Project Catalyst is a full success in initiating impactful, community led projects. As projects mature, they establish strong services and formats. However, as the projects and the participating community members are fully focused on the execution, many projects have a lack of time and resources to focus on crucial media & marketing campaigns to increase their outreach and showcase their services to the broader community.
The Catalyst Swarm identified the problem and wants to offer a direct solution.
We want to explore and establish a Catalyst Swarm Media & Marketing (M&M) Lab in collaboration with professional marketing experts which also know well about Project Catalyst and the kind of projects which emerge in our ecosystem.
The main goal is to set up a Media and Marketing lab and to offer direct Marketing & Media services to Catalyst projects. With the M&M Lab we will increase the outreach of several promising projects and will help to improve visibility among the wider Cardano community.
The M&M Lab will offer following solutions:
- Create standardised pitch videos for Catalyst projects (restricted to max 50 projects in fund 8) to share their ideas, vision and challenges
- Use our social media channels (mainly Twitter, YouTube and Discord) as a stage for Catalyst projects
- Create challenge/theme based trailers to feature a group of projects
- Co-create media collaterals with Catalyst projects, Cardano Foundation and IOG ((example: see YouTube-Link)
Future direction of M&M Labs:
Since our capacity via treasury funding is limited, there is the possibility that projects from Catalyst can receive marketing and media services for a fee. This includes the conception and production of media content as well as the creation and development of communication and marketing strategies. As our team are also experts in the founding and development of start-ups, we can even offer support in business development. Our goal is that within the first 3 months after a successful funding at least 5 projects receive professional support from us.
The Swarm M&M Lab is going to create a Media and Marketing framework which is owned by the community and equally accessible to all. The M&M Lab aims to provide a stream of resources to teams that want to market their projects and contribute back to the community by sharing part of their efforts in terms of open source projects, open-source frameworks and accessible knowledge.
M&M Labs are building Marketing and Media tools to support new forms of collaboration and especially communication, which is as essential as the technology. All tech experts need a variety of disciplines to work together with a common goal. M&M Labs helps the non marketers to get a voice and become more visible. M&M labs organises virtual pitch events to bring the development ecosystem together and to empowers the Catalyst projects to get more visibility in the community (contribute back by providing transparency, sharing status quo, knowledge and insights), as well as increasing their reach on multiple channels to people beyond the community in order to grow the entire ecosystem in a competitive environment.
We also aim to attract new Marketing and Media experts to support the M&M Labs. We do this by reaching out via our social media channels and potentially hiring freelancers to extend our workbench and to provide them access to the Catalyst/Cardano ecosystem.
The Outcomes of the Marketing and Media Labs will be circulated in the Catalyst & Cardano Community. Main activities will be documented in the Catalyst Swarm Gitbook.
Main Risk for this proposal might be a clear expectation management. As we start with a small team, at the beginning we won't be able to provide services to all proposers.
Therefore, once fundings is approved, our focus will be on recruiting new team members to rapidly staff up the Catalyst Swarm Marketing & Media Labs.