Community Building and Awareness
Community building 101
The community is the heartbeat of any DAO. With BioDAOs specifically, having a strong community of scientists, developers, legal experts, designers, science communicators and investors will play a crucial role in achieving the purpose of the BioDAO. Important to note is that, because web3 is so new to most people, a strong emphasis should be placed on creating educational content as far as possible. Onboarding new members is equally important. Without educational content a decent onboarding process, retention will be low and awareness efforts will generally be wasted.
Without a community of people who strongly believe in, and are aligned with the purpose of the DAO, it will not be easy to bootstrap the project for long, unless you and a handful of core contributors are happy going at it alone for quite some time or if you have the resources to pay contributors to help you launch the project. The latter is not the ideal scenario, because the vision and purpose is the strongest driving force for the long term success of the DAO and if you can’t get a community to back that, you should evaluate why.
There is no one-size-fits-all solution to building a BioDAO community. However, a key principle is that you need to create a shared space that will enable collaboration and open communication between members. This can be done in a number of ways, such as Discourse, Discord, Twitter Spaces, community calls or organizing in-person events. Starting out, it might be worth picking just one or two of these, ideally engaging contributors on the platforms they are already using and being consistent on those platforms, this could include your routine of, for example, when you have your community calls. This will reduce anxiety of new members and help them to plan and get into your routine, giving them a sense of control and making them feel valued and respected.
Actionable tips:
Position and communicate the purpose of the DAO as concise as possible. Communicate the purpose of the DAO consistently and repeatedly across all platforms.
There is a high likelihood that the community already exists, and you are merely creating a platform to facilitate communication within it. Meet the community where they are.
Make sure the communication/content is interesting (quality over quantity).
Encourage all core contributors to post, it’s not only up to the community & awareness working group.
Have a rhythm - some communities need daily high quality posts, some live off the weekly newsletter - determine your audience.
Be nice, especially to newcomers.
Effectively manage spammers and trolls - appoint early community moderators.
If you're creating a new community from scratch, focus on a niche and build from there.
Provide resources and support for members, including weekly onboarding calls or even initial 1-on-1 support for your community members.
Building a decentralized community
With power shared across a large number of members, the risk of centralized manipulation is reduced. Decentralized communities are powered by sharing pre-competitive resources within a community to achieve a common goal. They promote an open-source culture to their members and incentivise them to collaborate using token-based mechanisms.
Decentralized networks provide a permissionless environment where data reconciliation is improved, points of weakness are reduced, and resource distribution is optimized at scale. In the context of biotech, this means creating new organizational structures that have a low barrier to entry (logging onto Discord, for example), are intrinsically collaborative and incentive aligned (WAGMI), and can coordinate capital and work from any participant (even the general public and patients). These features are emerging in the form of decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs).
Tools for Community Building
There is enough friction onboarding people into web3, so finding the right balance of using the best tools for your use case is important. For instance, social media platforms such as Instagram or Tiktok can be powerful places to connect with where your community is already located. Leverage the tools that best align with your mission and where your community enjoys interacting to build the strongest community.
To make the most of all of these platforms, there are many automation tools and bots to scale your efforts. New tools are coming out each day positioned for different use cases and many can be customized to fit your DAOs exact needs.
BioDAO Awareness
Awareness across the board
From the outset, it is important to engage thought leaders in the field of your BioDAO. This can be done in a number of ways, either through journal clubs, community calls, Twitter spaces, webinars, etc. Where community and awareness really intersects on this front is with in person meetups, as the very curious lurkers (potentially those with a high value to your BioDAO) will be in attendance - we have seen this time and again. You could search for blockchain events in major cities on Meetup, Eventbrite, Lu.ma, etc.
To get on the radar of developers, you could have a booth or attend hackathons at blockchain conferences such as DappCon, DevCon, EthAmsterdam, etc. See more events at EthGlobal. Keep in mind that a booth could also tie you down and you could cover more ground without a booth and save costs - more time for networking. Once again, meet the type of developer you’re trying to attract where they currently are, this could be on HackerNews, Women Who Code, Stack Overflow or even LinkedIn. To attract other talent to your BioDAO, adding a small sponsorship to a conference could start giving you name recognition. Keep in mind that you do not always have to sponsor financially, sometimes you could offer your time to help with planning and organizing. Ask the organizers if that could be an option. For smaller conferences, it might just be the case. You can also apply to speak at these conferences, often at no cost.
Traditional marketing efforts still exist, but are often hard to measure especially when done in parallel to other campaigns, i.e. taking out an advertisement in Nature if you are hosting a Decentralized Science meetup while also working with student ambassadors to post A1 printed posters at your local university lab. All said, to attract these and other types of talent, interest or research projects to your BioDAO, you should establish your presence in the particular field, even if only for a weekend. These and numerous other awareness efforts will essentially drive value and actionable projects and deliverables into your BioDAO.
Content creation and production
Awareness efforts should always be coupled with thoughtful and impactful written or visual content. BioDAO milestones should be captured in high quality blog posts and/or thoughtful twitter threads. It is also important to create one voice around your BioDAO and this could be done by always keeping the mission/goal of the DAO in mind when for example interviewing specific scientists and researchers in your field, appearing on reputable or niche podcasts, and participating in conferences. To this end, having clear and informative videos that are easily accessible and explanatory on your core focus points could drive engagement and act as a little effort onboarding mechanism into the BioDAO.
Getting on track with BioDAO Community and Awareness
The following could be implemented as an initial framework to best support the initial marketing and community goals of your BioDAO and could easily be built on. Any examples are options and should be customized to your DAO. You are encouraged to find the right metric that YOU want to optimize for. The more specific you are the more successful you will be.
Some examples:
Discord
____ Members
____ % engagement (% of daily active users divided by total members)
____ Tweet Impressions
____ Twitter Followers
Newsletter
____ Newsletters Shipped
____ Newsletter Subscribers
____ % engagement (e.g. # of opens/clicks divided by # of subscribers)
Onboarding
____ number of people onboarded via onboarding calls or through self-onboarding via Notion or Discord channels (specify how here: _____)
Content
____ video clips produced in the past month/week.
____ blog posts produced in the past month/week.
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