The Telos x Pomelo Season 3 Report

7 min readSep 26, 2022

Overview

In July of 2022, Telos Culture received $7,450 USD (37,250 TLOS valued at $0.20/TLOS) from Telos Works for a proposal titled Pomelo Community Initiative.

The purpose of these funds were to support an initiative to onboard more Telos based projects into Season 3 of Pomelo and encourage further engagement from the community. At the same time, we believe that this initiative helped contribute to the broader growth of the Antelope codebase and facilitate further collaboration across our communities.

Pomelo is an open-source crowdfunding platform that multiplies contributions from users. Inspired by Gitcoin, contributions are matched from a pool of funds provided by the EOS Network Foundation and other funding bodies in the Antelope space. Those interested in reading the initial funding request can find it here.

This report breaks down the work undertaken, the results of this initiative and what we learned. In a nutshell we found it to be extremely positive. Many projects building on Telos received funds that they would not have otherwise. New community members learned about the benefits of public goods funding and quadratic funding. However, as with any initiative there is always room for improvement.

We started this initiative without much time before Season 3 kicked off, so projects had limited time to get their grant applications submitted. This resulted in less promotion to their respective communities and a lower level of community engagement than we would have hoped to have seen. These are two areas we would seek to improve in the future.

With that said, we still believe that there was a meaningful ROI for the network from this project and we plan to launch a similar initiative for Season 4. If you don’t have time to read our entire report, jump to the end for the TL;DR.

Project Engagement

The first phase of this initiative was outreach to projects and potential contributors that might be interested in submitting a grant. As Pomelo promotes Antelope development, we focused on Telos Native. Here are the key metrics:

39 Projects Contacted
Of those contacted 12 projects created grants
10 grants qualified
We also saw engagement from Telos-related projects that we did not contact directly, for a total of 22 grants related to Telos

In addition to informing projects about Pomelo and providing informational materials to aid in the application process, we also met with a handful of projects to offer advice specific to their grant.

We spoke with several projects after the fact and the feedback was positive. While some saw late approval due to the last minute nature of this initiative, they were still happy to be involved in this season and plan to resubmit their grants for Season 4.

We predict that in Season 4 less effort will be needed onboarding projects and assisting in the grant application process. This is due to the fact that many will be able to reuse their previous application with minor modifications. With that said, we intend to be more proactive in our outreach for Season 4 to give more time to this part of the process.

Community Engagement & Funds Matched

We saw a fair amount of engagement in Telos-related projects, but not as much as we had hoped. This is largely due to the fact that our efforts were focused more on onboarding projects as opposed to encouraging engagement. Here are the key metrics for Telos related grants:

The most popular grant saw 162 contributors
The least popular grants saw 6 contributors
There was a total of 673 contributors across all grants
An average of 31 contributors per grant
$16,465 USD contributed across all Telos related grants
$34,392 USD matched across all Telos related grants
$50,857 USD total raised across all Telos related grants

By “Telos related” we mean projects that have a part of their project on the Telos network or mentioned integrating Telos in their grant application. It’s possible there were more than we are aware of. The entire list is at the end of this report. If your grant was missed, let us know!

It’s also worth noting that it is difficult to measure which donations came from our community versus those already aware of Pomelo. In the future we can look at better ways to track these metrics.

Regardless of whether contributions were the outcome of this initiative or from those already aware of Pomelo, these metrics show that the Pomelo platform is actively investing in projects that have a direct impact on the Telos ecosystem.

The most important KPIs to look at for Season 4 would be an increase in the average contributors per grant and total USD raised across all Telos related grants. We believe that this can be achieved by focusing more efforts on the community engagement aspect, as opposed to project onboarding. Additionally, we can provide projects with marketing materials for their community and help onboard them into broader Pomelo events and media.

We’d like to make a point that in all our marketing efforts for Telos, we aim to be as objective as possible and not influence our audience to donate to any specific grant. Rather, our goal is to increase awareness of the platform and make the community aware of the opportunity to support Telos projects.

Media

We released several key pieces of content to inform projects and community members of Pomelo and encourage them to get involved. Here are the primary pieces of content along with some key metrics:

Medium Article: Telos Projects, Fund Your Public Goods With Pomelo! — Views: 103 | Reads: 34 | Read ratio: 33%
Medium Article: How to Apply for Pomelo Funding as a Telos Project — Views: 68 | Reads: 13 | Read ratio: 19%
Medium Article: How to Turn Your TLOS into Public Goods Funding on Pomelo — Views: 43 | Reads: 13 | Read ratio: 30%
Medium Article: A Telos & Pomelo Grant Roundup! — Views: 34 | Reads: 10 | Read ratio: 29%
YouTube Video: All About Public Goods and Quadratic Funding on Pomelo! — 694 views | 100% Like Ratio (vs dislikes)
YouTube Live Event: Crowdfunding on EOS Feat. Pomelo Grants — 53 views | 100% Like Ratio (vs dislikes)
Twitter Spaces Event: Pomelo Party With Daniel Keyes — 22 Users Joined In
General Social Media Cadence: Telos Culture Twitter During Pomelo Season 3 (July 19 — August 17 2022) — 12.5K impressions | 386 Likes | 147 Retweets

Our goal is to have these KPIs to look at going forward, with the intent on increasing them every funding season. By taking a more proactive approach in season four and aligning our content calendar with other bodies in the ecosystem, we believe we’ll be able to increase the reach of this content further. We would also like to provide projects with more templates for their own social media cadence and encourage them to share all the materials with their own communities.

It’s worth also noting that most of the media we created was not specific to season 3 and can be easily reused in future seasons. This will allow us to continue widening the focus of our media content for future seasons.

Conclusion & Next Steps

In general, we believe that this initiative was worthwhile for the Telos ecosystem for these key reasons:

Many projects got involved in Pomelo that would not have otherwise
Community members that would not have known about Pomelo otherwise also got engaged
A large amount of funding ($50,857 USD) from Season 3 of Pomelo went towards Telos related projects
We built out a body of content that got the community excited about Public Goods and Quadratic Funding
Many projects can reuse their grant applications in future seasons with minor revisions
Feedback so far from community and projects has been positive
Media created and events run had a meaningful reach and most of this content can be reused in future seasons

For a first-time initiative we believe that all of this makes for a positive experience. However, that’s not to say there aren’t things we would do next time around. Here’s what we would do differently to improve our efforts:

Start earlier with more lead-time for projects to submit grants and more time to plan marketing efforts
Focus on increasing community engagement and build out tooling to track these metrics better
Work proactively enough to align our marketing efforts more closely with other bodies in the Telos ecosystem
Offer more templated marketing materials or guidance to projects to easily get their communities involved
Work to onboard Telos related grants into broader promotional channels and events surrounding Pomelo

We have already begun discussions surrounding a similar proposal for Season 4 of Pomelo, with the potential for Telos to become more deeply involved as a matching partner.

We have also spoken with the Pomelo team about the potential for a Telos integration, making it easier for TLOS holders to participate in future rounds. While this won’t be ready for Season 4, it could come in 2023 if the community supports it.

Keep your eyes peeled for more discussions around this and early drafts to be shared soon!

We Want to Hear From You!

Let us know your thoughts on this project by dropping your feedback in the Telos Works Telegram, Telos Culture Telegram or by filling out this Google form.

Thanks to the Telos community for supporting this initiative! We look forward to more exciting projects soon!

All Telos Grants

Anchor
Appics Social Media dApp X Metaverse on EOS
ChallengeDac EOS and Pomelo Content Creation
The EOSIO+ Coalition Chronicle
DefiAnts — Build, Create & Educate
EOS Authority Explorer & Wallet
CETF — Decentralized Exchange Traded Funds
Host Open Block Explorer — Infrastructure
EOSIO Climate Bridge using IoT!
EOSIO Dashboard — network data visualization
EOSIO IBC Tools & Services
Ecology System World (ESW)
Fortis Labs
Hyperion History API — Maintenance and Operation
Metahub — EOS Web Plugin Wallet
Open Block Explorer Configurable for Multi-chain
Social Recovery for EOS, Telos and WAX Communities
Subdeeply
Telos FORCE
Telos Scouts
The TelosTask Freelance Ecosystem (Micro & Macro)
tipit: Social Wallet, NFTs, and Rewards
T-Starter