Summary
This proposal seeks to continue the operation of the Social Impact Working Group for another three-month period from May through July 31th 2023. The documentation below provides a review of the accomplishments in the group’s last season and the plan for continuing this work to fulfill Popcorn’s mission of creating real-world impact with its products and educating users as well as the general public about it.
Links to previous discussions
Last season review
Goals of the last season and what was accomplished:
Partnership with an implementation partner for the beneficiary program
Popcorn has established a marketing partnership with Gitcoin for the launch of VaultCraft, Popcorn’s flagship product. This will help us spread the word with Gitcoin’s audience and grow the user base of Popcorn. We also agreed with Gitcoin that we will be able to use their decentralized grants protocol to fast-track the setup of our beneficiary program. Their grants protocol is currently still in development and we need to wait for them to finish internal testing before we can start developing our own prototype setup prior to the official release of the protocol.
Develop a system for beneficiary referrals
The WG developed a dedicated form for the referral of beneficiaries. Additionally, the onboarding in (crew3) was updated to show this option to all new users. In the past, Popcorn already developed a prototype of the grants UI to show which beneficiaries are already onboarded at Popcorn but due to missing capacity of the dev team, the development was halted and can only be continued in the next/this season.
Framework for beneficiary marketing efforts
The WG has developed multiple ideas/strategies for marketing efforts for future grant rounds tailored to the different target groups that need to be reached. In general, it will be necessary to grow Popcorn’s beneficiary network, expand Popcorn’s user base to generate more fees, and to educate Popcorn’s community about future rounds. Additionally, the WG has also identified potential partners in the REFI/impact space for future joint marketing campaigns/cross-marketing opportunities.
UI for voting on the distribution of grants.
The goal was to have a UI for voting on the grants that is aligned with the rest of Popcorn’s UIs (look and feel, branding, etc). At the beginning of the last season it was unclear if this will be possible with Gitcoin’s decentralized protocol and while we now know that they can provide a template UI for us to utilize when setting up our own grant rounds we still don’t know all the required details about customization. For this reason and also because Popcorn’s dev team was focused on the launch of the VaultCraft protocol, it was decided to postpone this task for later.
Process in-bound beneficiary requests
The WG was in contact with various potential beneficiaries as well as other people interested in Popcorn’s impact efforts and updated them about the current state and progress of Popcorn’s beneficiary program.
In summary, all tasks except those that required extended effort from the dev team were finished as planned. In addition to the original targets, the WG was working on various other tasks, most of which are explained in the updates to the original RFC.
Proposal for next phase (3 months)
Objectives, work streams, and KPIs
Give users a better insight/overview of past impact activities of Popcorn and current beneficiary network
- The WG already created a public notion pages about all things social impact at Popcorn (link), to give (potential) users a better overview of e.g. Popcorn’s strategy to create impact, focus areas, how to apply for funding, and how Popcorn has created impact in the past. The plan for this season is to expand it and give users/potential users a better overview of how Popcorn creates real world impact as well as how they can get involved and help out. Popcorn is planing to update its websites and (if dev capacity allows it) we also want to move some of this info to the website. In addition, we want to continue work on our own prototype of a grants UI that showcases all
- beneficiaries that have been onboarded at Popcorn.
→ Expand impact related notion pages until beginning of June
→ Show impact related information on Popcorn’s website by beginning of July
→ UI to see beneficiaries in Popcorn’s network (grants UI if dev capacity is available or else some other solution) by end of July
Continue working with Gitcoin to become one of their first implementation partners for their decentralized grants protocol
- As mentioned before it was decided that the best/fastest way to realize Popcorn’s mission will be to outsource part of the beneficiary process to focus on the improvement of the DEFI strategies, which will enable a bigger impact (also for the social mission) later on. In addition to that, working with the most known and successful player in the space can be a great way to grow Popcorn’s network. The goal therefore is to utilize Gitcoin’s decentralized grants protocol for our beneficiary setup and create a first implementation as soon as the protocol is ready for initial testing (estimated to be within the next two months).
→ get access to Gitcoin’s grant protocol and start development of own setup until July
Process in-bound beneficiary requests
- In the same way as last season we want to make sure that all potential beneficiaries that find and contact Popcorn on their own have somebody to talk to and can be onboarded to Popcorn’s network for future grant rounds. It is important to tell them exactly where we are in the process of setting up our own beneficiary program and explain to them the current options and new products of Popcorn (VaultCraft, Vaults with impact, etc.)
→ Continue to process all in-bound beneficiary requests
Approach potential partners in the REFI/Impact space regarding VaultCraft
- To speed up the adoption of VaultCraft, Popcorn’s new flagship product, and further expand Popcorn’s user base, we want to strategically approach players in the REFI/impact space that we have identified as potential users/partners for VaultCraft. The idea is that we either convince them to utilize VaultCraft to create their own strategies or educate them about VaultCraft’s possibilities so they can tell their users. There are many smaller companies that are working on environmental or social problems that might not have the manpower to develop their own vaults and we want to get the message out to them.
→ convince at least one bigger player to utilize VaultCraft for every month of the season
Team structure & Budget
Core Team Liaison: Joey N
Team lead: PopstarPepe
The budget for the WG lead consists of $1500 USD per month paid in POP, based on the 30-day MA of POP on the last day of the month (for roughly 60h work/month).
For tasks relating to communication and marketing, we want to work with bounties that will be managed through Dework. Users/Popstars can also suggest bounties in the tool.
These could be:
- Writing articles or updates on social impact related activities at Popcorn
- Creating guides for beneficiaries or users
For the three-month period of this season, the WG suggests a budget of 1000 POP for bounties. POP that was not used at the end of this period will be returned to the treasury.