Starting an Outreach Program for Steem #1 : Steem Ambassadors - Can we just do this?
It's been talked about, it's been written about. Steem needs an outreach program.
One big part of that should be a team of 'Steem Ambassadors' who will go out to crypto related events around the world to give presentations about Steem.
Although Steemit Inc do occasionally get to a few conferences they don't have the resources to do much on this front.
Therefore it is with the community to take this forward.
Several leading steemians have already off their own back, and generally at their own expense, been going to crypto conferences to talk about Steem.
With the arrival of the Steem Proposal System there is the opportunity to fund a more coordinated program of sending Steem speakers to crypto conferences.
This is a suggested plan for an initial 6 month trial to learn how best to organise this and to see what results it gets.
A Steem Ambassadors Outreach Plan (6 month trial)
Although there has been a previous Steem Ambassadors project run by @starkerz and @anarcotech of Promo-Steem, the name will be reused now in this new context of a group of steemians selected to speak, present and represent Steem at crypto / blockchain related events and conferences around the world.
For this new plan there would be two levels of Ambassadors...
Level 1 Ambassadors would be the more experienced and accomplished speakers who would attend the larger global / continental / regional level events
Level 2 Ambassadors would be the less experienced presenters without a long track record who would attend smaller local / country / sub-regional events.
The aim would be for the Level 2 Ambassadors to progress to Level 1 in a second phase of the project.
For the trial project there would be three level 1 ambassadors selected and three level 2 ambassadors.
Ideally they would be spread around the world, have relevant previous experience of presenting at business or crypto type events.
It would also be good to have a mix of crypto financial and crypto technical/development knowledge among the ambassadors.
In addition to the ambassadors the project team would be completed by a Coordinator or Administrator who would help seek out relevant conferences, coordinate speakers for selected events and manage budgets.
Project Budget
During the 6 month trial the target would be for each ambassador to speak at three events at their appropriate level - making 18 appearances in total.
Costs would vary significantly from event to event and country to country but target expense costs for the top level events would be $1200, and for the level 2 events $600.
These costs would cover travel, accommodation, food and event attendance/speaking fees.
In addition there would be overall project budget of $3600 for any promotional materials.
There should also be a budget of $3600 to directly reward the ambassadors on a per event basis.
Additionally there would be a monthly stipend of $100 for the work of the project coordinator.
This gives a total project budget for the 6 month trial of US$ 24,000 or approximately 40,000 SBD at current rates.
Because of the significant volatility / downward pressure on the SBD price it would be prudent to add in a contingency percentage of 20% taking the total budget to 48,000 SBD. (This can be rolled into phase 2 if not required.)
Over the 180 days of the trial this represents a daily cost of just 267 SBD which is well within the bounds of the current Steem Proposal System funding ability.
Project Governance & Management
The obvious home for the project will be the Steem Foundation, but if that is not ready or able to take this on yet then an adhoc working group could oversee it.
In this later case funding would be sent to a specific project account ideally with some sort of multi-sig authority (if that is available).
Budgets, transactions and expense recording would be regularly and publicly reported for community scrutiny.
All ambassadors would be required to make a minimum of five event posts - two before, one during, and two after including one as a one month follow up on any leads etc. These posts would be with 50% author / 50% @steem.dao beneficiaries.
It is suggested that the trial project would commence on 1 January 2020. This would give time for the SPS proposal to be put in place, the ambassadors selected and the initial events found.
By month 5 a project evaluation would be carried out. If the project has had suitably positive results then numbers of ambassadors and events could be doubled for phase 2.
Ambassador Selection
Particularly for the level 1 ambassadors there will only likely be a small pool of candidates with the appropriate knowledge and experience.
For the phase 1 trial the target zones would be North America, Europe and South East Asia.
Suggested candidates might include...
North America - @coruscate, @justineh, @aggroed, @yabapmatt, @theycallmedan...
Europe - @exyle, @starkerz, @anarcotech, @fredrikaa, @rea...
South-East Asia - @bitrocker2020, @mariska.lubis...
Please make further suggestions in the comments below.
This is a draft outline to kickstart this much needed Steem outreach and marketing project into life.
The structure of the project and the numbers can be debated and refined.
But not endlessly. Action is needed.
If there is sufficient interest I am happy to hold an open forum on MSP Waves to discuss this and move it forwards.
Comments please.
[ image from pixabay.com ]
We hope that China can have an ambassador. In Chengdu, China, at least one large cryptocurrency activity per week, and at least 10 cities in China.
I hope so too. Have you been promoting @wherein at any crypto events yet?
We have been promoting Steem in China. We can don't need funds, but we are willing to cooperate with China's Steem promotion ambassador.
That will be great, thank you.
We are from India and we approve this. We need steem ambassador here. Largest country with high internet users, providing techie guys for every gaint companies like Microsoft,Google. India has vast potential to accommodate STEEM.
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I believe India is a growing market for Steem.
Are there many crypto conferences in India at present?
Yes, this month on 17th.
https://10times.com/ocbt-conference-chennai
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Thank you for this. India would definitely be a good target for this sort of outreach work.
Are there any steemians in India with experience of presenting at these sorts of events?
Yes , @firepower, @hungryhustle are pretty much experienced people who are from IT background and active here. If they are willing to be, you can surely consider as level1 ambassadors.
I am @hungryharish running @steemindian project to curate and onboarding Indians. At local level like in my workplace already doing promotion for steem.
Hope they found this and join.
If you have any contact with @firepower do mention it to him.
I know @hungryhustle already so I will make contact with him.
He is on discord and not so contact details with me. But as we are tagging him multiple times, he could have already noticed this 😂
I would be willing to delegate Steem to a pool used to recruit interesting content creators to using the steem platform. The idea is providing an initial sponsorship in a predetermined upvote amount to help authors / content creators / make the transition to Steems platforms without incurring financial losses in making the transition while they get established. Could also include a cut-off of the sponsorship based on time and where organic up-vote revenue exceeds a certain amount. They always say "Content is King" Please let me know if this is something you would be intested in running with. Either way, I support your efforts! Thank you!
@minerthreat awesome thought. I am running this curation exclusive project to onboard and reward more Indians as possible and looking for helping hand. If you are interested to offer, check out our project.
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I will check it out, thank you!
Welcome 🤝
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Yep, as I have mentioned repeatedly and even went into more detail on Sunday, I think this is very important but also important of who is being sent to be a representative. I like the idea of multiple tiers but education will be important imo. Essentially the community would be paying for these people to represent them so how they do so is important.
I’ve been writing up something and trying to come up with the best way to do this while also preventing it from turning into just another abused project. It’s a hard balance and I think it needs oversight, one I don’t think the foundation can do currently.
Thanks for making a post about it to get the conversation going.
Yes indeed, there will be need to be careful selection to find the right people.
For the level 1 Ambassadors I would suspect all the potential candidates will likely already be well known to the community.
Beyond that education and training will certainly be important.
I can do Central/South America (@ecoinstant) presentations in English/Spanish.
I should also mention that we are launching @quintaesencia in Colombia, which I hope will become a tool for incentivized sustainable development, government transparency and increased accountability in difficult areas of the world.
That sounds like a very interesting project - now following.
Excelente, gracias.
I would be happy to speak at any conferences on behalf of Steem in North America or beyond.
Excellent, thank you Dan. I really hope we can push this forward now.
I'd suggest that you budget in someone to actively seek out opportunities.
Agreed. The budgets will need to be built upon, particularly as it becomes clearer what the potential funding capacity of the SPS will be.
My husband and I are hosting a CryptoCurrency Meetup Group tomorrow in Victoria BC Canada. I will take some photos and post them.... There should be about 6 people. The meetup group we have been running for the past few years has 500+ people who have subscribed. I will give a presentation on Steem tomorrow.... I wonder if it's gotten easier for people to join Steem yet. The last few times I tried to help people join up - they got discouraged by the lag between when they were signing up and when their account got approved.
I believe Steemit Inc have now the signup process down to a day or two. But we still need to work on this to make signup as swift and easy as possible.
I think you should consider separate proposals for each region as some need more awareness spreading and jave more potential than others.
That is a possibility but currently every proposal has to get over 14 million SP of votes to get accepted for funding on the Steem Proposal System.
Achieving that for multiple proposals could be quite a major task.
That is a good point. Maybe there is a way to use something like dpoll to decide where and how much to finace at a subproposal level.
For the 6 month trial the aim is to get something up and running.
But there is certainly more refinement that can be done.
Great idea and definitely needed 💯🐒
Thank you.