How to Manage a Web3 Community
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How to Manage a Web3 Community
A complete guide on community management in the web3 world
Introduction
“What should young people do with their lives today? Many things. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured.”
-Kurt Vonnegut
The human operating system runs on communities. The sense of community is probably one of the oldest and most primitive human senses which was developed. They offer a sense of mutuality, connection, and empathy.
In the web 2 world of Facebook and Twitter, users generally join to maintain existing relationships and connect with their friends, family, and co-workers. It is a place where like-minded people connect to learn, collaborate and grow; this can be said to serve as a community but a true online community develops out of shared interests, goals, or preferences, and most often users don’t have prior relationships.
Here is where web3 comes in. Communities are at the heart of web3 based applications and projects. A good community can help a project to grow organically with community members doubling down as promoters and fans of the project.
Developing a vibrant community is henceforth crucial for any web3 based projects. It will help them scale and provide some real value to the asset they have issued or dapp they have developed. Although the value of the communities is not still quantifiable, most of the successful projects have a great community backing them. The support from a community ranges from social media promotion to developing important dev tooling for the project. Any which way, it helps the project to attract more people.
For some business folks out there, communities are customer engagement on steroids.
Going forward, I would like to lay down some principles on how to create and manage a community, what community engagement tools are currently available, and what are some of the possible pitfalls which should be avoided. This essay aims to provide community managers, a complete guide on community management.
Building and managing a community
1) Before starting:
Web3 is new, when we think of starting a new community we need to take some cues from existing structures.
Before starting, you need to have a strategy or a roadmap for the project, it helps in developing confidence in the project. The goals of the project should be very clear. Your project should be interesting enough to involve and add value to a large group of people.
While a community can have multiple goals, it’s best to focus on a small number of goals that represent value created for you and your community, and can be tied to specific behaviours and outcomes.
The next and the most important step is to communicate these goals shortly and clearly. Ideally, it should not take more than a single slide(4 points) to describe a project. Shorter the better.
During the initial stages of the project, community members need to trust the project creators, henceforth it becomes crucial to maximizing trust as much as possible. Human beings are naturally inclined to trust someone based on their past. Although anonymity is considered one of the important aspects of the crypto world, I insist that there should be some available information of the past workings of the creators and it should be accessible in a transparent way. This may help people to judge and form an informed and honest conclusion about the project based on their experience.
Building in public means taking constant feedback from the community and improving upon the product, it is also about being transparent about the development activities happening behind the scenes. These values should be imbibed by the project from the initial stage itself, to create a positive feedback loop.
All the information regarding the project should be available in a single place, it can be a medium account, youtube channel, or a gitbook. The content around the project must be concise and clear, ideally, it should act as a one-stop solution to know everything about the project.
Last but not least is about having an active social media account. Twitter account of the project, acts as a gateway for people to start. It should be well maintained and should be attractive enough for people to engage with the project. I would not go much deep into social media management as there is already a lot of literature on it.
2) Distribution
Whether you are doing an NFT drop or a token distribution, it must be a fair distribution. A fair distribution creates the conditions for a healthy and sustainable network of contributors. Initial distribution is one aspect of community management that has to be right as you have only one chance at it.
A small philosophical point: When creating a community don’t think that you are giving ownership of your project to others, owning NFTs or tokens should be seen as stewardship rather than ownership. In that regards every steward is now accountable and crucial in guiding the project forward.
I have observed some past token distributions and NFT drops that have happened in the past and based on that I have constructed an ideal model for both things. I will list the pros and cons of my model, since this is my personal opinion, it can be disputed.
(I) For token sales:
Partnering with a launchpad:
Pros:
Launchpads already have a loyal userbase and a reputable but a permissioned one may also have sufficient expertise in token sales; most of the work can be delegated to them allowing you to concentrate on project development and community building afterwards.
It reduces the effort required to build a community as all the people who have received the tokens may start engaging with the project.
The distribution is generally equitable, most of the launchpads have some kind of mechanisms to prevent manipulation from whales, they also take sufficient care to prevent front running.
Cons:
Since the distribution in some of the launchpads is purely based on luck and the probability of someone getting the airdrop is very low, it may leave many people with bad taste.
Since the system is not fully decentralized and permissionless, there is always a counterparty risk.
2. Retroactive airdrop:
Pros:
Rewarding active users and contributors of the project create an incentive for more people to use it.
Weeds out people who were just there for making a profit, since there was no token for a major part of the project’s existence.
It acts as a great one-shot marketing move, which gives serious visibility to the project.
When there is no token initially, it helps for the community to concentrate on building rather than shilling, in the longer term, this is beneficial for the project.
Cons:
Tokens are one of the greatest marketing tools for the project, if you don’t have a token initially it may be difficult to attract people.
Taking cues from the recent ENS and PSP airdrops, almost every time some users will remain disappointed as it is very difficult to determine the deserved people for the airdrop.
(II) NFT launch:
I think paradigm’s research on designing an effective NFT drop is the way to go for every project. Here are some crucial highlights, credits to them:
If you take nothing else away from this article, let it be these three rules:
Unexploitable fairness is the most critical property of an NFT launch with random metadata. Use robust randomness and never reveal the metadata of an NFT before it has been bought and settled.
Race conditions hurt users, both those who participate in the mint and those who don’t. Use sequential bidding and clearing (e.g., a raffle or a batched auction) to solve this problem.
Consider cost-efficiency from minute one. Ask if any step that currently happens on-chain could also happen off-chain to save money for your users. Off-chain steps can include bidding but also market clearing, assuming users can establish some degree of trust in the operator. Consider batching in the reveal phase.
Here is an ideal NFT drop:
Bidding: In our implementation, users can bid by buying tickets to a raffle. The duration of the raffle is determined by the operator (we recommend 24-48h). The price per ticket consists of gas as well as the price per NFT, specified by the operator. The latter acts as a “security deposit” and is refunded on all losing tickets after clearing the market. Sybil resistance is created in three ways: the gas per transaction, the cost of capital on locked funds, and the maximum number of tickets per address.
Clearing: Once the bidding period has concluded, a number of winners equal to the number of available NFTs must be drawn from the pool of all tickets. First, anyone can call `collectEntropy()` to get a random number from Chainlink VRF. This randomness is used in ‘shuffleEntries(),’ which implements a Fisher-Yates Shuffle. Anyone can call this function, guaranteeing liveness and making the gas cost socializable (e.g., by whales).
Distribution: After all the winners have been drawn, users have an indefinite period to claim an NFT from their winning tickets and get a refund on their losing tickets. Both happen within the same transaction. The operator can now start withdrawing the proceeds from winning tickets.
Metadata Reveal: Users can reveal their NFTs metadata one block after they claim. Anyone can request a new random number that automatically reveals the metadata of all items that have been minted and are pending assignment. This allows users with a high time preference to pay to reveal immediately but benefit all users.
3) Governance
Every community manager should make sure that crucial decisions are taken by engaging with the community members, it can be through voting.
Voting for any change in the projects poses many challenges, one is about low participation which may alienate a large part of the community, other is about stagnation or slowing down of the development work as now there is democracy involved.
If some changes are crucial and needed then it can be done without voting or any governance provided that those changes are there for the public good and the community will only be affected positively.
Having a say in the project is important, but honestly, I feel voting and having governance everywhere is kind of overrated, the values of transparency and community involvement can be done more informally as well. For example, make sure that there is always a member from the team who is active in the project’s Discord server and taking feedbacks from the community to improve the project.
Going forward, I think community governance is an area of active research with none of the approaches to it convincing me enough to recommend, for Dapps and NFT drops, governance can be done informally as mentioned above, things only get serious when network governance is being talked about.
Having stripped the importance of governance above, I must put a caveat; if there is a treasury for the project and if there was a promise made that it would be spent for the betterment of the community then make sure that it is done that way. The last thing people want is the treasury being plundered for personal gains.
4) Community engagement and growth
This is by far the most important job of a community manager. This is all about how to create a sticky and growing community.
One of the peculiar things about the web3 world of projects is that there are a lot of them. People often hop on one after the other to find their place. A community manager should now take into account differences amongst the community members, based on which, he should decide upon steps required to accommodate maximum people.
I have divided my recommendations for community engagement and growth into two parts, crucial things & additional activities.
Crucial things:
Always have someone from the team tracking the discord/telegram chat and answering questions of the community members regarding the project. Twitter replies should also be actively checked and answered upon. It may get repetitive at some point, but a manager has to maintain patience and do the same thing again and again, eventually, it may act as a great knowledge source for new people entering.
Promoting active members as discord/Reddit mods, tools such as the mee6 bot for discord can be used to judge the engagement level of various community members.
Frequently rewarding active community members with bounties, airdrops, or special limited edition NFTs.
Promoting active collaboration amongst community members, it is natural that there will be sub-groups amongst community members, promote them. For example, for sub-groups based on language, a separate discord server can be created
Promoting community-generated content is by far the most important thing to do, it will act as free marketing for your project. As community members get more involved with the project, they will start creating, memes, tutorials, videos, dev tools for the project. All this content should be supported by a community manager as much as possible. Retweet, like, promote, comment on community-generated content. Bounties can also be introduced to encourage more people to create content.
Apart from external engagement, there should be frequent updates on the status of the project; everyone likes surprises, a surprise collaboration with some other web3 project may help you get visibility for the project.
Social media especially Twitter is the most important tool for attracting more people. Host frequent retweet contests; retweet, and get bounties, promote the project through existing reputed influencers, give them nice special pfp NFT of the project. A tweetstorm can also be planned by the existing community to increase the visibility of the project.
Frequent AMAs or a community call with the community.
Additional activities:
Various activities with community members can be done. Here are some ideas to get started with:
Discord sticker and meme contest.
Limited edition merchandise can be launched.
Additional airdrops for the existing holders to grow the community and also to incentivize the existing members. For example BAYC→ MAYC
Exclusive place on the metaverse for members.
Whitelist members for testing the project.
Frequent bounties, for competing in various contests.
Tools for community management
Discord is currently the best tool for community management and growth.
It has a great bot ecosystem, a I said before mee6 bot is crucial, apart from it, you can have bots tracking crypto prices and NFT floors for all the degens in the community who are into full-time crypto trading.
It gives tools to managers to segregate community members into different servers, different roles, and many other things.
You can also host frequent community calls easily.
Here are some pros and cons of discord to help you judge its effectiveness:
Pros:
Lots of flexibility and freedom since it allows to create servers for sub-communities.
Already has a wide userbase.
Has an amazing bot ecosystem for community management.
Helps in segregating important content related to the project from others, for example, a separate channel for announcements.
Interest groups and hobby community building.
In-build tooling for calls can be used for community calls and other activities.
Mods have control over roles and members.
Cons:
Can be overwhelming for new users, there are lots of things happening at a time.
Discord has been used primarily by the gamer community it sometimes lacks in aesthetics.
Lots of spam and bot attacks are frequent.
Integration with other services and applications is lacking.
Additionally, Medium can be used to write detailed explainer about the project and also a user guide for interacting with it.
A community-based project builds loyalty not by driving sales transactions but by helping people meet their needs. You’ll need to find ways to turn that community value into specific behaviours that create this value.
Going forward, we can also create KPIs, while your KPIs will vary depending on your community purpose, some of them can be generalized, like:
User Growth
Total number of users
New users in the past month
Churned (lost) users in the past month
New user growth (Month over month, Quarter over Quarter, Year over Year)
User Engagement
What % of total users engaged with the project content published?
What % of total users were inactive?
Tools like notion can be used to monitor the community performance based on the goals set and pre-set KPIs.
Possible pitfalls to avoid
1) Toxicity:
It is generally agreed upon that people on the internet are mean to each other. Example: Twitter.
However, we are learning that a badly designed social system actively generates toxicity, often at a rate that will inevitably overwhelm the human resources aimed at controlling it.
In a community, there will always be poorly socialized individuals who will resort to anti-social behaviour for their gains. Hence it is important to create and enforce strict guidelines in the community. Anybody found violating it should be dealt with as soon as possible. Individual toxicity still can be handled effectively with the worst-case being blocking an account from engaging with the community.
The real challenge comes from group toxicity, it arises when intergroup friction results in unhealthy interactions. As I said before, there will be subgroups formed amongst the existing group members. Competition between these groups can be healthy and can be motivating but it can also breed damaging behaviours such as organized aggression against something. In such cases, it is crucial to engage with people and not let this aggression spill out to the whole community.
Toxicity arises from mismatched expectations. A group with different assumptions about the community disrupts other people with a varying viewpoint, such as expecting more airdrops and bounties vs using resources to develop the project. In such cases, it’s better to take ownership of the community resources and be transparent about their usage. Maintaining clear communication channels prevents misinformation and solidifies the information about the project.
2) Miscommunication and Information overload
Trust is one of the most important aspects of a community. It keeps the relationship going and hence it keeps on adding value for the community. For building trust amongst the community members and also amongst the community and the project builders, some of the crucial things to remember are:
Repeat interactions
You need the knowledge of possible future repeat interactions before trust can evolve. I again plug in the same point over here, please try and host frequent AMAs, community calls, also promote interactions amongst community members with various community-building events. For example, voice channels can be created for various games:
Low miscommunications
If the level of miscommunication is too high, trust breaks down. Always be clear and concise in the language used for announcements, tweets, and roadmaps. Any possible issues with the project, in most cases, should be immediately flagged and communicated to the community honestly.
Information overload
This is a surprising problem faced by many web3 communities. Sometimes the community members are considered an authority on the official information available for the project. This leads to a lot of conflicting and often wrong information about the project in public which may mislead people into thinking something else. Using common animal and fruit names as the name also leads to a lot of confusion as there may be existing projects with the same name available and people may get confused.
The best way to deal with the issue is to formalize the communication channels for the project, for example, have a verified Twitter account of the project and its founders. If people feel that there is a lot of new things happening with the project, which is difficult to keep track of, also many new things may make past information irrelevant, then try to restrict project updates monthly or bi-monthly. Maintain only specified channels for updates and information regarding the project, like for long blogs only use medium and for announcements only use Discord and Twitter. Avoid sending notifications on discord, possibly restrict the usage of tagging @everyone in discord for announcements only.
As a community manager, you need to ensure that every mod and core team member is clear about the vision and goal of the project. Internal communication is also crucial as many times different versions of the same story from the core team members come out which leads to misinformation.
Conclusion
A diverse set of contributors can help build a more useful, robust, and decentralized network. The value of friendship, altruism and the shared goal should be maintained. As a community manager, you should make sure that individuals feel competence, volition, and relatedness, both for themselves and for their friends. Promote activities that involve intrinsically motivated altruism and cooperation. Communities should work towards a common goal via mutual interdependence and achieve feelings of purpose and meaningfulness.
You know what you want people to do but you also want to allow them to explore.
The deepest ritual of web3 communities is to see things in non-dualistic ways. In that realization, people find deep sort of responsibilities for the community and liberation.
Bibliography
[BUIDL] Community Building in Web3
Web3 Communities (1 of 4) with IDEO - Web3 Community Principles