Web3 community building tech stack

Author: Katerina, Co-Lead, TogetherCrew

As a community manager your tasked with serving and nurturing the community. For that you need the right tools. But don’t worry, you don’t need everything from the gecko.

Phase 1: Seeding your community

Tools you need: internal chat tool + social media tool

On day 1 what you need most is chat tool for members to talk with each other (internal private communication) and a tool to talk with not-yet-members (external communication). In web3, most use Twitter + Discord or Twitter + Telegram. But there is change in the air thanks to Decentralized Social getting more mature. Lens and Farcaster are great alternatives for Twitter.

Examples

• ImpactDAO has a social media channel to showcase their work, and a discord to organize members.

Phase 2: Nurturing your community

Tools you should add: Forum, newsletter, event registration, analytics, token-gated

In Phase 2 you have a strong base of community members. It might not always be the same people who show up, but the numbers remain stable. It’s time to expand your offering and impact. In that phase, communities add tools to help them document processes and create value for others. For documenting processes, most web3 communities still default to Notion. A web3 native solution is CharmVerse.

It’s also at this stage that web3 communities realize that Discord or Telegram aren’t great if you want to have a slower conversation on important topics. Discord and especially Telegram, are great for rapid fire convos. But for slowly developing, more async and reflective style of conversation forums are better. Most commonly used forum tool is Discourse.

The other set of tools, web3 communities add at this stage are service-offering tools. This could be anything related to scheduling and hosting events, or distributing (token-gated) content to members. These tools are different to social media tools as the community collects information about who registered to an event or subscribed to a newsletter. This helps getting a better idea of who is interested in your community, fine-tune your offering, and increase your impact.

Most commonly this means a combination of the following:

• Event scheduling and registration: lu.ma for events (web2 tool) or events.xyz for a web3 alternative integrated with Farcaster. For IRL events, more and more web3 communities are turning to unlock protocol.
• Online event hosting: youtube, unlonely, Twitter spaces
• Newsletter: paragraph.xyz, mirror, medium, substack, lu.ma

A relatively new tool is Hypersub created by with fabric. While the branding is specifically targeting creators, communities should check it out for it’s reward feature. Subscribers get a referral link they can share with their network. But far more interesting is that subscribers get rewarded for subscribing and referring others.

This is also the stage where you have to seriously consider how you discover new members and their needs, and nurture relationships. This means two things: A tool that gives you quick insights into what is happening, and a way to automate actions such as blocking posts that mention unwanted keywords. With TogetherCrew you can analyze the impact of your strategies on the growth and activity within your community.

To improve your moderation game, start with blocking certain keywords or pictures (you can’t imagine how often porn is shared in communities), and setting up a way to verify members through collab.land, using TogetherCrew schedule your announcement, and using our member segmentation feature to regularly reward active members.

This is also the stage when communities experiment with different community engagement solutions. Don’t forget that engagement is a very broad term. You are getting no-where without sitting down and asking yourself What form of engagement will matter for my community? This could be

• event attendance
• blog posts
• course completion rate
• mints
• new projects created
• money raised
• grants submitted
• getting new members
• renewed subscriptions

Examples

• GMFarcaster is Farcaster-native media company. They post their content on a channel, users can mint the episodes on Zora while subscribers get them airdropped into their wallets. Finally, they also have a private chat group for regular listeners.
• MetaGame has a bit more complicated set-up: They have a social media channel to showcase their work and announce events, a discord channel for their core contributors, and a Telegram group for events that are held during a season. They are also using lu.ma for event registrations, and continue to use substack for their newsletter.

Phase 3: Sustaining your community

In Phase 3, there aren’t that many more tools you’ll add. This phase is more about fine-tuning, looking for specific features, or asking your devs to build exactly what you need. This is what web3 communities commonly add:

• Better customer support with the help of QA bot (keep an eye on us, we’ve got something in the making), more moderators, updated documentation
• Better usage metrics: This could be tracking referral links, or what your users mint (onchain CRM tool like Bello)

Examples:

Justin Vogel from Safary shared the following setup with me. It’s a great combination of async and text based communication (e.g., Telegram) mixed with live meetings (e.g., Gather town)

RnDAO uses the traditional combination of Twitter and Discord. Members can subscribe to events via lu.ma, and for those who missed it they can watch the recordings on Youtube. Lu.ma is also used as their newsletter tool. Voting happens Tally.xyz, and processes are documented on Notion. Brand assets are shared via Figma.

Special use case

Web3 communities are diverse, ranging from social DAOs to DeFi protocols to memecoins that flourish and die within a week. Here are some special tool tips:

DAOs: If your web3 community is a DAO, you need to add governance tools in Phase 2. Look for on-chain governance tools like Snapshot, Tally, or Agora. In Phase 3, consider adding Hats Protocol to make it easier to share access to tools and role-based opportunities.

Meme-based community: You need a way to share your brand assets (e.g., Figma) and a person who scans the ecosystem for scams involving your name. Of course everyone needs to DYOR, but as community managers you are also responsible to warn people about scams.

To keep receiving tips and tricks on community management, follow us on Twitter and our Medium page. If you want to discuss any specific challenges you are facing, feel free to join our Telegram group for community builders.