Truly Optimistic: TrueFi NFT Drop Campaign

Growth Goal: Brand Awareness

Introduction to TrueFi

TrueFi is DeFi’s first credit protocol, offering on-chain capital markets with a broad selection of real-world and crypto-native financial opportunities. Through a path of progressive decentralization, TrueFi is now owned and governed by holders of the TRU token, with underwriting owned by TrueFi DAO or independent portfolio managers. As of November 2022, TrueFi has originated over $1.7 billion in uncollateralized loans and paid out over $35 million to lenders while maintaining an industry-leading record of repayments. Every dollar allocated is transparently reported on-chain.

TrueFi serves — and is made possible by — four major actors, acting in coordination:

1. Lenders use TrueFi to access lucrative, sustainable earning opportunities from a range of diverse portfolios not usually available to retail investors.
2. Borrowers, after careful vetting, depend on TrueFi to quickly access competitively priced capital with no collateral lockup, allowing them to maximize capital efficiency.
3. Portfolio managers use TrueFi to set up on-chain portfolios, bringing the benefits of blockchain to their investing activity — such as 24/7 access to global lenders, greater transparency, and lower operating costs — while enjoying institutional-grade controls over the design and management of their portfolio.
4. TRU Holders effectively own and govern the TrueFi protocol, making both the key decisions and contributions necessary for TrueFi to grow, using open discussion and on-chain voting.

The Challenge: Amplification & Community Growth

TrueFi approached Galxe in July 2022 to execute an NFT Drop in celebration of their launch on Optimism Network — the protocol’s first Layer 2. TrueFi’s main goals for this marketing campaign were maximizing the visibility of the L2 launch with new and existing followers, while also growing its community — especially across Twitter and Discord.

Michael Gasiorek, Head of Marketing at TrueFi, had this to say about the campaign:

“Our Galxe campaign surpassed all expectations and ranks as one of the most impactful marketing projects since TrueFi’s much-hyped launch. To us, Galxe wasn’t just a flexible campaign infrastructure and support — the team went above and beyond with a bespoke product update to support our launch on Optimism, crushed co-marketing, and made us feel like VIPs. We’re looking forward to our next campaign together!”

TrueFi started its marketing campaign with a healthy midsized audience: 37k Twitter followers, 5k Discord users, and steady engagement on social posts.

TrueFi’s final results were indeed incredible: over 120k new email signups, an extra 45k Twitter followers (122% increase), more than 15k new Discord members (200% increase), and a whole lot of eyes on their Optimism launch.

Let’s look behind the scenes at what made this campaign so successful, focusing on three key areas where TrueFi paid special attention and Galxe helped support:

1. Marketing Campaign Design
2. Community Management
3. Co-Marketing

1. Marketing Campaign Design: Partnered Drop, Credential Selection, and Free Minting

As TrueFi’s campaign was built around the launch of the protocol on Optimism, it was a no-brainer to build the campaign in direct partnership with the Optimism Network. TrueFi integrated Optimism directly into the design of their NFT and bounties — effectively guaranteeing TrueFi’s campaign would reach the very sizable Optimism audience, and vice-versa.

In the ultimate design of the campaign, Galxe helped TrueFi choose credentials that utilized Optimism’s reach. Doing this ensured that TrueFi could capture information that would be useful to future campaigns. Specifically, alongside a transparent privacy policy, this meant collecting a user’s social profiles and email, and wallet address. This allowed TrueFi to tailor outreach to prospective lenders, get in direct contact with NFT claimants based on their on-chain activity, and otherwise gain business development value out of this campaign.

Lastly, while visually engaging, TrueFi focused the utility of their NFT to real-world utility: free or discounted TrueFi swag, access to a VIP member community, and reserved access to sold-out TrueFi events. To make participation in the campaign a no-lose scenario, rather than overselling the future of the NFT, TrueFi chose to cover the cost of minting on Optimism. For less than 1 ETH, TrueFi was able to cover over 13,000 mints and maximize campaign engagement.

2. Community Management: Pre-Marketing, 24/7 Coverage & Follow-On Education

TrueFi began its campaign by tapping into an obvious but under-utilized traffic flywheel: NFT hunters. By listing their campaign across a handful of NFT Drop calendars, TrueFi was able to engage thousands of Web3 natives from day one. This preparation, led by TrueFI’s community management team, kicked off broad visibility and traction for the campaign that continued into its very last day.

Running for 45 days and attracting such a large audience, TrueFi was prepared for the influx of new users and questions with 24/7 community coverage on Discord, Telegram, and Twitter. It’s good that the team was prepared, as a campaign of this scale without dedicated and well-trained community management might have made TrueFi a victim of its own success!

Helping users navigate minting questions, credentialing issues, and interfacing directly with both Galxe and Optimism during the 45-day sprint, TrueFi’s 3 full-time community managers unblocked thousands of NFT hunters throughout the drop.

To begin converting new members into dedicated contributors, TrueFi also relied on its community managers and creative partners to start educating new members immediately. With in-community AMAs (complete with TRU prizes), links to written and video materials posted daily, and even an “academy” series with token awards, TrueFi’s NFT claimants have quickly become active and valuable members of the protocol.

3. Co-Marketing: Leveraging Your Partner Network

The final and perhaps most important “rocket fuel” for TrueFi’s record-setting Galxe campaign was perhaps years in the making: TrueFi’s long list of industry, protocol, and marketing partners. With the creation of a free NFT and their delightfully simple campaign designed on Galxe, TrueFi now had a way of both offering and capturing value among the communities of their business contacts.

Though TrueFi enjoyed the support of a strong starting community, TrueFi’s community represented only a fraction of the reach achieved during the campaign by leveraging leading, highly credible partners for co-promotion.

These direct co-marketing partners included exchanges that list TRU, like Binance and Gemini; other L1 and L2 partners like Optimism; global Web3 communities home to project analysis — and of course, Galxe itself heavily promoted TrueFi’s campaign on our socials and website. These relationships resulted in widely circulated Twitter Spaces, Telegram, and Discord AMAs along with newsletter shoutouts, and social reposts. In aggregate, these partnerships are believed to have driven as much as 50% of the campaign’s traffic while strengthening TrueFi’s partner relationships.

At the same time, TrueFi was also able to capture new community members from earned media during the campaign, presenting their campaign as the first thing seen by visitors earned from the likes of CoinDesk, Bankless, or Blockworks.

TrueFi’s Head of Community, Matt Kielczewski, added this about Galxe’s co-marketing efforts: “Our NFT drop allowed us to create value for the communities of TrueFi’s long list of partners. This allowed us to leverage existing business relationships in a new and powerful way, and ultimately amplify our message in a way that would not have been possible without Galxe.”

Solution

Using our growth hacking decentralized network, Galxe helped TrueFi build their Truly Optimistic: TrueFi NFT Drop Campaign — with an expertly designed list of simple but effective credentials. Not only that but support for minting on Optimism, and a free mint pre-funded by the TrueFi team were also tools used to make this campaign a success.

TrueFi utilized Galxe’s Discord and Twitter Credentials to validate the quality of their campaign respondents, and leveraged Galxe’s Retweet Credential to boost the visibility of both the Optimism news and the campaign itself.

TrueFi enjoyed the support of Galxe on both infrastructure and co-marketing with several official Galxe Tweets, two live Galxe AMAs (on Telegram and Discord), value homepage visibility, and account verification for the TrueFi manager account.

With Galxe’s Credential Infrastructure, the TrueFi campaign quickly climbed towards 21k retweets and 15k likes, resulting in over 120k respondents and 13,133 qualifying mints. TrueFi’s credential design, along with the data collected and verified by Galxe, has helped the project build a huge new audience, with each respondent not only connected to their social presence but also their Ethereum wallet. At the end of the day, Galxe Credentials allowed TrueFi to understand who its audience was and use that information to grow as a project.

This is the power of Galxe Credentials. This is the type of engagement and growth a Project can achieve when they use our Credential Infrastructure.

Results

With Galxe’s help and credential instruction, this growth campaign saw a massive surge in engagement. TrueFi’s Twitter grew from 37k to 80k, while their Discord amassed 17k new users by September 10th, 2022. Not only that but, by the end of the campaign, more than 13k NFTs were minted, and TrueFi achieved a secondary market volume of 25 ETH within the first month!

Ready To Run Your Own Campaign?

Are you a brand, protocol, or builder looking to start playing around with Web3 campaigns? Do you want to increase your user base and reward loyal community members? Our BD Team is ready to get you started! Contact us here: business@galxe.com

About Galxe (previously Project Galaxy)

Galxe is building a protocol that powers on-chain credentials with plug-and-play NFT modules. The permission-less infrastructure allows everyone to create, distribute, and gamify NFTs with customized on-chain data. Developers can build their loyalty programs, and individuals can issue and claim the NFTs backed by their on-chain achievements.

With Galxe, NFTs become more than just collectibles, but also forms of identification, empowering developers and community members to build more engaging communities together.

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