proposed timeline & budget, we’d expect to run this program as a 3-4 month trial with a 50,000 TRU budget (equivalent to 10-50 reward disbursements, depending on tier), or until the budget is exhausted - whichever comes first.
Adjusting budget after the end of the trial: If the program is successful, the budget will run out before the trial period. The community may then vote to refill the program budget. If the program is largely underutilized and much of the budget remains unspent, the community can vote to reallocate the budget or reclaim it for general treasury use at the end of the trial period.
The “TrueFi Marketing Bounty Committee” - Suggested Makeup
As executing on many of these referrals will demand the active participation of the TrueFi core marketing team, it’s proposed that the committee steering this initiative have at least some TrueFi core marketing team representation, who will serve both as standard committee members and oversee execution on the referral (which may look like slotting time on Rafael’s schedule for a podcast, booking travel for a conference appearance, creating marketing collateral for a PR opportunity, etc).
As it’s a community-funded effort, and as one of the objectives is to introduce more community leadership to TrueFi’s marketing efforts, it’s also important this committee include representatives from outside the TrueFi core team. Ideally these members would (a) be longstanding users of TrueFi, as well as current TRU holders, (b) have at least nominal expertise in marketing/PR/social media, and (c) be endorsed by the broader TRU community.
The function of the committee is: vetting incoming opportunities, choosing the tier of awards, and paying out successful referrers.
Proposed team structure: to start the conversation, we propose a committee of 6, composed of 3 TrueFi core marketing team members and 3 TrueFi community members endorsed by TRU holders. The committee would require a majority to approve any activity, not full consensus. Any member inactive for 30 days or ineffective (as deemed by committee vote) may be removed from the committee, with the intention that the member be replaced by a person of the same type (i.e. core team or community member).
We encourage you to share any other effective structure to run the program in comments!
Whitelisted Functions Rewarded by the Bounty Committee:
As it stands, it’s the authors’ opinion that the highest ROI marketing activities that can benefit from the widest possible community involvement are largely (a) warm introductions to credible folks with a large, relevant audience and (b) the creation of original educational content on TrueFi. The list below attempts to categorize and qualify each of these activities:
If it’s not obvious, any referring party must be a relevant, warm intro: the referral should fall under one of the above categories, and the referred party should both roughly understand TrueFi & have an intention to work with the project. No duplicate entries, please.
If this program is approved, we’ll accept referrals via Typeform (a survey platform), and then reach out to the referrer via Telegram and/or email.
Reward Tiers: After a referral is approved and executed, the Bounty Committee will rank the value of the resulting deliverable on a 1-3 scale, with 1000-5000 TRU up for grabs (again, these are proposed reward tiers). A sample tiering system, subject to the discretion of the Bounty Committee, is presented below:
These prizes can be adjusted by the committee, especially as TRU price changes, with 7-day advanced notice by the committee on the forum.
Discussion
This idea will progress in three steps: overall idea & budget approval, then committee selection, and finally, approval of reward types and grant sizes. We’ll discuss it for 3-7 days.
To approve the idea and budget: Does the TRU community approve of this test timeline (3-4 months) and budget (50,000 TRU), and the overall plan for distributing these rewards? It’s at this point we’ll likely move to a Snapshot vote.
Then, to approve the committee makeup, we’ll want to look for good candidates to participate now. Your endorsements of relevant community members are hugely valuable for this - or nominate yourself! (Tip: Tag the person with @____ here in the forum).
Finally, the committee will approve what it will award grants to, and how much those grants will be, from their allotted TRU budget.
