🧠Planning A Pot
How to actually plan and raise for a pot before its deployed
Link to Document to Copy: https://potlock.org/plan-pot-doc
We built Potlock so anyone can deploy their own funding strategies in a permissionless manner. We are pretty excited about the amount of interest we’ve had for those who wanted to run their own quadratic funding rounds. While we previously made a Chef-training document for Pot owners, admins, and chefs on how to use the platform and difficulties associated with running a round; that more applies to the duration of when the round is open. This document focused on off chain activities, actually planning the round, pitching to sponsors, and finding co-organizers leading up to this, as well as collecting data with a retrospective and engaging projects after the pot.
In this guide we will be showing you
Round Templates w/ Examples
Announcing Your Round
How to Coordinate with Potlock Team
Template with Pitches and Agreements
Some outcomes of this document
You have a clear written plan of when and who your round will be involved
You have an outreach strategy for reaching out to likely sponsors and projects in your round
You will have documents to streamline agreements and pitch
You will have clear communication with Potlock team for any customization and to streamline marketing as well as support for executing
Round Template
Context
Before you start a round you need time for planning a round. If you have not raised and gotten soft commits we recommend you space out 2 months. If you have experience raising for hackathons, events, or pitching a grant program this is similar. You usually need a soft commit to actually do a round or deploy. However you can still deploy your pot contract and use this to pool community resources in a more grassroots way.
In your pitch you need to establish the success of quadratic funding or even explain the concept. At this point you usually have an idea of what the focus of your round can be, maybe you have an idea of projects that are already in the space.
Pot Brainstorming Exercise
Questions to ask yourself before you start [COPY THIS DOC]
What impact do you want to make?
Are the donors for this vertical crypto native or native to NEAR? What is the best path for them to board and bring donations? How many are you expecting
Is there a particular vertical that you want to tackle?
Who would be the ones likely to fund these type of vertical? Do you have their contact?
Are there projects already in this ecosystem?
Who do you have in your community that can run a round or job is already to help those in this ecosystem get funding?
What are your marketing assets and deliverables?
What are the requirements for your projects? Should they only be on the public goods registry? Will you need your own registry that you curate and will people allowed to be apply?
How many projects are you expecting to apply?
What are the OKRs and ultimate success like that warrant an valuable ROI for sponsors you have in mind?
What does a successful round look like for you? What can you measure immediately, and what can you track later?
Do you have necessary funds in wallets to facilitate. Example 4.4 NEAR to deploy pot, 1 NEAR for approvals, rejections and extensions, and 30 NEAR to seed donations and to onboard other wallets? If not, contact Potlock?
Example of going through this exercise for citizens round (https://potlock.org/pot-example)
Objectives
This section is where you clearly outline why you are doing this round, and prepare all the available documents. This is high -level concepts and the following bullet points are very broad and should be fine tuned for your use case.
Boost marketing
Support __ vertical
Inject capital directly into project immediately
Incubate projects and prospect project to build on ___ stack
Details
Organizer:
Lead Name
Contact information. Why you are the best person, and any relevant team members, their role and their background.
This is your organization.
Put relevant information about your organization especially regarding the vertical, experience organizing groups.
How to Pitch
Outside of using the platform, what are ways to pitch to projects, sponsors, and donors.
Pitching to Projects
Not just finding supporters and getting financial support
Build reputation, be eligible for future rounds
Discovering other people in public goods. space
Pitching to Sponsors
Get your logo shown
Support cohort of projects
Alignment with public goods ecosystem
Donors
Support your favorite project, and impact with not just your donation but against a matching pool.
Creating A Deck:
Some questions to consider
How can funding public goods lead to a ROI investment?
More competitive than a hackathon
High projects in ecosystem and alignment with brand
Retroactive alignment
What is the background on the platform and how does it works?
How does using Potlock make it easier than traditional grant making software?
Who is your team?
What projects are you expecting
What is the Timeline?
How to Sponsor / Ask call to action?
Copy the Following Pitch Template https://potlock.org/pitch-template
Pot Proposal Template
The following document is for you to plan your pot and turn it into a funding proposal. https://potlock.org/pot-template
Frequently Asked Questions?
How do I get a sponsor on the contract?
You need to get it on-chain via NEAR. Need to onramp and convert. You can do so on the following support exchanges or onramps.
What if a sponsor requests and invoice?
You may already have an invoice software for your organization or use a free alternative.
What if sponsor requests and agreement?
Quadratic Funding Round on Potlock Sponsor Agreement
Securing Sponsorship
Often sponsors want some type of documentation to agree with
Sponsorship Agreement template https://potlock.org/sponsorship-template
Make a copy and replace all the highlighted sections, also decide whether they will pay via NEAR directly in quadratic funding round (only supported currency) or you will handle the onramping of the funds.
Outreach
While you may have projects in mind. Most often you need to personally have outreach with prospective projects that you want in the round. This also gives an opportunity for your team to set up communications and also add them to the cohort chat and provide direct support. Ultimately you want to have projects that are not only aligned with your objectives for the round, but are engaged and incentivized enough to onboard more donors..
Be clear about your eligibility requirements. Examples from Gitcoin Eligibility, General Potlock Public Goods Guidelines, and NEAR Retroactive Builders Round.
Really envision the type of project you want in your ecosystem, the level of your team, whether estimated funding amount targets on average warrant the caliber team you are looking for, and whether these projects can onboard their community into the ecosystem. Gitcoin has a good example of this https://www.gitcoin.co/blog/identifying-high-potential-grantees
Getting Help From Us
We are a resource, and a successful one. The best way to reach out to the team is go to the Potlock telegram
Ways We Can Support with Preparing Your Round
Do not hesitate to reach out. Every problem you face is an opportunity to integrate a product oriented solution that can scale. We can support by customization the stack
Customization: build.
Help with the deployment of your round
Enable a custom registry (ex; not just a public good)
Enable custom human requirements (recommended use nada.bot default)
Round Management Support
1 on 1 training. Support channels and async support
Documentation support
Customization
There are options for customization that include not using Potlock’s public goods registry and not using standard nada bot registry. For this
Create your own lists others can apply to (WIP)
Create own nada.bot requirements (not based on our score, ex; based on nft membership, etc)
Preparing For Round
Make sure
You have a sync’d with your team on Run Of Show
Who is responsible for off chain? Who will be a chef championing round and getting fees?
How often will you be reviewing applications? Who will be primarily the reviewer?
Who will be doing outbound to target applications. Establish a CRM for outreach projects with their application status, level of engagement, and whether communications has set up?
Who will be reaching out and writing retrospective report?
Do you have marketing plan? Who is responsible for KOLs in the vertical for
If you need to KYC all projects, that is up to you and we currently don’t have this in the software. Its better to have projects KYC or KYB or have proof of such beforehand. Examples of KYC providers are FractalID.
Announce Your Round
The following is how to streamline your marketing for the round. General structure
TLDR: summarize points from article so people don't have to read
Backstory/Overview: Explain why you are doing
Objectives: Outline objectives and allude to OKRs
Explain Quadratic Funding & Potlock background: make clear quadratic funding requires that and background about past background.
Convince Why Project Should Sign Up: Potential earnings
Call to Actions: urge users to verify with nada.bot, other sponsors to support matching pool. Also give links to your community
Here are references to other articles announcing quadratic funding rounds
NEAR Foundation Announces Rounds https://pages.near.org/blog/potlock-and-near-foundation-partner-to-accelerate-public-goods-funding-pgf/
NEAR Retroactive Builders Round https://blog.potlock.org/retroactive-funding-round-for-near-builders-83a6934979d9
Africa Public Goods Round https://blog.potlock.org/announcing-the-africa-public-goods-quadratic-funding-round-d7d2fec67591
Tips
Use hemingway to read at a 3rd grade level
Get KOLs to amplify the post
Send article to projects and communities groups to urge them to sign up even after first initial announcements
Round Communication
This is covered in chef training, but it is absolutely important that you set up communications channels with your entire round like a cohort, and directly with that project's teams. Projects will be actively onboarding users inside of their community and there is a level of customer support. We highly recommend you put in users in the Potlock telegram as we are always checking. We also recommend that projects get in habit of posting weekly updates as post (and on their impact page) so donors can see their growth.
Data Analytics and Reporting For Your Round
Data is essential for your round. You want to automate to understand which projects are receiving donations, whether those projects are also paying fees to the chef, whether they come from existing web3 communities, whether they are donating to other projects. Whether they are newly created accounts, etc.
We have a data guild at Potlock and here is information on Flipside to get a sense of pot https://flipsidecrypto.xyz/Lordking/potlock-UD3Flm?tabIndex=6
Operating the Round
YEAR OF CHEF TRAINING https://potlock.org/chef-training
YEAR OF CHEF TRAINING PLAYLIST https://potlock.org/chef-training-playlist
After Payouts: Creating A Round Retrospective
After a round it is important to write something retroactive. The following is templates for you and your team to reflect on how to improve your round, forms for you to gain feedback from projects that participated in your round.
Retro Template (to fill out during and after to note your progress) https://potlock.org/retro-template
And example of a report https://potlock.org/retro-creative
Here is a google form for a Retroactive form template to send out https://potlock.org/pot-feedback-template
After A Round
After a round things are not over. We want to follow up with projects. It's important that projects share their experience, we can keep track of the rounds to improve, and pipeline to new funding opportunities, and get projects to continue to attest.
To let them know they get paid. Any possible offramping.
To make sure that donors are attesting
To have them share on social media via templates. Copy templates at https://potlock.org/canva
Additionally work with the Potlock team to get messaging about overall round, and then get individual projects paid out to share their experience. Have projects copy the graphic templates (potlock.org/canva) for projects to share about how much donors they had, how much direct donations, and how much matched amount they got. and what they plan to do for the funds. Encourage them to connect twitter to NEAR.social to make a post so it shows up.
Notable Resources
Big Shoutout to Gitcoin for their training modules and for pioneering
Gitcoin Round Ooperation Docs https://roundoperations.gitcoin.co/round-operations/
Gitcoin Round Manager Training Cohort https://app.charmverse.io/gp-round-manager-training-cohort/cohort-curriculum-25970338147403904
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