Community Team Vision For 2018
A couple of months back we declared that transparency is what we’re all about. We decided to share everything about the progress we’re making at Kin in all fronts — product plans, technology, even ongoing tasks that keep us busy on a daily basis.
Not only that, but we decided we’ll be giving our community a behind the scenes look at who we are personally and where we came from.
So this post is in the same spirit, laying out what are some of the things our team is working on, our goals for 2018 and some of our considerations. Tomorrow you can expect a post showing our faces, letting you know what we’re all about but today — we focus on the community itself.
Before diving in
Our team consists of 6 community moderators, leading all interaction with our community. You mostly got to know us by reading out posts on Reddit or you may have read our comments on Telegram. However, there’s a lot more to it.
At the beginning of the new year I had to sit down and kinda break down what our goals for this community are, what we aim to achieve as a team and how it all aligns with company objectives. It’s pretty easy to talk about it now, having a clear presentation and all, but trust me when I say — it took a lot of digging in to figure out what’s right for our unique community.
Remembering that Kin is building something special. We want to make KIN the most used crypto token in the world, which will be used for value exchange, empowering individuals to take part in this evolving new economy.
But what does it mean for our community efforts?
Let’s take a step back and understand what defines the community and what they value the most. I joined the party three months ago, with no real grace — period, finding quickly that the crypto community is different than any other community I’ve worked with. Our community members are knowledgeable about crypto, they are (at times) a step or two ahead of us when it comes to market news and they will always ask and say anything that comes to mind. It takes some time to get used to the fact that responses need to be given immediately and we need to know every little bit of it. I quickly learned that the best way to go is to be completely open and upfront with what we’re doing and where we’re going. We also learned that the members themselves have an important role in dictating how Kin will be seen by others, for example, depending on the sentiment of discussions on Reddit.
It all got us to understand that this is something we need to pay attention to and look at as our long term partners. After all, a community is a group of people working together to achieve shared values or interests. We, at Kin believe we will “win together by working together” and to do that we need to:
- Listen to our community
- Build trust
- Encourage participation
- Reward our most active users
Build trust and foster a strong community
Moving forward, we started with defining a mission:
Build a community of Kin advocates.
Understanding that the audience we’re working with may be somewhat different than the general audience Kin Foundation is tuning towards, we figured that the objectives should be somewhat different as well.
Defining the audiences as TDE participants and the entire crypto space, basically, we see the community as a driving force for the entire Ecosystem. Our community members are ones who can spread the word about Kin and increase its usability and they’re the ones who can influence potential partners when deciding whether or not to become part of the ecosystem. So you understand — we see a great deal of importance in them when thinking about the success of the ecosystem.
Going back to the objectives, we feel there are a few:
- Increase the brand awareness and brand value
- Leverage the passion of developers and partners to join and build the ecosystem
- Create a global community of Kin enthusiasts
Some key aspects
We take community efforts very seriously. We look at it as another business unit, one that aligns with all other teams — legal, finance, product and R&D. We defined KPI’s, thinking about our goals for the long and short terms. We share here the ‘Team Vision and Goals for 2018’ deck so you can check it all out. Without going into too many details, we do want to share some of the interesting things we’ve come up with:
Our voice and tone.
- When thinking about how we want to communicate and what we want our community to experience from us, we came up with our values. Based on them, this is how we want to engage with our community:
- We, the community team, want to be assertive but not commanding. We are confident and think we should show it, without patronising.
- We are transparent but in a professional way. We remember there’s a bigger goal than the immediate satisfaction. We share everything we can, up to a point where it might jeopardise things.
- We are formal, but it’s important for us to be kind with our community members. After all, we are the voice of the company, trying to mediate its formality so that everyday users could understand.
- Expert but not arrogant. We are always open for new ideas. We encourage them. Constructiveness is a key element in our community.
- We engage with our community but don’t force you guys to do so. If it’s not working — we’ll constantly figure out new ways to interact with you.
- We are helpful but will not be taken advantage of. Just like Al Capone once said: “don’t mistake my kindness for weakness”…
We aim to achieve our objectives by working on four different directions:
- Generating great content
- Developing strong relations with external thought leaders in the space
- Leveraging and incentivising you guys — our most dedicated ambassadors
- Marketing, though not directly managed by our team.
Our team
In our team, as mentioned, are 6 talented community moderators. Other than being part of the community in our channels, they each have their own field of responsibility. Sure, they make sure that conversations are healthy and productive, but they also bring tons of initiatives of their own. Building an ambassador’s program, working on a power — user meet-up, organising all of our content in one cohesive wiki page and working on getting a budget for a series of educational YouTube videos are just some examples from the top of the head.
In this deck we share with you the nitty gritty details of how we plan to communicate from this point onwards. Some might think we’re crazy laying it all out there, but hey, like I said — we want you involved in everything we’re doing, and it start with us being upfront with what we’re doing.
