Case Study on how to segment and engage specific kinds of community members automatically using Guild w/ Tjark from PoolTogether

We e-sat down with Tjark, community lead at PoolTogether, to discuss their community engagement strategies and tactics. In this issue of Guild It, we'll explore how Tjark uses Guild to continually engage and re-engage specific member groups around high-value initiatives.

What’s PoolTogether? The TLDR

The protocol

“PoolTogether is a protocol on the blockchain that helps people access wealth through prize savings. It is a financial primitive taken from the fiat world but it works better on the blockchain. We want to be the infrastructure for anyone in the world to save.”

- Tjark, Community Lead at PoolTogether

The community and member personas

Knowing who you are building for is the first step to a better community structure and experience for all. Member identities are the true building blocks of a healthy community. In the case of PoolTogether, there are three main personas:

• Users

• Fans

• Contributors

“Alongside the protocol is a community. Some are users, some are fans, some are contributors. The goal of this community is to help everyone in the world become more wealthy. The mission creates a special kind of vibe!”

Challenge: Connecting opportunities with community members’ aspirations = needs + wants

Each of these member groups can be segmented into sub-groups. For example, some members simply attend community calls while others participate in governance and test new PoolTogether product releases.

This brings up two main challenges for Tjark and his team:

1. mapping high-value sub-groups and

2. engage them efficiently around initiatives.

Challenge 1: guide members towards high-value initiatives

With all the noise that exists in Discord, Twitter and mailboxes, it is important that communities have a single place where their members can get up to speed about ongoing initiatives and how to engage with them meaningfully. Moreover, it is good to reward members thoughtfully for their engagement to signal the importance of key community initiatives.

Challenge 2: segmenting members into the right subgroups

Not all initiatives are suitable for everyone. The community team needs to be able to form sub-groups of members who meet specific, sometimes advanced requirements. In addition, there needs to be a way to communicate with these sub-groups in a targeted way.

Solutions: signaling, segmenting and engaging members with Guild

“We use Guild on a daily basis as it can be used by anyone who wants to get further involved with our project, just by looking at the Guild Dashboard one can get context even when they don’t want to ask questions in the Discord.”

Solution 1: Signaling

Goal: signal the value of community calls by rewarding call attendance with Guild’s POAP module to facilitate conversations with members.

In this case, POAP badges are used by Tjark and his team as rewards to signal the importance of community calls to the extended PoolTogether community.

Community calls in PoolTogether are open to all Discord members and attendance tends to be the highest among all community events. During Community calls, Tjark announces new initiatives and gives updates on products, partnerships, governance, and so on.

PoolTogether uses Guild’s POAP integration to smoothly distribute unique POAPs after each community call. These have proved extremely popular as members love to collect fun badges and feel motivated to show up on the call consistently.

In order to minimize farming, Guild’s attendance verification feature makes sure that a given member has attended for a minimum amount of time in order to be able to claim a POAP.

Results

• 6000 POAPS were distributed across 20 community calls through the POAP minting tool with the supply fully being minted out 19 out of 20 times

• Farming is minimized thanks to Guild’s attendance verification tool

Solution 2: Segmenting

Goal: form a user testing sub-group to test PoolTogether’s upcoming release.

This was made possible by creating a Guild group with requirements filtering for highly involved members:

1. POAP holders of one of the past 6 community calls

2. Poolycon POAP holders

3. Code contributors to PoolTogether holding a GitPOAP

4. Holders of any NFTs created by Churck Bergeron, PoolTogether’s cofounder and artist

Thanks to this new role Tjark was able to onboard a couple hundred, highly engaged members to the new initiative and give them access to a gated document introducing their new protocol.

“Guild also helps connect all the different credentialing tools which is useful in segmenting groups of members.”

Results

• In a matter of a few days, close to 200 members got their Alpha Leak role to access and test the new protocol!

Solution 3: Engaging

Goal: engage a sub-group of governance-savvy members to involve them in Pooltogether’s governance activities.

It is possible to use custom queries for role requirements on Guild. It means using any smart contract's ‘read function' as the source for a requirement. The PoolTogether team has used this feature in order to form a group of $OP holders among their members. They then used a gated Google document to coordinate with them. PoolTogether successfully became a major delegate on the Optimism blockchain.

“What this means is that all PT people who have delegated their OP voting power to our multisig get access to a specific Google Document and this helps communicate with them better.”

Besides coordination, Guild requirements and roles are also a great way to spotlight community sub-groups. Roles are like titles and direct status for those who contribute to the community and project.

“It looks like people find it super rewarding to be recognized. If these people are delegates and get a role for it they tend to really appreciate it. The roles that you get through Guild feel like badges that you collect. Sometimes you click on a profile and you’re like “wow this person here has done a lot”.

Results:

• Delegate sub-group successfully engaged and took action. Guild was used as the coordination and incentive tool to grow PoolCollective -PoolTogether’s delegate- as a top 25 delegate on OP Token House governance, totaling 0.85% of the votable supply.

We covered how to signal, segment and engage sub-groups in a community through PoolTogether and their methods and strategies.

Last but not least, a tip from Tjark to make the most out of Guild:

“To be fair, not a lot of tools make things easier in web3. Guild however takes away a lot of friction as it connects everything, multiple platforms and multiple tools, together.”

Big thanks to Tjark and the PoolTogether team for their time. Excited to keep working together on the future of the PT community!

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