Grant Proposal: The Graph Turkey

Grant ID: 3bmnzb0

Summary:

Swag sets are very important to increase community engagement and interaction. In this period when the markets are stagnant, I plan to distribute swag sets to our community by organizing giveaways on Twitter & Telegram. I have been the community manager of TheGraph Turkey for 2.5 years now and I would like to distribute gifts to our community. Thus, we will increase our interaction and growth rate.

I have read and agree to the privacy policy:
true

If available, please enter a link to your project below:
https://twitter.com/GraphProtocolTR

Are you applying as a team or individual?:
Individual

What type of grant are you pursuing?:
Long-term (continuous)

Please select the category your project best fits into:
Regional Community

Please select who you think will benefit from your project?:
Other

How much funding are you looking for? (USD):
6000

Have you received funding from somewhere else?:
Yes

If yes, please describe where you’ve received funding from and how much you have, or will, receive:
Again, I have a $3000 grant that I received from Graph Protocol’s grant rounds. With this grant covering about 6 months, I managed to grow our community by 70% on average every month. (Without having a Swag set prepared and distributed)

What’s your vision for how your project will impact The Graph and/or web3?:
POAP & Swag sets attract a lot of attention in the web3 ecosystem. We will giveaways the attention of different users in this ecosystem with regular monthly draws, which I expect will have high participation. Thus, we will reach many more people naturally and continue to grow our community rapidly.

What can you share about any past work that is relevant to this grant?:
I organized many swag set giveaways with the community management I carried out in different projects. We send swag sets to 5 different people every month from our giveaways. I will organize raffles in the same way as the grant I will receive from here. Each giveaways receives around 20-30k organic interactions and contributes ~50% to growth.

Can you share any information about current/past web3 experience?:
I have been dealing with e-commerce & marketing for ten years. I did my master’s education on Interactive Marketing (3,94). I published my master’s thesis on blockchain and IoT. As I have been dealing with e-commerce and community management for many years, I know well to inform and persuade people. Turkey is a key point for Europe and Asia. And Turkey is Europe’s first and the world’s fourth largest country in the field of blockchain and cryptocurrency.

I have been making a living over the internet for about ten years. And also I am an investor. I have been dealing and investing in blockchain and cryptocurrencies for seven years. I have been working on blockchain projects for three years. I took part in dozens of projects such as The Graph Protocol, Avalanche, Mina Protocol, Covalent, Agoric, Connext, Portal Finance etc. I created and managed the community in an important society like Turkey.

More details & presentation: https://onursarayli.com

Why are you interested in contributing to The Graph and/or web3?:
The Graph Protocol has been intriguing since the first day. I am very excited to be a part of TheGraph community, the future Google, for many years. We are proud to be among those who design the future. I want to add something else to my life to tell our grandchildren.




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Hi! I took a look at your proposal and website and I got some questions!

  • You talk about active participation and growing your community 70%, etc. but it isn’t clear how big and active that community actually is. Do you have links to that community or examples of meetups? How many people actively participate, what do they discuss, etc?

  • To build a community swag can help, but there’s more to a community than giving away items. It seems to me like you haven’t given any examples and thought to how that community might develop, but it might just be missing from your proposal, is there a possibility you can explain more broadly how you want to grow the community beyond swag?

  • I actually believe that regular giveaways could foster the wrong kind of participation. Where people only participate because they want free stuff, and not because they are interested in discussing the project. How do you plan on ensuring that engagement is “real” and people actually participate beyond vying for free things?

2 Likes

Hello! Many thanks for your excellent feedback and comments. I will try to answer your questions with great care.

  • Graph Turkey community is a regional community that already exists and has been active for 2.5 years. I’m not going to recreate it. I’m trying to make our existing community even more active and bigger. I’ve been managing Graph Turkey communities since the first day I founded it and I want to bring it to a better place with the GraphAdvocates family that I am a part of. Our Telegram and Twitter platforms feature current news, announcements, community discussions and conversations about the project. We have ~600 followers on our Twitter profile and ~900 people in our Telegram group. I stated that with the grant I received between June and September last year, I had grown our communities by an average of 70% during that period. This has only been achieved through collaborations and more intense work. With the grant I am currently applying for, I plan to regularly distribute the swag sets that I will prepare to our community every month. You can check out our communities here:
  • Graph Turkey is a community that continues to grow and includes regular people. I do not intend to create it by distributing swag sets as gifts. Gifts such as swag sets, POAPs make community members much more loyal. At the same time, you reach more people organically with the posts made by the award winners. I have been dealing with community management for about seven years. I have been involved in many projects and have organized and distributed swag sets to communities as gifts. You can see such draws as “nitro”. It helps to accelerate your growth by ~doubling your already existing growth rate. Thanks to the gifts distributed, community members become more active and contribute to increasing your awareness thanks to their natural sharing. So in summary; With the swag set draws, I aim to grow our existing community in a much more effective and organic way. I will be happy to share the interaction and feedback we will receive during this process with you and our team.

  • I totally agree with what you’re saying. However, since I have been dealing with these organizations for years, I can now say that I have experience. There are dozens of effective ways to eliminate “Airdrop & Giveaways Hunters”. First of all, every Twitter raffle participant must be in our Telegram group to eliminate multi accounts. Thus, since bot accounts do not usually have phones, we will eliminate the majority of them. Other than that, I review each winning community member one by one before making announcements. If only accounts created for airdrop/giveaways won this event, I select the winners list again in the background. For this, I use a giveaways site where I have a pro account. So I repeat the process until I find people who are active in our community and are genuine Graph Protocol followers. It may sound difficult, but it is a fairly simple process. I announce the winners on all our platforms and ensure that the prizes reach them. Thus, all the rewards are distributed to the “real” members of our community. In the long run, we will have hundreds of swag set owner community members.

I hope I was able to answer your questions. If you have any other questions, please don’t hesitate to ask. I can’t wait to answer them.

I wish you a healthy day, best regards!

3 Likes

Hey Onur,
first, thanks for your reply. In order to go ahead we need a cost breakdown and further info that I report below:

  • Did you already select who will produce your swag-set?
  • How much are they going to charge per unit?
  • What is included in one swag-set? (e.g. t-shirt, hat, socks, etc.)
  • What will be the total cost per unit to produce and ship a swag-set?
  • How many swag-sets are you going to distribute?
  • Exactly, how the swag-sets will be awarded to people?

Thanks so much for providing answers to these questions.

2 Likes

Hello Paolo, first of all many thanks for your kind reply. Let me try to answer the questions you asked.

- Yes, the manufacturers of the products included in the swag set are known. I will have it produced in my own country, in Turkey. I will work with the same manufacturers again, as I have had these products produced before in different projects I have been involved in.
- I can list the costs per unit as follows. The thing to note here is that swag set manufacturers have minimum quantity limitations. Prices are very reasonable for orders of thousands. As the number of ordered pieces decreases, the prices offered by the factories to us increase. Ordering in large quantities requires very high costs. Considering all these factors, I will order ~100 units of each product.

  • T-Shirt: 18$ (100*18=1800$)
  • Mug: 9.5$ (100*9.5=950$)
  • Hat: 11$ (100*11= 1100$)
  • Magic Pen: 4.5$ (100*4.5=450$)
  • Web Cam Cover: 2$ (100*2=200$)
  • Stickers: 500pcs 25$
  • Bookmarks: 500 pcs 25$
  • Socks: 9$ (150*9=1350$)
  • Boxes: 1$ (100*1=100$)

TOTAL= 6000USD

- In a swag set; There will be T-shirts, Mugs, Hats, Magic Pens, Web Cam Covers, Stickers, Bookmarks and socks. I will also have cargo boxes prepared to accommodate them.
- Each set will contain one of each product. The cost of one set per unit (including my shipping, fuel and transportation costs) will be ~70USD (65+5). Shipping costs are quite high. However, since my own company and UPS Cargo have an agreement, my average shipping cost is around 5 USD.
- Routinely, swag sets will be given to 10 different people each month (including Telegram & Twitter). In addition, I am thinking of increasing our awareness even more by sending gift swag sets to the influencers I contact. This means that I will consume the sets I created with this budget in approximately 6 months.
- I will organize giveaways on Twitter every month. I will announce the announcements of this event both on Graph Turkey Telegram & Twitter channels and in different airdrop/giveaways Turkey groups. The conditions for participating in the draw will be “RT the announcement tweet, like and tag 3 friends”. In addition, it is a must for the winners to be in our Telegram group. Thus, all our social media channels will grow equally. I shared my methods of getting rid of fake users and airdrop hunters above. So our community members who truly support the Graph Protocol will benefit from these swag kits.

I have carefully tried to answer your questions. I hope my answers were appropriate. If you have any other question, please do not hesitate to ask.

Best Regards

2 Likes

Thanks so much @onur-TheGraphTurkey for your detailed answer, it is very much appreciated.
We are going to provide you a feedback shortly. Thanks for now.
In the meantime, if anyone wants to post questions, feel free to ask.

2 Likes

Unfortunately, this grant proposal did not generate the level of support in the community to move it to the next phase of the grant application process.

Thank you for submitting this proposal and you are encouraged to stay engaged in the Graph community. You are also welcome to submit new grant applications in the future with proposals that may generate stronger community support.

1 Like