As an NFT Project founder, your members and holders are your lifeline.

Without individuals who engage with, and even more than that believe in your product, your brand is just a static web page. With that in mind, it’s clear that successful communal relations are key to a strong business.

This module is all about member success. Here at TokenTag, we use the flywheel framework as the foundation of our community growth strategy. This model allows us to create a virtuous cycle of member retention and outreach, where members are truly advocates for the brand.

🌐 Curious about how to attain super-fans of your own brand? Read on

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❤️ Fostering Community Relationships for Your NFT Project

Since the advent of paid partnerships and advertising practices aimed at deep-rooted connection, direct to consumer brands have leveraged their Superfans to create a network of individuals dedicated to the success of the brand.

Nike has Michael Jordan and LeBron James, capturing the hearts of basketball fans and young athletes. Adidas has Pharrel and (had) Kanye West, capturing the hearts of hip/hop listeners and the fashion industry alike. Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) has Eminem, Shaquille O’Neal, Mark Cuban, Steph Curry, Serena Williams, and Snoop Dogg — capturing the hearts of people from all walks of life.

All of these examples paint an important picture: digital assets play an increasingly large part in the way individuals express themselves. Most, if not all, owners of Bored Apes display them as profile pictures on one medium or the other to signify membership into this ‘elite’ group of ‘art connoisseurs’.

That being said, the ways in which online communities attract, engage, and delight their members becomes vital to long-term success. Increasingly more so in the digital era, creating a loyal group of fans is paramount to a brand’s ability to win over new members and create deep-rooted feelings of trust and integrity.

Give Members and Holders a Voice

As a prospective member of a new community, or consumer of a new good/service, I want to know that someone I know and trust would put their name and reputation on the line for this brand — “I’ve been apart of this community for months and the whole team is dedicated to making the best experience possible for each and every one of us” might be exactly what I want to hear. The natural question becomes, how do you make this happen.

In order to cultivate a strong sense of community and belonging it’s important for each person who expresses their voice to be listened to and acknowledged. Humans naturally want to converse and express their feelings with others. Being ignored or silenced can be one of the most humiliating and suppress one’s desire to speak up the next time something comes to mind.

As a leader it’s critical to make sure that members can speak up without fear of “sounding silent” or having their voice over-shadowed. This can be accomplished in a number of ways, but I will focus on two that largely encompass existing mechanisms for “finding voice” within communities.

Web3 Communities Need a Forum for Discussion

The first, and seemingly most obvious, way to build a community in which everyone’s voice can be heard is to constantly promote an environment where all ideas are welcomed and taken seriously with a critical lens.

This in practice looks like creating an environment where I as a member can voice my feelings and others can continue that conversation with feelings of their own, comments, and clarifying questions. At its core: creating a forum where individuals can share ideas and critically analyze propositions.

Most often these forums or discussions happen on Reddit, Twitter, Discord, or even Telegram — platforms designed specifically for being heard, sharing ideas, and critical analysis. We’ve implemented TokenTag as a new forum to unify conversations within the Web3 niche from all of these platforms.

In addition to one-off discussions on these forums, users should feel that they always have a voice and are a part of ongoing discussion within the community.

To fully harness the power of digital communities that transcend any sort of geographical, political, or ideological barriers, each individual must be given a shares ideas and collaborate with others. By doing so, the community benefits from a wide range of diverse and unique perspectives that can be pivotal in the way “the community ethos” manifests itself.

Action Items:

Open Project Communication Channels:

On traditional engagement channels like Discord and Twitter it can be hard to see and acknowledge every comment, like, or tweet that’s made pertaining to the community. These idea sharing spaces can be clouded with comments and discussion irrelevant to community initiatives, and more centered around every day happenings (this is OK!, and even highly encouraged). This means that members are connecting and sharing with each other building genuine relationships, which at all costs should be encouraged and cultivated.

However, this means that community leaders must work extra hard to ensure that people looking to participate have outlets to convey their ideas and share their thoughts without being drowned out by other noise.

In practice, community managers should constantly be keeping tabs on participants and those sharing ideas. They should then make it a priority to get these idea sharers into smaller, more private and goal-specific forums where they can collaborate and build deeper relationships.

This might take the shape of a Twitter DM group that’s made up of members already actively participating with each other. By giving them their own stage for discussion, the wider general forum is opened up to new members who now have a place to be involved. An active community manager will monitor this “main stage” for participants who are sharing ideas and working to build the project, and add them to the more private groups for refined and topic specific conversations. The cycle will continue.

Time Blocking/Scheduling Communication:

While it may seem less genuine, if you find yourself struggling to build relationships with community members, it may be helpful to schedule in 10–20 minutes per day to engage on Discord, Twitter, and/or any other chats you have. While you might have a community manager who is in charge of engaging on a specific site, engaging with members is the most powerful thing you can do to improve sentiment about your community, and is worth dedicating time to every day. Everyone, from founders to community managers, should be on the front lines connecting with members, so users know that you are team leaders, not corporate employees.

In the end, a thoughtful approach to community building as well as consistency will take you far in Web3

This post is part of a series on Cultivating Your Community of Members. Follow the rest of the series below:

Part 2: Attracting Members

Part 3: Educating Members

Part 4: Engaging & Delighting Members

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