GiveCrypto Monthly Update — March 2021
Update on the ambassador program, enhanced videos and treasury management v2
Ambassador Program Update
We launched the automated ambassador program at the end of February, making March the first full month of usage. In its current state, the ambassador program is basic, but this is by design. By starting off with a simple, streamlined interface, we’ll have the bandwidth to refine the platform along the way as we see fit.
The web app we developed to support the ambassador program needed a bit of work, so we spent a good portion of March fixing bugs and polishing the app. Although it’s far from perfect, we’re proud to say that we’ve gotten it to a pretty stable state. We expect this to help facilitate the ambassador program’s expansion in the coming months.
The program delegates a lot of responsibility to the ambassadors: they’re tasked with selecting recipients, approving funding requests, and deciding which content gets amplified. Finding high-quality ambassadors will be critical to the program’s success. We spent quite a bit of time this month exploring different ways to recruit ambassadors, and we expect to continue exploring these options for the foreseeable future.Our ultimate aim here is to find scalable and cost-effective ways to acquire trustworthy ambassadors.
So far, this process has taught us a major lesson: recruiting ambassadors without compensation will be more challenging than we anticipated. Naive as it may have been, we believed people would be eager to help those in need in their community. We’re not giving up yet, though. By tinkering with the parameters on our end, we hope our experiments will show that such a model is viable.
The table above shows the tactics we’ve used thus far to recruit ambassadors. On Upwork, we made direct payments to the ambassadors for each recipient they recruited. On the other channels, we paid contractors to generate lists of potential recipients on Twitter and Reddit who we would then contact ourselves.
As the table above demonstrates, compensating ambassadors directly (as we did on Upwork) has been the most effective, both on a cost per recipient and conversion rate basis. The data generated from this experiment has helped us develop clear expectations about what to expect in terms of ambassador performance. Despite Upwork’s utility in helping us understand what to expect from a “good” ambassador, we do not feel that the acquisition costs are scalable. We’d like to explore ways to compensate ambassadors, but we feel that paying ~$15 per recipient is not viable based on our goal of helping millions of people.
As far as other tactics go, at the moment, we’re experimenting with direct email campaigns aimed at organizations in our target countries. We’re also continuing to experiment with various social media channels.
Looking forward, we see interesting possibilities for various types of ambassador compensation. Ambassadors could be paid for performing higher-value services such as running spot checks, recruiting stores to accept payments in crypto, or converting crypto to cash for the recipients. There are many potential roles the ambassadors could fill and we’re excited about exploring those options to align incentives.
Enhanced Videos
As mentioned in January’s update, one of the goals of the ambassador program is to generate content that demonstrates how crypto is being used to help people in need. We expect this content to primarily take the form of photos and videos. While it is possible to convey quite a bit of information in a photo or video, it’s not easy to present all the pertinent details of each recipient and their financial situation.
For this reason, we are exploring ways to enhance the photos and videos with graphical overlays that include more information about how the crypto was used. We’re specifically trying to make these videos as social media friendly as possible. To do this, we want to create highly shareable videos that convey data in a simple manner without using audio. Some important data points would be:
- Recipient’s location
- Amount of money received
- How recipient spent or converted the crypto
- Breakdown of spend
- Recipient’s job
- Recipient’s living situation and family circumstances
While we’ve seen some good examples of videos with graphical overlays in other verticals, we haven’t found any best practices for charities. For this reason, we decided to leverage the creativity of others by hiring a number of video editors to help us generate ideas. They were given a sample video and a deliberately vague project description, hoping they would use their creativity to find good ways to display the information.
After a few rounds of back-and-forth, we condensed the ideas into a tight video with graphical overlays. As you can see, it was a large improvement from the original.:
The process taught us a few things about best practices for graphical overlays:
- All information should be textual or minimalistic graphics (rather than animations or spliced stock footage)
- All information should ride on top of recipient’s original video or photo
- Provide a summary of the key points at the end of the video
We intend to make the overlays as informative as possible while also making the editing process as scalable as possible. We expect to be editing and uploading a lot of these videos, so we want to optimize the process by minimizing the amount of customization each video requires.
Additionally, we want to make sure that the videos are showing positive messages about the recipients. We believe the video above is a good example of that; it shows the fact that the recipient is building a house, rather than showing the initial lack of a house. This will be a somewhat subjective line to walk as we do not want the videos to seem exploitative.
Treasury Management
GiveCrypto has always embodied a crypto-forward philosophy. This is true not just of the work we do, but also in our treasury management, where we have tried to maximize our exposure to crypto’s upside.
Our previous treasury management plan was deliberately simple and can be summarized in two bullet points:
- Hold as much crypto as possible (only enough fiat for 3–4 months of expenses)
- Hold a market cap weighted amount of BTC and ETH
Thanks to the recent asset price increases, this has been a profitable strategy. The past year has also been characterized by a colossal explosion of staking, DeFi, and yield generation options.
It is possible that we could simultaneously maintain our exposure to crypto’s upside while generating passive income to cover operational expenses. But as is the case with investing, we can’t predict the future. We take our role as custodians of our donors’ funds very seriously and are appropriately concerned about the potential downside of such a strategy.
With that in mind, we have decided to dip our toes into this world and will be recommending (pending board approval) a modest allocation of our treasury to ETH2 staking. We are still evaluating other options, but there’s a lot to consider there, including the counter-party risk these options present. For now, we’re content to continue weighing those options as we put these other plans into effect.
Staying Connected
As always, we love to hear from supporters. Please follow along on Twitter and our blog for information on our programs.
