Community Management in Web3: Workarounds and Tooling to Overcome Pain Points
In the last article — we articulated that community management, especially for community-led businesses in both Web3 and Web2, is akin to product management in hard-mode. Community management entails building something that is intrinsic to core value for your business, while dealing with the temperaments of humans on a real-time basis. “It’s a really hard job, and most people overlook that.” We cover the pain points of all the community managers we spoke to in-depth here.
In this article, we lay out the tools and solutions that Web3 community managers use today to overcome these pain points to paint a picture of the current state. With this departure point in mind, we will then visualize what an ideal state of community management tooling can look like.
Tools that extend functionality of chat platforms
The vast majority of community managers we spoke to were highly familiar with these brand of solutions (e.g. Discord bots), deploying them within their chat platforms to automate and reduce the need for human intervention on simple tasks. The main selling point of using these chat platform tools is abundance, configurability, and native-ness.
For instance, on Discord, there are now 10K+ bots and apps, offering a range of customizations for servers, and are directly built on top of Discord through their open API — allowing for a seamless experience. There are bots on Discord built for community moderation, analytics, ticketing, and anything you might think of. Tooling also exists for other platforms like Telegram or Twitter (though Discord is the most rich).
In Web3, the top use cases for chat platform tooling includes automated moderation, verification, role management, analytics, and gas / token price feeds. Some popular examples include:
- MEE6: Universally one of the most popular Discord bots; MEE6 functionality includes automated moderation (highlight and take action on bad behavior e.g. spams, insults) and reaction-based roles
- Collab.land: Enables token-gating through user connecting their wallet
- Guild: Enables token-based role management
- Statbot: Provides in-depth member and channel activity data
- Gas/Ethereum Tracker: Provides live-feed of gas / on-chain asset data
However, there are certain drawbacks with using bots that our community manager interviewees mentioned, two of which we highlight. First is fragmentation: having to manage diverse tooling can be inefficient. Second, with the abundance and need to use disparate tools, community managers also highlight that they could present potential security risks — as communities could get hacked through using these external bots. MEE6, for example, was recently compromised causing spam / phishing messages to circulate across communities.
Web3-specific point solutions for community management and engagement
The rich, contextual user data that a simple wallet address contains in a permissionless, open world, further amplified by tokenization — are already proving valuable to help community managers in Web3 understand, engage, and coordinate users in an unprecedented way. Though still nascent, there is already a rich canvas of community management and engagement tools that are specifically designed for Web3 communities.
The most commonly used Web3 point solutions we’ll dive into below — highlighting their current state and potential future direction — are in (1) identity & credentials, (2) airdrops & contributor rewards, and (3) governance.
Identity & credentials
The first form of Web3 solutions is in identity and credentials. These go beyond chat-based token gating or role management — covering more feature-rich identity use cases that are fungible across communications platforms. These solutions help community managers solve the problem: “How might we ensure that the right people are in our community, and furthermore empower community members through embedded reputation & ownership?”
As of now, most community deploy identity & credential solutions in onboarding. Through these solutions — communities are able to provide exclusive access to token holders (e.g. NFTs or a certain quantity of ERC-20 tokens). The use case most communities that have token gating use it for is to create some sort of financial exclusivity for the community itself, driving value through the financialization of tokens itself (e.g. BAYC, PROOF). However, the more interesting use cases go beyond financial exclusivity, for example:
- POP by Crypto Packaged Goods, for example, opens a scholarship program where those like students who cannot afford to buy the NFTs itself can earn access through an application process
- Token-gating can also prevent spam, with certain communities implementing a requirement to have a small amount of ETH in the wallet to be able to access the community. “Turns out this small requirement ended up almost eliminating all bots” — a community manager mentioned.
While onboarding & access are the primary use cases of identity solutions today, understanding identity can be the means in which projects empower users to build reputation through their actions — which can be a powerful incentive to drive constructive behavior through embedded ownership.
- POAPs (or Proof of Attendance Protocols) are a unique ERC-721 token (NFT) that enables participants of events to hold a digital, verifiable memento of their attendance. Community managers can use POAPs as a verification mechanism for rewards or for providing additional access (e.g. for further events, or even to identify promoters to include in product discussions).
- Project Galaxy, for instance, is building a credentialing platform that enable users to earn credentials in their Galaxy ID for both on-chain and off-chain actions. Web3 projects and communities can leverage these credentials through an API to find target audiences, reward community contributors, customize governance, or even go as far as to calculate things like credit scores.
More interesting use cases will no-doubt emerge out of this space, with the birth of innovations on the blockchain like non-transferrable Soul-Bound Tokens that amplify credentialing and identity solutions like Proof of Humanity that tie wallets to the underlying human behind it.
These solutions acknowledge something very real: communities are not made for pure scale; there’s a level of intent that needs to come with designing “community-member fit”.
Furthermore, identity is the bedrock for communities to deploy more sophisticated reward and ownership mechanisms which we’ll cover next.
Airdrops & contributor rewards
The second form of common Web3 solutions employed by community managers today we’ll highlight are airdrops & contributor rewards. Tokenization enables a digitally-native way for community managers to coordinate people through seamlessly distributing value on a universal platform (e.g. Ethereum). This is unprecedented in a Web2 world — where many communities avoided extrinsic rewards due to the difficulties of financialization (e.g. global invoicing and regulations).
Through airdrop and contributor reward tools like MyWish, Disperse, PayMagic, and Coordinape — community managers are able to:
- Retroactively airdrop users who are strong potential candidates for the community (Optimism’s airdrop was a great example of this)
- Reward current token holders in order to further engage them with the promise of additional utility (BAYC airdropping APE to NFT holders)
- Reward contributors in the community (e.g. automated payments to DAO members through Utopia Labs, community-led rewarding through Coordinape)
The innovation in this space will come from the evolution of the design space of community coordination in Web3 rather than the intricacies of tooling itself. As Web3 communities figure out stronger governance and ownership frameworks — the tools in which value is distributed to stakeholders will adapt accordingly.
Governance
The final form of common Web3 solutions is in governance. Enabled by tokenization and identity / credentials, these suite of solutions allow community managers to engage their members by offering them a “seat at the table” in decision-making.
Tools like Snapshot (pictured above) enable community members who hold tokens to vote and comment on proposals — enabling the community managers to understand what makes their members tick (e.g. “temperature checks”) and to enable some level of decentralized decision-making. Even more Web3-native versions of governance are on-chain, where votes are directly tied to executable smart contracts (e.g. Curve’s voting mechanism automatically changes pool weights).
There are two innovations worth noting in Web3 governance solutions:
- Most current solutions adopt a “one token, one vote model” which might not be ideal — as one could theoretically buy their way into influence, even if it is not in the best interest of the protocol itself. There are some protocols — like Optimism — that are innovating on this model by introducing multi-branch voting mechanisms, Soul-bound NFTs, and identity mechanisms to optimize governance
- Governance delegation solutions (e.g. like Gitcoin adopts through Tally) enable those who might not have enough knowledge to vote to delegate their votes to trusted voters while maintaining skin in the game.
Others
There are other tools we could foresee become a critical part of Web3 community infrastructure: from messaging (XMTP) to small-group communications within the community (Orca Protocol). The space is only growing more interesting, and builders are truly pushing the limit of what’s possible. We’ll cover these in future articles.
However, the major downside to the current suites of Web3-specific point solutions is fragmentation. Remember how community managers found it overwhelming to have to manage between a plethora of different bots? Fragmentation of tooling — with different tools all trying to solve different problems — causes the following problems to community managers:
- Difficulty in identifying the right tools to deploy
- Complexity in deploying the tools (some are no-code, and some like SourceCred explicitly require technical chops to setup)
- Orchestrating various tools in a systematic, aligned way
- Managing tools between chains (as some tools may be native to a chain e.g. EPNS)
The fragmentation increases community managers’ already high mental load and make community managers hesitant to invest in any specific Web3 point solution unless it solves a very clear pain point.
Knowledge management and communication systems
In a 24/7, global, high velocity space such as Web3 communities (some with 20+ channels with high frequency), community managers looking for additional support usually have to recruit and manage moderators hailing from different geographies & time zones. You can see some of the difficulties that this causes community managers in the quotes below:
“I managed a server of 90K members where a professional FUD group targeted my server to try to drive our NFT prices down. I was the only Community Manager online at the time, and had to manage these conversations. I noticed that the FUD accounts all had similar naming syntax, and thus alerted the team to proactively ban new accounts with the same format. In my handover, I gave the moderators who took over me tips on how to manage the conversations ahead, what to look out for, and what process to follow to ban these accounts.”
“Sometimes in handovers between moderators in different time-zones one simple thing that’s super important to help is just gauging sentiment. If there’s been a tough night in the market when I was asleep, and everyone’s just down — it’s helpful for me as a moderator taking over to know the voice I should adopt in the chats and how to boost up morale.”
The high-frequency intake of moderators coming into communities, as well as the sheer amount of information transfer that needs to happen in an easily digestible way across time zones during “handover periods” thus necessitates two things: (1) a strong onboarding process and reference materials (FAQs, templates) that community managers can leverage, and (2) strong systems for handovers, alerts, and tasks between the community managers and moderators.
The way that knowledge management and transfer occurs in communities today highly differs — but it often happens in more scrappy, less organized manners that are not necessarily built for scale and knowledge retention.
For instance, for knowledge management, some communities maintain a Notion or GitHub Docs (if more technical) page for their community managers with FAQs and prompts. For knowledge transfer, some communities use an internal Slack channel to share updates and handovers (written on chat or on Google Docs). This may work for a while, but these practices don’t scale, and knowledge will get lost over time. In a world where insights, knowledge, and user voice are so critical to maintain — it is likely that there needs to be a better solution to stay on top of this information, across community managers and moderators.
In summary
Across all the community managers we interviewed, what resonates is that there are parts of the job that require a “human touch”. One-off tooling can only do so much. Whether it’s knowing how to keep morale up, or being able to truly understand the voice of user — the most important part of the job is often in the intangibles.
If we are able to reduce the mental load of community managers and get them doing the “work that really matters” more easily — we’ll be able to create much more deeply engaged communities, and drive value to the community members in a scalable way.
At Vantient, we seek to empower projects and community managers in building active and engage communities. If you’re intrigued by this mission statement, keep following us for the journey ahead. For interested community managers, owners, or marketers/growth leaders — we’d love to get to know you. Sign up for early access at https://vantient.io.
