I am proposing the funding of a Creative & Design Working Group for three months ending July 25th 2021. This is a formal proposal, following up from the informal proposal here and seeking to incorporate historical feedback.
What is the core problem(s) you want to solve?
The creative and design process is fragmented, not centralized into a specific function in the Coop
This makes it:
Inefficient, less coordinated
Harder for non-designers to submit briefs in an easy-to-understand and keep-in-touch-with way
Less clear for non-designers what the designers are working on, timelines and competing demands for design resources
More difficult for designers to manage requests and interact with wider DAO
Harder to attract and onboard new designers to the Coop, who currently cannot engage with an understandable department, leader, working tools, rewards structure, etc
Why is this worth addressing today?
As the Coop matures, has more contributors, more products to design for and market, this problem of coordination and execution will become worse. And, executing design at a high level is important - as we know from brands such as Apple, Dyson, etc
This Working Group seeks to act as the starting point of a longer-term ambition and effort to turn the Coop into the DeFi DAO with the highest quality design execution in the market
How will you address it?
Focus and organize the creative and design function
Leader handling communications and engagement with wider DAO, admin, initial onboarding of new talent, etc
Design request submission process and tracking tool:
Message in Design channel to alert designers and submit request here
Track brief here (board managed by CWDG members)
Centralize folders and access points for assets and files
Plan and execute projects originated from within CDWG. Examples:
Brand framework (in motion)
Email templates
Video collateral
Rationalize and execute projects which originate from other areas of the Coop. Examples:
Ads
CGI and MVI launch assets
Biz Dev and Sales assets and decks
Banners and graphics
Other requests from Biz Dev, Sales, GWG, Product
What impact will this project have? Goals & KPIs
General
Improve perception of the Coopâs design execution:
Internal: qualitative feedback signals from community members that our design and marketing assets have âsignificantly stepped upâ. Could be via a poll and/or comments from community members and key stakeholders such as Biz Dev, Sales, GWG, etc. We can take a regular pulse on this
Externally: harder to gauge without a significant project we lack resources for now, but internal feedback signals above at scale should be directionally significant and correlated with external opinions
Specific
If the update website project is greenlit (more info in future post)
Publish updated planning docs and trackers (largely built)
Design Figma files for new website (gating function, to earn greenlight from community and large stakeholders if design execution is highly rated)
Assist in planning resourcing, build, testing and release
Attract 100% more people to the group in the first iteration of CDWG: double head count from three to six
Have clearly understood locations for community members to:
Submit design requests and track them through delivery
Experience: deep marketing and management experience contributing to the community across ads, content, social
Responsibilities: overall communication and management, enabling designers to do more design and less admin/comms. Propose to also have authority to allocate rewards to working group contributors
Experience: experienced designers who have delivered artwork, banners, videos and other assets to the Coop
Responsibilities: overall design strategy and design implementation. Creative leads
Request for funding
Proposed Budget:
CDWG rewards budget: up to $25k/month, which may well not get fully used
CDWG tools budget: up to $2.5k/month
CDWG leader: $6,000/month
Use of Funds:
CDWG rewards budget:
To reward and incentivize contributors
Having this potential budget will help attract submission of really high value projects (e.g. ambitious videos, partnership projects with tokens, etc) and also attract new, external design skills
CDWG tools budget:
To cover design apps and organization tools, such as Adobe Creative Cloud, Figma, Notion, Sketch, InVision, etc
Licenses being paid for by CDWG members at this time
Organization
What will you be doing? Short-term focus
Deliver brand framework to community: @mestigoit is working on this now, with a Figma file to share shortly
Plan and scope updated website project for community feedback: forum post coming soon
Continue acting as supporting function to Biz Dev, Sales, GWG, product launches and individual contributors
I am committed to serving the entire Index Coop with my work.
I am committed to open, rapid communication: I know that clear, constant, public communication lifts up the entire Index Coop community. I am committed to this style of communication.
Shared learnings: I will share my progress, learnings with the entire community. I will ensure that anything I create is accessible beyond my own tenure for future generations of Indexers to access & build on.
Intellectual honesty: I am committed to growth and improvement. I am open to feedback and will use feedback to improve my work for the benefit of the entire Coop community.
I am committed to making Index Coop a welcoming, fun, and engaging community to work in!
Great post @0x_Dev - really well written and I am definitely FOR the creation of a CDWG.
My only question is around how the CDWG interacts with other WG involved with content creation, presently this includes:
Growth Working Group - written articles / pitch decks
Marketing - content translations
CDWG - videos, infographics, banners
Do you see there being parallels processes tracking content build? For example, one for creating the images for an article, one for writing the article and one for translating the article. Or is the aim to build one single source of truth for managing all content in development (i.e. both graphic and written)?
I have a strong preferences for using the same approach and process for tracking content development across each of these areas. Simply put, if I am creating video (1) and writing and article (2) I would like to track the status of both items in the same place - and direct colleagues to a tracker showing all the content in the production.
Hopefully this can be something the CDWG can explore and which will really help us reduce silos long term as the Coop grows. From discussion with @LemonadeAlpha and @marshmellow the Growth WG could really benefit from any insights the creative design team have around the best way to manage a content pipeline (and if we can share a process all the better!).
Interesting question. Our trackers are siloed to CDWG at this time, but we can discuss with GWG and other WGs about centralizing. We might want to have a master tracker for clients of these WGs, but intra-WG trackers for specific things. I can see a couple of use cases off the top my head where CDWG would need their own tracker, but others would not need such a view - it seems to boil down to:
Overall: Great to see this evolve from the original post and take account the feedback there
Question: Rather than ending July 25, mind setting an end-date for June 30 so that it aligns with the other working groups and end of Q2-2021? If this causes some issue, please do push back!
Problem: Indeed this is a problem that exists in the Coop and needs to be solved
Why worth addressing today? Iâd add that Coop members already need design help today for blog posts, launch videos, and more. There is ample evidence of this in the #design channel
Question: Why is doubling head count a priority?
It seems a bit tangential to what you lay out in âhow will you address it?â â I am not sure headcount is a good measure of success.
Budget: For âup-to $25K of rewardsâ, what/who do you expect to reward with these funds?
I see âpartnership projects with tokensâ which seems more growth related + attracting new/external design skills.
it seems like brand framework, plan/scope updated website, continue acting as supporting function is a lot itself and that executing on those 3 alone would be massive wins without hitting on growth or recruiting.
End date: happy to end at July 30/31 - whateverâs easy for you and other persons.
Doubling headcount: having more designers - we only have 2 part time persons - helps us do more design work. Thereâs lots more things we could be doing - videos for social, content that works on other channels (ie instagram), email templates, et cetera. Weâre not currently leveraging YouTube either. I can help onboard new design talent pretty efficiently: an example being onboarding caf and Static121 in Discord this week with a 1-1, few DMs, reviewing their ideas in document - they were introduced by DarkForestCap.
But, the core focus of CDWG is: brand framework, website project planning and design and support wider Coop in their needs - onboarding new talent is easy to do on side.
Rewards: a) Who ? Any designer doing work as part of CDWG. So, codeMathics, Martin, the two new designers mentioned above, and any new folks that come in. $25k rewards should cover this for now, and might not get used - if we have many more designers in the future and this becomes a restriction we can discuss. I donât see budget getting too small being a problem in the 3 months.
b) What ? For portfolios of work submitted at end of each month, based on a mixture of quality, value add (results) and quantity. This can include some planning work, but ve are mostly looking to reward designers for creative output. I should be clear, partnerships with other tokens in MVI is an initiative lead by MVI methodologists where CDWGâs role is support on the creative side. If Lemonade has a similar partnerships idea, Iâd expect us to play a similar support role. Many project ideas like this involve GWG, so weâll need to ensure good communication between WGs.
Great work guys! You know I am deeply committed to seeing this working group get of the ground and moving in a productive direction. I have a strong degree of support for this proposal and I am excited to see what you produce.
I also look forward to you onboarding new designers and bringing more creative energy into the Coop. We are first and foremost a finance focused community - this will always be the center of our mission. However, we are at an important aesthetic turning point with how financial information is visually communicated.
The days of boring financial spreadsheets and hard to understand slide decks are over. Our products are complex and the onus is one us to ensure that our customers understand them. Good graphics and visuals are incredibly important here.
So stoked for more graphics, memes, videos, and designs
Branding is critical for attracting investors, especially institutional investors, as it signals professionalism and quality when done well. This is a key driver for how we differentiate ourselves from the competition. Very excited to see this effort take off and looking forward to working with you all more on these initiatives.
I echo the comments @Metfanmike & @BigSky7 here. I am supportive of creating the group and seeing how we can level up in this area. IMHO - we really do need a slick professional looking website design that appeals to institutional investors!
Reading over the post, I interpret the lead role to be set renumeration and the $25K/month is largely for bounty driven work scopes ?
Just wondering how this ties-in with contributor rewards.
What I am thinking, is the lead has to ensure all the different bits of work across the coop are logged, tracked and delivered as needed by the respective function. This might mean attending a few meetings belonging to other working groups, but allows people join CDWG and receive a continuous workflow from a single source. Perhaps people outside of CWDG can populate Notion as well to identify future work flow. This should create visibility around the volume of work and allow CDWG to execute really efficiently.
Thanks for the support and the comment. Good question.
The CDWG budget is to reward creative contributors for creative efforts in this WG. Ie - making a video, social media images. If creatives in the CDWG want to work on non-creative things in the Coop, such as Treasury, Governance, and the output is not creative or design stuff I think would make sense for those efforts to be reflected by the Treasury Committee and their general contributor rewards.
We will be tracking all creative work done in this Notion board here and in the open and private design channels - onus on me to track it and communicate with creatives about it at end of the month. An example: someone in GWG needs a new ad (Lemonade did this yesterday), he submits a request here and we track the rest in our CDWG tools and trackers. All Coop people welcome to submit requests - details of how to have been shared with key partners such as BD/Sales, Growth, Content. Example share here.
