GTC Strategy (Go To Community) | Dan Rodman - CoUnity

strap in it's going to be a wild ride uh I want to thank Aaron grack from polka dot who spoke a minute ago but next up we have one heck of a presentation from a good friend of mine Dan Rodman CEO of co- Unity he's not your average onra strategist if you ask me he's going to be talking about GTC strategy or goto Community strategy big round of applause for Dan hey hey what's up everybody all right Ser serious face most web 3 projects fail and not necessarily because of bad Tech or branding or marketing a lot of time it comes down to a lack of a community strategy Community strategy is an afterthought these next 15 minutes I'm going to walk through as much as I can of a GTC strategy to kind of give you a bit of insights here and share a little reason Source uh as well at the end um first I guess a little bit about me uh so uh I am the CEO at co- Unity we're Community strategy agency as well as running Community guild at masin my uh path to community building has been a little bit unconventional uh I grew up in BC Canada shreding the slope skiing as well as a little bit of a career in professional soccer um as well as getting my paragliding license and doing a bunch of paragliding so I like the wild fun side of things for sure and as for background I studied as a mechanical engineer and um then worked as the head of operations at a robotics distribution facility got into lots of analytics and things like this and then uh throwback then slowly down the rabbit hole into blockchain technology marketing and then community three years ago uh eat Denver podcast Booth then last year eat podcast booth and then yesterday podcast Booth doing lots of different things around community and marketing and stuff like this so it's been it's been really really great now let's get into the GTC strategy I'm going to start with kind of a comparison to GTM and everyone's more familiar with go to market right um it's a pretty common thing lots of people are talking about uh all around the conference here I'm sure and when you look at uh comparing the two of these go to market has a bit of a value capture model where you're looking at going after Target personas you're looking up kpis on like cost per click conversions you're bringing someone through like a funnel in a process into making a decision with something the way that I look at GTC is it is a value creation model where we're looking at creating value and looking at instead of Target personas it's more Community personas you're looking at how you can pull people into the center of your community it's almost like a a gravitational pull which I'll get to in a second um value exchange is like an important part of it and of course I'm not saying you should do you know GTC over GTM it's not one or the other I think you know obviously you need to have a marketing component you need to have both if you got both it's very nice you know um so a little bit of an analogy though to just further build on this you can think of um whoops I guess we're not there we go you can think of the photo on the left there as the go to market kind of strategy where you're kind of fishing you're looking at what you can do to capture the attention of different people right whereas on the right you've kind of got an element of a watering hole I really like the watering hole analogy because when you have a watering hole you're attracting people to it it's a valuable place you get a lot of good things there like this juicy rainbow water and you know I've got some fun Community things kind of happening around there you might have some campfires close by to this Watering Hole where little initiatives and things are going on right and so that's kind of a little bit on a analogy component looking at the two of them if that makes that makes sense um now a model that I really like uh in the community space that some of you may recognize is the orbit love model and um the CEO of orbit love uh Patrick Woods he wrote a lot of really good articles articles and I asked to actually have to confess he mentioned GTC I thought I came up with it myself about four or five years ago in an article um just taking the torch and trying to push further with it but this overall model is really great because it is a good example of what GTC is in the element of a gravitational pole and they measure that with their on their platform with this thing called love right and this is the amount of community engagement or participation that pulls you in towards the center of a community because honestly when you try and think about comparing too much of community to marketing processes it's not like a linear path you know Community has this aspect of more of a of like an orbit in a way that can be different paths as you come down into a community right now my process in getting into the world of community was deep with the similar ethos of my engineering background I started with research and then I went into reverse engineering in right I had a master's thesis project that I designed a water sampling system for a drone and that whole project started with a ton of research to see what was out there and then working backwards to see what I could build and I kind of take the same methodology when I when I go into community building and so I looked at a lot of cool projects and this is pretty zoomed out I know but just to give you an idea of some of the research I'm a big fan of digital whiteboards and fig Jam as well um looking at like chain link and the the blue box in the far left is things the community is doing well in Discord in the middle is things there doing well on their website and on the far right things are doing well on social media and then I looked at monad and how they did their cult likee community and the meme generator thing on their website and how they rally with that on their Twitter and how they do the roles in their Discord and learned a lot about that and then I looked at arbitrum and what they do with their grants programs and everything there and learned a lot there and then one part of me when I was looking at these communities is I was always joining and going through the process of onboarding into them and I found that that was a really weak link I feel like in a lot of projects GTC is what I like to call like the onboarding experience or the ox and this is just a whole bunch of different projects that I would walk through the Discord onboarding and looking at what they do and how I learned a bit about it and I think like it's one spot where there's a little bit of uh room for improvement whereas a lot of people may feel like when you join a community you know do do they really know a lot about who you are and and how to like engage with you and so for that you know I'm looking a lot at community personas and so mapping out Community personas I think is really an important thing to do um this is thinking how you look at their thoughts motivations of these different groups right and and who they are and I I I did a little bit of a eth Denver example throughout a lot of this deck and I'll touch more on it but like you know you've got spor Dow members you got different maybe delegates of the spor Dow and biders and investors and regenerates and degenerates right um and knowing a little bit more about these people and then mapping it into a a bit of aun funnel process flow for what the community is um let's see here I think that's not loading it's all good um so yeah on the analytics side this is where we start to understand a little bit about different community members right and there's a lot of different analytics tools we use and uh if the question comes about right now like well which ones of these do you use the most I use a blend of of all these tools actually because they each have something some specific metrics that they're really good at there's some examples of some screenshots here uh with them as well just to give you an idea like I've actually made I think a 44 page report once on a community analysis on a project and it had tons of screenshots on all these different tools but the important part about it was really like the insights on the first two pages where you're thinking about you know what is the story all this data is telling us like how can we connect some of these metrics from one tool to another tool right and and what do we do with all this great data and information which leads me to one of my favorite uh Frameworks um with community-led growth and this is where I want to touch on that honestly Community is not like a a specific thing to easily do community is very difficult it's not like step one 2 3 4 uh there's a scientific process I believe that's super important to do and it starts in the bottom right hand corner of this FL flywheel which is in initiatives right and this is kind of the aspect of like you really got to like try out like you have to do a variety of different things and so you come up with a scientific method in a way of a hypothesis from this data you're like hm what's the story some of this data is telling us maybe if we do an event for this demographic we can capture their attention and get their engagement right and so then we put this campaign out there this this Quest or this element or this event and then we measure this engagement with the analytics and then we look carefully at like what did that tell us did it do you know good or bad did it build relationships to the next one are we building trust onto the fourth and then we look at reiterating on that we go back to the initiatives again and maybe we tweak a few things on it and try it again see how it does the next time or maybe we scrap it and say you know what that wasn't the best one we got to do something else creative let's move in a different direction and so this is a really core ethos I think of an important part of your GTC strategy which is focusing on trying out different initiatives not being scared to really push through things and I know some initiatives can be difficult with like legal and if you're doing rewards and tokens and stuff like this and these are just like the the games you have to play and you have to navigate right but I wanted to share some stuff to help you with this um and to start with it's looking at gamification mechanics and you know like you know mechanical engineer I'm a big fan of mechanisms and stuff like this so gamification mechanics I think are really cool I'm not going to explain each and every one of these but you can sell they're like a little bit self-explanatory and I would recommend that uh there's a little book recommendation for you these came from this book it's called for the wind the power of gamification and uh with game thinkinking and business education government social impact it's a bit of a mouthful but it's a great book and uh there's a few key elements in here that I don't even touch on like the pbl Triad with points badges leaderboards these mechanics as well it goes into a lot of detail and so using these uh gamification mechanics we turn different dials as everyone might be aware of when it comes to extrinsic and intrinsic motivators this comes up a lot when you're like coming up with like quests or campaigns or ways to incentivize people and that's like a really tough uh you know strategy in a way knowing how much reward to do because at some point if the rewards go away then do the people go away versus how do you get people's passion and intrinsic kind of behavior going on right so we created this one dock uh called our Master Quest flow and you know I'm a big fan of uh all of all these questing platforms and they all have different strengths and weaknesses right and you're probably familiar with some of these I'm sure you've heard of some of these Ze been very popular Galaxy um and whatnot right and they have they definitely all have a aspect of attracting different types of people to their platforms I think people may know that like zely often times there is a bit of aspect of airdrop farming and people who go there for these types of things just to do the bare minimum on of quest because then they can get their reward and and this is where we have to play with these dials of these motivators right now what I did though is Domino's a really cool tool that's similar to zapier with questing flows and you can add extra verification steps and then we map out every possible hook and trigger on those stickies to kind of know what are the different uh things that we can kind of play with uh to verify more activity throughout a questing flow and things like this and I drag all these stickies into a little bit of like a a flow process for for different clients on on what they need right um so yeah that's that and so now I wanted to I'm getting close to wrapping up here give a little bit of a gift to you guys you know and it's with uh a bit of help from our good friend uh Ai and it's really uh something that I found kind of neat this is called the community gamification grid and in the next slide I'm going to send a QR code to share this all to you so you don't need to worry about that cuz it's very hard to read I get that um on the left side here is a Google word doc with a prompt structure and it actually is from like a marketing prompt that I went through that's a system of creating a matrix table uh and it's a really great prompt style where you give the AI like an XY coordinate and you label columns and rows and then you can see here in the video it comes up with a table uh on a whole bunch of suggestions for you and your inputs are you have to change the stuff in red on what your community is dedicated to what your mission is and and then you fill in the community personas and obviously with AI the more data and the more input you give it the better results you get and so if you're using some of those analytics tools and getting those insights you can pull a lot of that in here into this uh into this information right and then it just gets you started I just want to do something to help people on that bottom right hand corner of the community flywheel right this gives you some ideas for Community initiatives I actually did this example with eth Denver and gave in some of these examples of different e Denver personas and you know the whole point of it is it gives you like the some of these ideas are definitely not directly ready to use out of the box but it gets your brain going you know it's not a white page you're looking at there are some ideas for the E Denver stuff around doing like a builder's Hall of Fame in the conference which I thought that's actually pretty cool like let's highlight some of the hackathon winners from previous years and have a space where they can be highlighted like that brings more intrinsic motivation for then someone else to like come and hack so I thought that was kind of cool but uh yeah that basically brings us to the end here um so would love you know if you guys this is a telegram group and if you hop in here pinned at the top of the telegram group is the Google Doc and you can copy that Google doc as well as I'm in there with some people from my team at Co Unity feel free to answer or ask any questions and we'll be happy to answer them or reach out to me as well and um yeah as well I'm going to be starting to do hopefully more content on Twitter been a lot of busy in the community world but I realized I need to get my Yap game going and start putting more content up so uh yeah you can find me on Twitter at thean Rodman and looking forward to any questions uh from you guys so appreciate your time [Applause]