Icon Pilipinas Community Building Growth Accelerator #2
Project Category
Community Activities
Project Description
Background: Across the globe, nobody spends more time per day on social media than the Philippines. As shown below, the average Filipino spends ~4 hours/day on social media.
Further, the Philippines is home to ~110 million people (13th largest country in the world, by population), comprised of a relatively young and growing demographics base that is already very familiar with using modern technology and devices.
Motivation: With that said, blockchain technology is still a fresh concept here in the Philippines. Most people still don’t know what blockchain is or how it works. As such, our team at Icon Pilipinas wants to hyper-accelerate blockchain growth by educating the masses and common everyday people about ICON - The major benefits and why it should be a premiere blockchain project people here think about and use in the Philippines.
With the help our first grant application approal (submitted on June 22, 2020), the Icon Pilipinas social media channels were able to grow to the following numbers:
Telegram: Telegram: Contact @icon_pilipinas
4,155 followers (up from 459 on June 22).
Facebook: Ginnie Pinas
57,283 followers (up from 53,000 on June 22).
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCqkwvlG2636SqqtjOYAxOhQ
1,272 followers (up from 237 followers on June 22).
Twitter: x.com
2,974 (up from 408 followers on June 22).
ICX News Ngayon:
As part of our growth strategy, the Icon Pilipinas team launched ICX News Ngayon in early July, and has been consistently producing new episodes ever since. To be clear, ICON is the only topic of conversation discussed here; each week, our team picks out a key news piece related to the ICON ecosystem and break it down in basic terms for non-techies.
Here are some examples:
Each of the 14 episodes recorded thus far of ICX News Ngayon can be found on both Facebook and YouTube.
Our team would like to continue filming, editing, and publishing this content as we think it helps us out tremendously in our mission to reach a broader audience here in the Philippines (particularly with new viewers who may not already be well versed with blockchain technology, cryptocurrencies, and especially ICON).
ICX News Ngayon aims to be educational, fun, and simple to understand for all viewers (i.e., as non-intimidating as possible).
ICX News Ngayon Quiz Time:
To help complement our efforts with ICX News Ngayon, our team also started featuring a new event, ICX News Ngayon Quiz Time, on our Facebook page, which also debuted in early July.
The purpose of ICX News Ngayon Quiz Time was to help us boost our engagement on Facebook, which was arguably quite lacking before because there previously wasn’t much incentive to keep people tuned in and coming back to our FB page.
After only a few months of running the Quiz Time event, we’re already very encouraged by the results, as we’ve been able to gain many more “top fans” on Facebook, to alongside with more comments/shares/likes/etc. To us gaining more “top fans” is a HUGE win, as it shows long-term interest and retention of followers, which is our primary objective.
In fact, we recently increased the weekly stakes from 500 PHP (~10.32 USD) free load (5x winners) to 1,000 PHP (~$20.64) free load (10x winners) to entice more people to actively participate and learn more about ICON. In a given month, there should be ~4x instances of ICX News Ngayon Quiz Time.
As shown below, the underlying goal is to work on increasing the number of comments/shares/reactions received for each new video:
In conjunction with publishing more episodes of ICX News Ngayon, we would also like to keep funding ICX News Ngayon Quiz Time; together, we think this pair is a good way to reach more Pinoys in the Philippines, as Facebook still remains by far the most used social media platform in the country.
Community Building Featured Events:
This next grant will also help us keep offering more events to the Icon Pilipinas community, particularly on Telegram (where our community and team are most actively engaged these days).
Without giving away too many details just yet, one future event that our team is really looking forward to launching in the very near future is a merchandise event, we are currently considering calling “ICON Merch Craze!”. The idea of course is to continue building camaraderie, having fun, and giving our community members a chance to get creative and directly involved with ICON.
For example, here is a design that one of our most passionate community members (@matT325) came up with (which she used as a prop in our last featured event on Telegram).
Although it’s still preliminary, our vision is to keep building and growing the Icon Pilipinas brand so that we can ultimately launch a merchandise store to more effectively promote ICON here in the Philippines. We want our community members to design the merchandise that they themselves will be wearing so that there is a greater sense of unity and pride involved. Also, having our own website will open up more doors and possibilities for delivering new content in the future.
We have already registered the domain name and signed up for web hosting, to support these growth efforts.
Some more examples of events our team has run in the past are highlighted below:
https://forum2.icon.community/t/futureicx-ama-icon-pilipinas/1158
This grant will ensure that we have the ability and means to keep offering a continuous pipeline of ICON-related events, raffles, prizes, etc. on a consistent basis.
Promotional Videos:
To help market featured events, our team would also like to continue producing “flashy” promo videos, as these are quite helpful in getting new audiences to take notice and pay attention to what it is we’re doing.
Here are a few examples:
You can find all of our promotional videos on both Facebook and YouTube.
Similar to ICX News Ngayon, these promo videos require a lot of time to edit and produce, so additional funding will be necessary to hire dedicated staff members to work on these assignments.
ICON KABOG!
Also, thanks to the support of the last grant, our team was able to introduce ICON KABOG!, which we officially unveiled on July 6, and has become an event that is a main staple in our line up.
ICON KABOG! is hosted 2x per week (on Friday and Saturday night) on the Icon Pilipinas Telegram chat.
As shown in our grant report update, user engagement on the Icon Pilipinas Telegram chat has been robust, averaging 5000+ messages/day, due in large part to the success of the ICON KABOG! event.
https://combot.org/c/1370909449/a
In fact, the Icon Pilipinas Telegram chat has been able to crack and maintain being featured in the top 10 list (provided by @combot data) of Top Telegram Groups in the Philippines.
https://combot.org/telegram/top/groups?lng=fil
Here is an example (from September 19) of what a typical ICON KABOG! event might look like:
Here is an example of “Marvelous Hunting”:
ICON KABOG! has also become a prime spot each week to engage the community by doing random giveaways, such as the aforementioned Marvelous gift cards:
Tipping Bots:
On the topic of giveaways, our team found that user engagement on Telegram really started to take off for us after we incorporated both the TipTap Bot (credit to iBriz - ICONOsphere P-Rep team) and tipicon Bot (credit to Piconbello P-Rep team) into the Icon Pilipinas chat.
Unfortunately, we don’t have tipping data available for tipicon Bot, but as the follow images will show below, our community is extremely active and committed to using tipping bots:
We rely on both tipping bots very heavily, frequently doing random tips and rain/airdrops, and with help of the grant we’ll be able to continue giving back to deserving community members who are helping us grow and promote ICON.
Off-site AMA Events:
Off-site AMA events are ones in which the Icon Pilipinas team is featured as a guest. To date, our main focus with AMAs has been to join some of the top/most popular blockchain/crypto communities on Telegram, such as the following:
AMA events aren’t flashy, but we think they are well worth the time and effort invested, as they’ve done so much to help us build our community and presence on Telegram. It is always an incredible experience for us to visit a new chat room, talk strictly ICON for 1-2 hours, and then observe how many attendees decide to wander over and join the Icon Pilipinas chat, or ICON Project chat.
In fact, we met several of our most passionate community members at one of the aforementioned AMA event… and they’ve since gone on to become very dedicated ICONists.
Marketing Campaign:
During the previous grant application, our main focus with our marketing budget was spending on Facebook ads, as shown below:
After running aggressive advertising campaigns on Facebook for several months now, our own thinking internally is that although this approach has helped us gain more followers and piqued the curiosity of certain individuals about what ICON is, we would like to try an altered hybrid approach for the next grant, and rely more on organic word-of-mouth growth for Facebook.
In our own local market, things like giveaways are gaining increasing popularity (these events can be slightly more difficult to pull off using Facebook), and Twitter is a social media platform that we would like to explore more to attract new people into joining our other social media platforms (e.g., Telegram, YouTube, Medium, etc.), and not to mention the ICON ecosystem, of course.
To avoid overlap with what other P-Rep teams may be doing on Twitter, our target audience for marketing on Twitter would be to primarily focus on the Philippines, reaching both blockchain/crypto enthusiasts and those who are completely new to the space. Again, ideally, any new people that we reach on Twitter will join our Telegram chat and also follow our various other social media accounts.
We will adjust and fine-tune our hybrid marketing approach, depending on results…
Community Feedback:
The Icon Pilipinas community continues to grow, and we will keep doing our absolute best to foster a supportive and fun environment that members enjoy being a part of.
Here’s some honest, unsolicited feedback we’ve gotten from some of our community members (pulled from this recent Twitter post from @tonoplast), which we are most humbled by:
We are exceptionally proud of the high quality ICON community we’re building, but at the same time we also realize that it’s really early days for ICON, and there’s still a tremendous amount of work to do to get to mainstream adoption…
With that said, our team is more motivated than ever before to continue doing everything we can in helping ICON achieve its vision of hyperconnecting the world.
KPI targets for this grant
For this grant, our team would really like to hone in and concentrate more on the successful execution of our featured events each month (e.g, ICON Merch Craze!), doing the best job that we can to really promote and grow ICON, with less of a concern for meeting a quota on actual numbers.
With that said, we are still cognizant to the fact that our team will need a way to quantify growth, so we have decided to focus on certain key areas. Our team would like the opportunity to aim for the following KPIs for the duration of this grant period, shown below:
KPI #1: Number of members in Telegram group
Current: 4,155
Target: 7,000 (after 3 months)
KPI #2: Number of YouTube subscribers
Current: 1,272
Target: 2,500 (after 3 months)
KPI #3: Number of ICON-focused promotional events (AMAs, live interviews, featured stories, raffles, ICON promotional events hosted on our social media channels, etc)
Current: 7
Target: 4-5/month (each month for duration of grant)
KPI #4: Successful launch of merchandise store
Current: Planning stages
Target: Community design event (after 1 month)
Target: Setting up logistics, website design/testing (after 2 months)
Target: Site launch featuring community-made designs (after 3 months)
Previous KPIs:
Lastly, thanks to the tremendous aid the previous grant, our team was able to meet, or exceed the following KPIs:
KPI #1: Number of members in Telegram group
Members: 459 (on June 22); grant start
Members: 1,518 (on July 21); month #1
Members: 3,361 (on August 19); month #2
Members: 4,032 (on September 19); month #3
Target: 2,200 (after 3 month); target achieved
KPI #2: User engagement on Telegram
Daily messages: 566/day (on June 22); grant start
Daily messages: 4,631/day (from June 23 to July 21); month #1
Daily messages: 5,795/day (from July 22 to August 19); month #2
Daily messages: 5,442/day (from August 20 to September 19); month #3
Target: 2,000 to 3,000 messages/day (after 3 months); target achieved
KPI #3: Facebook reach
Reach and Impressions: 757,595; 1,005,641 (from June 23 to July 21); month #1
Reach and Impressions: 974,951; 1,278,273 (from July 22 to August 19); month #2
Reach and Impressions: 809,044; 1,063,380 (from August 20 to September 19); month #3
KPI #3 Target: 1.0 million/month; target achieved
KPI #4: ICON-focused promotional events (AMAs, live interviews, featured stories, raffles, ICON promotional events hosted on our social media channels, etc)
Activities: 7 (from June 23 up to July 21); month #1
Activities: 7 (from July 22 up to August 19); month #2
Activities: 7 (from August 20 up to September 19); month #3
KPI #4 Target: 5-6/month (each month for duration of grant); target achieved
KPI #5: Number of YouTube subscribers
We are actively working on growing our YouTube channel:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCqkwvlG2636SqqtjOYAxOhQ
Subscribers: 237 (on June 22); grant start
Subscribers 602 (on July 21); month #1
Subscribers 1,029 (on August 19); month #2
Subscribers 1,268 (on September 19); month #3
KPI #5 Target: 1,000 (after 3 months); target achieved
Please refer to our previous community building reports for detailed data points on our continued growth:
[Grant Application] Icon Pilipinas Community Building Growth Accelerator
Icon Pilipinas Community Building Report #3 (September 2020)
Icon Pilipinas Community Building Report #2 (August 2020)
Icon Pilipinas Community Building Report #1
Also, please see our past transparency reports for even more details:
Project Milestones
Promoting and growing the number of ICONists in the Philippines on a daily basis, 24/7, across our various social media platforms.
Funding Amount Requested
$12,000 over 3 months ($4,000/month)
Official Team Name
Icon Pilipinas
Team Contact Information
iconpilipinas@gmail.com
Public Address
hx0a72c03881451a6270d4895f756085470fc311e4
Thank you very much for your time and consideration! Please do not hesitate to reach out to our team with any questions, concerns you may have. We look forward to hearing back from you!
Additional Resources:
Icon Pilipinas Telegram chat: Telegram: Contact @icon_pilipinas
Icon Pilipinas OFFICIAL Announcements on Telegram: Telegram: Contact @iconpilipinas
Icon Pilipinas Combot stats: https://combot.org/c/1370909449/a?start=2020-07-01&end=2020-07-21
iBriz Tip-Tap Bot Dashboard: https://icontiptap.ibriz.ai/
Icon Pilipinas Facebook: Ginnie Pinas
Icon Pilipinas YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCqkwvlG2636SqqtjOYAxOhQ
Icon Pilipinas Twitter: x.com
We are really looking forward to our next phase of community building growth, as we strive to make ICON a household name in the Philippines and beyond.