Experiential Community Engagement
If you are currently in the world of Web3 there is a good chance Discord has become a large part of your day to day. (It’s bit ironic that the Web3 revolution is hosted on a Web2 platform, but I digress.) The point here is many hours of the day are spent in Discord servers, engaging with friends, strangers and communities. But for me there is something missing. Strong relationships are the foundation for strong communities, yet there are only so many ways to engage with someone digitally, especially in Discord. Discord is a fantastic tool to facilitate community but interactions in the app are limited to chat and voice, I want more. In the real world my strongest relationships weren’t built by texting or talking, they were built through shared experiences. And if community is truly at the core of the Web3 revolution as we need start having shared experiences together. We need stories to tell. We need things to reminisce about.
At Canu DAO, we’re always trying to come up with new and innovative ways to build community, but oddly enough the inspiration for this blog post actually came from a consulting client of mine. The client, a company called TKKR.co, is bringing real world assets (RWA) online via NFTs. As the founder and I were gearing up to launch the community, we had a discussion around community engagement and various ways to keep things fresh and fun within the community. We kept coming up with the same stuff, AMAs, townhalls, so on… I didn’t feel excited about it, but what else was there? And then the client said, “what about poker?” What a great idea! Poker wasn’t directly related to the community but correlated enough with the demographic. This type of experiential engagement is obvious at 30,000 ft, but sometimes we get too far down the rabbit hole to see the obvious. Here are a list of some other ideas to increase “experiential community engagement”.
Here are 3 Experiential Ways to Increase your Community’s Engagement.
1. Gaming — It seems only fitting that this is at the top of the list. Gaming is a juggernaut and will be one of the most exciting areas in crypto moving forward. Whether you are playing poker, trivia night, Minecraft, or Axie; gaming can bring community members together in a fun and experiential way. It simply takes some planning!
2. NFTs — Purchase an NFT with a group of friends. Very few people in Web3 are in just one community. Buying an NFT with a group of friends establishes a “clique” and creates a subcommunity. Cliques often get a bad rap, but it’s human nature to migrate towards like minded people. Purchasing the NFT also gives you access to a new community, where new relationship and experiences can be built.
3. Community Competitions — Keep things spicy! Have weekly competitions, or giveaways. Reward top contributors, in an unplanned way. Send them a bottle of wine? Buy them an NFT from the community? Scheduled events, but also have spontaneous events and talks. Why does this matter? The mystery, the unknown, we as humans are drawn to it, which means engagement. Which means checking your Discord more often, engaging more frequently, and hopefully building some meaningful relationships.
Last week on the Canu Learns podcast we spoke about Community Engagement and ways to think outside the box to build relationships. It made me think about my personal life; the strongest relationships I had all came from experiences. Good experiences and especially bad experiences. Especially, bad experiences. Adversity and struggle bring us closer as humans, my closest friends are the ones I’ve built businesses with, played sports with and shared personal struggles with. All of those have one thing in common, “adversity.” And while adding struggle and adversity to your daily grind isn’t always healthy, sometimes it is needed to elevate you, to break barriers and help you reach your full potential. That is why recently at Canu DAO we’ve launched “Content Battle v1.” A fifteen day battle between 2 groups in the DAO to see who can generate the most meaningful content. Each day is worth a point, first to 8 points win. And while we are in competition, we are also supporting the other team by sharing their content across our networks.
Web3 has lots of struggles ahead as it strives to replace the dominate business models of the past. We need to prioritize relationships and engagement to build stronger communities, ones capable of overcoming the adversity ahead. All it takes a little bit of planning and creativity.
