Collaborations are a bootstrapped founder’s friend. Partnerships and collaborations are a crucial part of Web3 marketing since Web3 marketing is all about community building.
Partnerships and collaborations, from Twitter Megaspaces, to Discord Stages to even cross posting of tweets and whitelist partnerships, help projects expose themselves to already existing communities. When exposed to already existing communities, projects in turn, are also able to absorb fans from said community who may also be interested in the partner project.
From an operations standpoint, activating a partnerships team that can execute campaigns that grow communities will also maximise the results of the growth, marketing, and community department.
I’ve worked with bootstrapped Web3 projects with little to none marketing power, but with the right collaborations with the right projects, I was able to build a healthy and engaged community.
At its core, Web3 collaborations and partnerships are essential since:
- Collaboration is the language of real builders in Web3
- Collaboration helps projects absorb community members from already existing communities, both of which are crucial to building the ecosystem of the project
Part one: Selecting community profiles
Similar in Web2, where the customer persona is first profiled before all marketing and advertising efforts are launched, Web3 founders also have to set up profiles. However, in Web3, founders have to think not in customers but in communities. Enter community profiles.
Also Read: The future of Web3 communities: What’s next after the NFT community craze?
First step, founders have to identify the community profiles that they will partner with for their projects. The following are the non-negotiable factors to be identified:
- Community volume: What’s the minimum community members for our partners? Will we accept partners no less than 10K community members? What is our non-negotiable volume?
- Activity ratio: How do we define a healthy community? How many engagements on a weekly basis on their social media trees and discord server do we define as an active audience?
- Project quality: Is the project doable? Do the founders have what it takes to build the project? Is the project investor backed? What momentum and traction does the project have?
The following metrics have to be set, and founders have to check these before executing partnerships as if their project’s life depended on it because it does. Founders do not want their projects to be affiliated with projects that rug or fool its community.
It’s also important to note that communities exist both in Web2 and in Web3, and its crucial for founders to reachout to Web2 communities as well.
For example, an NFT collection of skateboard art with skateboarding related utilities can also benefit from partnerships from Web2 skateboarding communities. It’s just a matter of engaging with the right community profiles.
Part two: Pitching the collab
Partnerships that bear fiat payments are rare in the space of Web3 since communities are all about facilitating and exchanging value. The standard trade in community partnerships are usually cross WL giveaways, NFT giveaways, perks access, or the like to both communities (though in the guild side of Web3, some ask for “AMA fees”).
For reference, projects that receive the pitch usually check three important metrics before accepting the collaboration:
- Community member/following count: Does the pitching project have an ample community count?
- Activity ratio: Does the pitching project have a healthy community? Are they composed of real people or bots?
- Project quality: Do the founders of the project have a real project on their hands? Do they have what it takes to build it?
Hence, founders have to prepare a pitch that showcases the following metrics:
- Community members
- Social media trees audience
- Brand/project engagements
- PR engagements
- Audit results (if applicable)
Bottom-line is founders have to prepare a pitch that showcases their presence, momentum, traction, and legitimacy to make prospect community partners say yes.
Part three: Finalising collaboration terms
Once both communities say yes to the collaboration, similar to Web 2 partnerships, the terms of the partnerships have to be finalised. At this point, its also important to note that MOUs and MOAs for community partnerships for Web 3 projects are rare (from our experience working with more than 100+ Web 3 projects all around the world).
MOUs, MOAs, and the need for other sorts of documents defeat the purpose of building a decentralised web (latency and centralisation), so the approval of the founders via chat is almost always enough. Of course, if you’re a brand in Web3 and not necessarily a community, the MOUs, MOAs, and other documents are essential. But strictly, Web3 communities and projects often don’t have those.
Usual collaboration terms in Web3 partnerships include but are not limited to:
- Collaborations/partnership announcement: How will we announce the collaboration? Will we announce only on Twitter? Discord?
- Cross WL/NFT/perks giveaway: What value will we provide both communities? How much WL’s will each project allocate each other? How much NFTs? If not those, what perks or benefits will the project grant the community?
- AMA/Twitter space/Discord stage event: How will we execute the cross-community AMA? What’s the event brief and objectives for the event? Where will the event take place?
Part four: Hosting the space/stage
Hosting the Discord stage or the Twitter spaces is perhaps the most important part of the collaboration. Web3 marketing is all about community building, and as you know it, community building is never transactional — its always about relationships.
Also Read: Web3 marketing: Building a cult-like community
Hence, to build relationships between communities, the leaders (i.e., founders) of both projects have to show up on a platform to discuss to their communities the vision, roadmap, and collaboration plans of both projects moving forward.
Showing up to Twitter spaces or Discord stages is proof to the community of the project and the leaders that their leaders are engaged in the partnership. The event gives reason enough for the community members of both communities to checkout each other’s projects and communities. That’s when the growth happens.
Part five: Hiring a collab manager
Once founders find the right formula for their project’s collaborations and partnerships, I often recommend them to hire and outsource a collaborations manager to take the wheel so they can focus on building the project. The collab manager is one of the most important pieces of a Web3 marketing team ecosystem.
The collab manager is in charge of looking for other partner communities and projects with a vision, purpose, core values, and culture that matches the project being built. It is the duty of the collab manager to build a database of possible prospect partners, properly qualifying them with respect to community health, culture fitting, and value matching.
The collab manager should qualify the projects first and should not work with just any project that doesn’t match the community’s identity as it would mess with the work of the moderator.
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Image credit: Magdiel Lopez/Belmont Creative
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