Consider These Five DAO Marketing Strategies When Launching Your DAO

December 28, 2021

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DAO

Decentralized autonomous organizations, or DAOs, are people united by a purpose and governed by pre-defined rules enforced on a blockchain via smart contracts and based on a shared vision for the future. Unlike traditional communities, DAOs seek to solve the primary aim of transforming interest-based communities into successful organizations. 

If you're new to the world of web 3 and don't know how DAOs vary from traditional organizations, we will explain it in the most basic terms. In a DAO, token holders have equal ownership, and the community is governed and regulated through smart contracts.  Because everyone can see what a DAO is doing and how much money it is raising, it offers greater transparency than traditional organizations. This significantly limits the possibility of fraud and censorship.

Here’s a tweet that beautifully summarizes DAOs:

Why build your own DAO?

DAOs have been around since 2016, but they are getting more popular with the arrival of web 3.0.  In the recent few months, several new DAOs have emerged, attracting significant funding and a passionate community. They're everywhere, and they're doing crazy stuff like attempting to buy the US Constitution or an NBA team. According to DeepDAO, there are already more than 187 DAOs managing over $11 billion in assets. You have an excellent chance to build your own community and grow that into a successful DAO.

We've seen from the examples above that DAOs can be much more than simply a Discord server with a native token. Put another way, they’re groups of people who work together to accomplish a common goal while earning from its success.

Now that you know why you should build your own DAO, let's have a look at how you may go about creating one.

How to build your own DAO?

DAOs are community-owned businesses, and thus in order to create your own DAO, you must first create a community of like-minded individuals that share a common interest. However, if you have already built a thriving community and want to create a DAO for it, you have two options:

The first method is creating smart contracts and deploying them on programmable blockchains such as Ethereum, Solana, or Cardano. A blockchain developer or someone in your community who knows about blockchain development is required to do this.

The second way is an easy way. You can use DApps such as Aragon and DAOstack that allow you to develop and launch your DAO without getting bogged down in the technicalities of the blockchain. These DApps assist you in getting your DAO up and running by providing services such as members management, treasury tools, and governance infrastructure.

More tools that you can use to build a DAO

For management

Gnosis Safe - A multi-sig wallet that is widely used to handle community treasury.

CollabLand - Bots that offer token-gated access and tips in community channels.

Parcel - Treasury management to track and send funds effortlessly.

Tally - A governance platform to track on-chain vote history across various protocols.

Sybil - for Delegating on-chain governance and keeping track of it.

RabbitHole - A platform for rewarding tokens in exchange for completing on-chain work.

For communications

Boardroom - A governance portal for tokenholders to enable critical decision-making.

Snapshot - An off-chain voting platform for simple token-based management.

For building and engaging with the community

Discord & Telegram: Platforms preferred by crypto and blockchain enthusiasts for building communities

Coordinape - Coordination game to determine which contributors(s) deserve token rewards.

SourceCred - Instance to track community participation and reward active members.

Marketing strategies for launching your DAO

Launching a DAO isn't rocket science, but if you want to invite people and get some attention, you'll need to execute specific tasks correctly, including the marketing side of your DAO. This section will identify the most crucial marketing aspects you should not overlook when starting your DAO.

1. Clearly define your mission

Defining a mission is the first and probably, most crucial step while creating a DAO. You’re giving DAO members a clear north star to aim for by ensuring this. The mission of a DAO can be pretty much anything. For example, Uniswap is a DEX whose mission is to construct an open protocol for transferring value. Friends with Benefits is a community of creators who want to build the perfect social club. Defining your objective is merely the first step toward constructing a DAO. But once you've nailed that down, you can focus on people who believe in this mission, which leads us to build a community.

2. Build a community

The second and perhaps most challenging step in creating a DAO is to build a community. Before you begin your community’s outreach, you should decide whether your DAO shall be large or small, exclusive or open. You can use tools like Discord and Telegram to get these like-minded people together in the same space to start conversations and build a DAO around it. Once found, a DAO must promote cooperation among its members. Of course, healthy debate is the key to information exchange, which unlocks efficient voting habits, treasury management, and broader collaboration. No DAO wishes to be known as the Quiet Place.


Read more on the topic and check out our Discord guide on building an engaging community for your blockchain or NFT project.

3. Provide ownership and reward to community members

You must determine how participants in your DAO will be rewarded for their contributions. An alternate viewpoint would be that tokens have secondary market value, which increases as the DAO becomes more popular. If your DAO grows in popularity, it will attract the interest of more participants who wish to profit from the DAO's creative efforts, right to vote on the treasury, and other benefits.

As a result, your DAO with aligned incentives for contributors can have the potential to outperform other DAOs in the long run. The more members who can be paid for their work/contribution, the higher the value of your DAO will be.

4. Encourage high voting participation

The value of a DAO is driven not only by the member activity but also by active involvement in voting, which allows the organization to adapt and develop continuously. The fact that members have voting rights does not guarantee to vote. By looking at the percentage of people who voted on each proposal, you can understand how involved members are in the decision-making process. This metric is more meaningful if the DAO's size is small. 

5. Host airdrops & giveaways

Airdrops and giveaways are excellent strategies to generate further interest in your DAO. They can assist you in increasing community awareness, increasing participation, and growing your social media presence. Furthermore, airdrops can let you create a free distribution of your DAO's token. They can also contribute to the initial value by allowing users to exchange their tokens.

Read more on the topic and find out Everything you Need to Know Before Launching an Airdrop Campaign for your Blockchain Token or NFT.

We are here to help you

DAOs are opening up the era in crypto history by providing a novel mechanism for individuals to coordinate over the internet and have joint ownership. As interest in the field is growing, DAOs have begun to expand and push the limits of what is possible. Today, there are DAOs for investment, creating new products, networking, and much more. If you want to start a DAO with a genuine initiative that will alter the world. We are here to assist you in putting your ideas in front of the world.

Read more:

See Our DAO Marketing Guides

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