ICON Pinas Community Building and Social Media Growth Accelerator

[IconPilipinas]

1. Title

ICON Pinas Community Building and Social Media Growth Accelerator

2. Project Category

Community Activities

• Marketing, educational content and activities, and web community development and management

3. Project Description

Background Information:

Over the past year, ICON Pinas has worked hard in building up our ICON sub-community, particularly on Telegram, where our group chat has averaged ~5,600 messages/day (as tracked by combot data, since the bot was installed on May 25, 2020).

Through the liberal use of tipping bots, hosting events, giveaways, AMAs, quiz time for ICX News Ngayon episodes, being consistently active, etc. ICON Pinas has created one of the most active and engaged crypto communities in all of the Philippines.

The ICON Pinas Telegram chat has consistently ranked in the top 5 (as tracked by combot data) of all Telegram group chats based in the Philippines:

With that being said, it should be noted that competition is fierce in the blockchain space, and therefore our team would like the opportunity to seek help via the CPS as this time so that we can continue expanding our reach and aggressively promoting ICON.

The Motivation:

We believe in money (ICX) velocity, and have learned over the past year that the best way to get someone to care about ICON is to put ICX directly into their hands. We want to recruit as many people as possible to become ICONists.

The Projects:
The following are core components of what we had in mind, that the CPS would help us fund:

1. ICON Merch - Getting ICON merch into the hands of more and more ICONists will not only boost engagement but also help market and advertise ICON in the real physical world. To date, our team has purchased/printed/shipped 120+ ICON-related t-shirts.

Both locally and internationally…

We would like to ship out a lot more ICON merch to ICONists…

2. ICON DApps Promotion - In the past, we’ve been fortunate to have been able to work with high quality P-Reps such as ICONbet and Midos, who have greatly helped us fund the prize pool of certain DApp-related events.

DAOcolors:

FutureICX:

As more and more ICON DApps get released this year, our team would like to be able to consistently offer fun events for community members, to coincide with product launches… That, and also making sure to keep supporting existing ICON DApps, so they remain fresh in the mind of ICONists…

Marvelous:

All while at the same time also being able to incentivize people to participate in each event by being able to entice them with a lucrative prize pool…

2. Community Events - Ideally, our team would like to be able to put together 2 noteworthy events/month, for our community members to enjoy.

The following are examples of some events ICON Pinas has run since the start of this year:

And another event we ran to close out 2020, which we are most proud of:

3. Community content - In addition to hosting fun events each month, ICON Pinas would also like to encourage community members to produce original content, to be shared on all our social media accounts.

In recent months, ICON Pinas has become much more active on Instagram, where we are working hard to build up our presence on this particular social media platform.

Giving our community members a chance (and platform) to contribute, and see themselves, friends, family, etc. featured online is something we think will do a lot for building camaraderie and also a sense of pride for being an ICONist.

In addition to Instagram, ICON Pinas also launched our TikTok account in early February, which followed up on a pilot TikTok Battle event from last September.

Similar to Instagram, the ICON Pinas TikTok account is still in its early stages of growth, and over time, we would like to upload a lot more content from community members to help promote ICON on this fast-growing social media platform.

4. Celebrity Influencers - While sourcing content from community members is a primary objective, our team is also cognizant to the fact that if we want to recruit as many new ICONists as possible, we’ll also have to expand our reach, which means collaborating with social media influencers.

With help from the CPS, ICON Pinas will be better able to make continual efforts to connect with more and more prominent people, letting them know what ICON is all about…

With the right help, we’re hopeful that in time, the ICON Pinas community will be able to reach wider mainstream adoption. Longer-term, of course we want to do everything we can to make ICON a household name…

5. AMAs, Interviews, and Other Events - To date, ICON Pinas has participated in 19 different AMA/interview events, playing both the role of guest and host.

Particularly on Telegram, our team is regularly being contacted by different communities for ICON AMA opportunities. From time-to-time, we think it would still make sense for us to continue taking part in these external AMA events on Telegram, in order to recruit new ICONists.

In addition to AMAs, we would also be keen on looking for “other events” (e.g., conferences, featured cover stories, etc.) to help us further promote ICON, if/when they become available to us.

6. Quiz Time - The Quiz Time “mini” event, hosted on our Facebook page, helps complement each video release of ICX News Ngayon (31 episodes have been published at this time of writing), giving participants a chance to win ICX/PHP, upon being able to successfully answer all multiple choice/fill-in-the-blank questions pertaining to the most recent episode.

In the past, we’ve allocated for 10 winners each week, however, moving forward, we would like to bump this number up to 20 winners, in order to encourage more people to not only watch, but pay close attention to each episode of ICX News Ngayon (i.e., learn more + retain information about events occurring in the ICON ecosystem).

We are most proud of the grassroots ICON community we’ve built and feel confident that the best days lie ahead!

4. Project duration

6 months

5. Project Milestones

Key project milestones would be primarily (but not limited to):

• Hosting regular events (~2x/month) for the ICON Pinas community, while at the same time strategically promoting select ICON DApps (P-Rep collaboration is key and something we’re always happy to engage in).
• Growing the number of followers and regularly posting new ICON-related content on Instagram.
• Growing the number of followers and regularly posting new ICON-related content on TikTok.
• Recruiting celebrities/social media influencers to help promote ICON on their dominant platforms.
• Printing and distributing more ICON merch to ICONists.

The primary objective will always be to recruit new ICONists and get ICX into the hands of more and more people.

6. Funding Amount Requested and Payment Milestones

Total Funding Amount Requested: $4,000/month ($24,000 for total 6 month duration of grant)

Monthly Breakdown:

• Staff (Event hosting, games, video editing, content posting, curating, etc.): $1,500
• Events (prizes, giveaways, raffles, airdrops, daily “para” tipping, etc.): $1,000
• Marketing (content creation, outreach, collaborations, etc.): $1,000
• Merchandise (items, printing, shipping): $500

7. Official Team Name

ICON Pinas

8. Team Contact Information

Telegram: @Jenny_ICONPinas
Email: iconpinas@gmail.com

ICON Pinas Social Media Accounts:
Telegram : https://t.me/icon_pinas
Instagram : https://www.instagram.com/iconpinas
TikTok : https://www.tiktok.com/@iconpinas
Twitter : https://twitter.com/IconPinas
YouTube : https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCqkwvlG2636SqqtjOYAxOhQ
Facebook : https://www.facebook.com/IconPinas/
Medium : https://medium.com/@iconpinas

9. Public Address

hx0a72c03881451a6270d4895f756085470fc311e4

Thank you for your time and consideration!

[Edouard_Stakin]

Hi, I really appreciate your initiatives to promote ICON in the local communities

I believe it could be interesting to organize events focused on ICON products and Dapps, and adopt an educative approach. There are some interesting Dapps on ICON which could benefit from further adoption. Let me know if you want to organize something together focused on our lottery Dapp.

On another note, I see your budgeting 2,500 ICX per month during 6 months. What’s your plan if ICON goes to $10?

[IconPilipinas]

Hi Edouard,

Thank you for your feedback. In terms of promoting ICON Dapps and products, yes, that’s what our community is all about and we’re always happy to do so. In the past, we’ve done events for Dapps such as: Marvelous, FutureICX (EPICX), DAOcolors, etc. If you have something particular in mind for your lottery, please feel free to reach out to us via dm and we can discuss more.

In terms of “what if…” when it comes to the ICX price, as you’re well aware, it’s very volatile and in the past, grants were pegged to USD value. I guess you could also ask a similar question as to what would the plan be if ICX goes in the reverse (unfavorable) direction?

For the CPS, we applied the ICX price at ~draft/submission of grant proposal…

[BennyOptions_LL]

Hey @Edouard_Stakin this is more a question about the CPS functionality. Right now we don’t have the option to request a budget adjustment to lower the budget, only to increase, but we will be adding that feature as you’re not the first to point this out.

[nblaze]

Hey @BennyOptions_LL! Just to confirm - is that not the reason that the Grants are given in USD value? Would a budget correction even be necessary if the Grants are approved in USD value?

It seems like a self-correcting mechanism to me. It is assumed that the Grant rewards are spent on a monthly basis to fund the teams’ expenses and that is why each month they are adjusted to the USD value that was agreed on in the first place

So if ICX goes to $10 as @Edouard_Stakin mentioned, I assume that the team will simply receive less ICX for the month (as we have done with every Grant project so far), so there will be no need for budget adjustments?

[BennyOptions_LL]

CPS grants are not given in USD value, it’s in ICX. When somebody submits a proposal, they ask for an ICX amount. It’s not manually distributed, it’s operated by a smart contract so the budget for each project must be known precisely. The smart contract has 250k ICX and can allocate it based on ICX budgets. If it was in USD and adjusted amount of ICX using an oracle data feed, small changes in ICX price could ruin the budgeting of the CPS.

For example, if we allocate the entire 250k to projects and ICX price goes down by 5 cents, there would need to be tons of logic built to decide which projects no longer receive the full budget. Instead of building logic to handle all these edge cases, there’s a budget-change request form that people can fill out if necessary.

If you have any follow ups on this topic please move to another thread as I don’t want to clutter their proposal with this

[nblaze]

Yeah, you are right. I apologize @IconPilipinas for going off topic!

The proposal looks great and given your track record of being so active and efficient in your PR work, Im sure that you will get approved. Good luck!

[iconsweden]

Great proposal. We think ICON need to enhance Marketing, Educational, and Awareness activities and try to attract common people from the society to ensure continuous healthy growth of ICON.

[Edouard_Stakin]

I’ve been giving some additional thoughts into the proposal. While promoting Dapps and producing educative materials with a local approach is interesting and key to ICON success, I do not think that sending ICON Pinas branded merch or increasing ICON Pinas Tiktok/Instagram followers is a good use of public funds.

These initiatives could be taken using P-Rep rewards. Giveaways, when including other ICON Dapps, can also be financed by the Dapps or P-Rep themselves. At Stakin we’ve been organizing a few, and we’re more than happy to organize an ICON Pinas special draw on the noloss Dapp.

I would be willing to partially approve the proposal if you can review the budget breakdown.

Celebrity influencers, ICON branded merch ok, Dapps video ok. Would recommend dividing the campaign into 2 phases of 3 months each while the feature for budget adjustments is being developed.

Thanks for taking the time to read my feedback. Let me know if it makes sense.

[IconPilipinas]

Hi Edouard,

The reason our team is asking for a 6 month grant is that we would like a bit of assurance in budget so that we can hire out staff and assign tasks without always feeling pressured by time. Given our track record of being one of the most active P-Rep teams and communities for ICON, we feel that we have proven our commitment to this project.

As mentioned in the proposal outline, much of the budget from this grant will be invested in the community itself:

We believe in money (ICX) velocity, and have learned over the past year that the best way to get someone to care about ICON is to put ICX directly into their hands. We want to recruit as many people as possible to become ICONists.

In addition to the promos you highlighted, worth noting is that everyday our team puts ICX into the hands of our community members and tipping bots (random tipping, small tasks, airdrops, etc.) are running 24/7 in our Telegram Chat. We think this is essential to getting people who might not otherwise care to really invest deeper into ICON and ICX. Ultimately, we want network effects to take on a life of its own to further drive mass adoption.

In terms of merch, TikTok, Instagram, we can agree to disagree as we think it’s important to help ICON grow via those platforms. There is a HUGE sense of pride felt by many of our community members who receive a package with ICON Pinas merch in it, but you would have to see it to believe it…

Please keep in mind, ICON Pinas is a sub P-Rep, not a main P-Rep. We don’t have the same budget as the top teams and honestly don’t believe we’re asking for anything too excessive here.

[SAMS]

Interesting Work. Let’s see how it progresses.