[Grant Proposal] Aura Marketing Outreach Salaries

Name: Gengar

Organization: Aura Finance

Detailed Description of Grant Request:

We’re requesting a grant for Aura HR and Payroll which will become a solution for promoting the growth of Aura Finance by allocating resources towards go-to-market efforts, and identifying partnership opportunities to scale up successful initiatives for the Aura Ecosystem.

This proposal comes at a crucial time when Aura Finance is poised for exponential growth. To recap on its performance starting from its official launch in July 2022, it has accomplished multiple milestones in several months. As of this proposal’s writing, it has:

  • $455M+ in TVL
  • 26.39% of all veBAL in circulation
  • 8,972,693 Aura locked, in light of the unlockening
  • Built strong partnerships towards the usage of Aura, with deposits of protocol-owned liquidity, incentivizing vlAURA votes via Hidden Hand by DAOs such as Gnosis, Olympus, Badger, Temple, DFX. Aave has also announced an intent to use Aura heavily as it rolls out its GHO stablecoin product.
  • Have organically grown to 10.3K Twitter followers on the @aurafinance handle
  • Setup a regular community newsletter as well as tutorial videos that help educate and promote interested contributors
  • Launched a limited edition NFT collection called Aura Meditators

Knowing this, the setup of the Aura HR and Payroll is critical in order to fuel and not hinder the growth of the Aura Ecosystem and its contributors, all the while keeping competitors at bay and providing a good mix of organic and paid avenues for brand awareness.

Aura HR and Payroll aims to benefit the Aura Ecosystem in the following manner:

  • Strengthen the Aura narrative and its messaging. While Aura has organically established a new narrative for ve-tokenomics within the Balancer system, the Aura ecosystem (especially new DAOs) can benefit from a stronger narrative on Aura’s overall utility, as well as a further knowledge push on gauge voting incentives, and a strong belief in the Aura brand that is trustworthy, capable, and inspiring despite bear market sentiments. Ideally, Aura messaging should spread awareness of those opportunities to more audiences and build a strong brand that is recognized and trusted by end-users and partners. As we further drive this narrative, we need to invest resources to broadcast that brand narrative and drive reach and awareness for Aura within the different DeFi communities, specifically to DAOs that control significant capital or require deeper liquidity.

  • Build a proactive contributor outreach strategy that focuses on community engagement, organic growth, and contributor education. Aura needs to continue its development in repeatedly engaging the DeFi community and educate new contributors on the utilities of Aura, auraBAL, vlAURA and ensure that we have consistent contributors who are able to clearly communicate the Aura narrative into new communities. As part of this strategy, we would ideally create the capabilities for ongoing management and consultation with contributors to ensure that they have the tools and accurate context they need to continue to grow their own tribes. By having a strong contributor outreach strategy, the Aura ecosystem will be able to develop more grassroots, niche community efforts versus solely relying on paid channels.

  • Double down on internal and external content that educates and evangelizes new and existing community members. As the adoption of Aura can be contributed to helpful written and video content, we would need to further continue creating content that not only establishes Aura’s importance in the DeFi community, but also provide our contributors an avenue to become potential evangelists within the Aura ecosystem. We will also aim in launching communications and marketing initiatives around new product updates and partnership developments. Internally, the ecosystem can benefit from an improvement in Aura’s organic reach by investing in domain and search engine analytics tools, website resources, and improving Aura’s internal PR library for easier and more efficient distribution to media agencies, as illustrated in the next point.

  • Invest in media, marketing partnerships, and ambassadorships. While Aura Finance builds its strength in organic content, we should also consider Aura’s relationships with PR and marketing agencies, as well as potential industry gatekeepers. This will help us focus on widening our audience base for the Aura ecosystem, and allowing us to continue to drive awareness with regards to Aura’s utility in these currently untapped bases.

How much are you requesting for the grant? 50,000 USD to be used for the purposes of expanding Aura Finance’s HR and Payroll.

2 Likes

Hello thank you for your grant while am totally in support of your grant
The ideas of establishing a community growth and creating awareness bout Aura in all region should be a priority now if I understand very well you are starting an advocate program
But am more concerned bout
1)The $50,000 that look like a whole lot of money
I will appreciate if you can give a break down of how this money will be used to fund the respective areas
2)Also we would also love to have a clear idea of how long this grant will last in this program
I will appreciate a time frame
Give us a particular interval of how the grant will last
3)Lastly
Will this program in future request for another grant

Thank you

1 Like

Thank you, the AEF Committee has received your request and will review shortly.

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Hi @Gengar - thanks for your proposal. My initial comment at this point is technical. Is it accurate to call this proposal Aura HR and Payroll?

The proposal offers straight up marketing, outreach, and educational services and deliverables. The grantee may have HR and payroll costs that it incurs in performing those svcs and deliverables, but if that’s the case, I don’t think that alone justifies calling the grant proposal Aura HR and Payroll.

For instance, there are administrative expenses for svcs and deliverables that would include payroll or other compensation that are incurred and paid by the grantee, but it’s not like Aura the protocol is giving folks W-9s, W-2s, 1099s, etc., or doing payroll withholdings.

2 Likes

Hi Najbaby, thanks for your comment! The grant request will primarily be for interested contributors for a term of 1 year.

Hi, Matt_AlfalfaOrSpanky - I’m really flexible in changing the name. We can name it Aura Marketing Outreach and I’d be good with it.

1 Like

It’s an honor to get a reply from you
I was Concerned bout 3 things so far you have only answered one

The following are left unattended to

Also permit me to add this very last question
This is a campaign set up for an awareness /promotion program

Pls curious what would be the expected kpi or what will be use as a metric for measuring the success of this campaign ?

I will appreciate a response thank you

That name sounds great. Thanks, @Gengar.

1 Like

Hello there. I’m interested why you think $50,000 is a lot for marketing and PR. It seems to me like AURA is one of the best things going on in DeFi right now. Nice stable yields on lots of pairs, and good opportunities for DAOs.
In the current market, news doesn’t travel as fast and many people don’t even know AURA exists.

Allocating $50,000 to be paid out to the community in order to spread gospel and help everyone both discover and understand AURA seems like a modest investment to me. The protocol is quite complicated, so we need to find content creators and promoters who have a pretty deep understanding of DeFi and can convey that to and educate others.

What do you think would be a reasonable 1 year spend on community promotion and education around AURA?

2 Likes

Hello @Tritium
Am totally in support of this campaign

You see my support for the grant from the beginning
But due to my experience on Daos and marketing
I have seen alot of fine written proposals not deliver as expected

$50,000 is a huge amount of money
If not properly spent will be a big lost to the Dao
Now this give rise to my concern

  1. a detail break down of how the money will be spent in a Calendar year

  2. what would be the expected kpi ( every marketing moves should have an expected stat) and metric for measuring success

  3. will this grant needs to be refunded
    If yes when? Will it be funded yearly as stated the program will last for a year

These are the three things that should be clear on this proposal then I will say a yes to it

This sounds very interesting and is probably overdue. $50k seems like a modest investment, especially noting that awareness is one of the biggest challenges we face in a bear market.

1 Like

Hi @Najbaby

Just a few updates:

  1. Essentially we are allocating these for 2 full-time marketing contributor salaries, 24k each for a period of 1 year, with 2k for bonus.
  2. Grant may need to be funded on a yearly basis, but the current grant is not recurring. Happy to make a new request if needed.
1 Like

Hello thanks for your response again
in as much as I like the idea behind this proposal

There are certain things I don’t still understand
Like example

We are employing 2 full time marketers for a year and their salary 24k each
For two of them we pay 48k
And a bonus of 2k to make it 50k a year

This give rise to more questions like

° Who are these marketers ?
° What would be their approach of marketing ?
° What would be the kpi or return of investment ?

In as much as my knowledge of marketing is deep I would suggest this is not the best marketing strategy for AURA
Our main objective at this point

° is to get more outreach
° Promote aura to the wider crypto commune
and investors
° Bring in more community contributors who are
willing and ready to shape aura
° Increase engagement in the Aura ecosystem

There are several things still needs to be address in this proposal

Feel free to make any request ser
The community and council are listening

2 Likes

Hi, this grant request has been taken to the Grant committee for review and voting. If you would like to make any final amendments to the proposal to further clarify any of the questions raised, then please do so in the next 24 hours.

The AEF Governing Committee has approved this grant request.
The proposal is a very reasonable request for the hire of 2 marketers to support the growth and development of Aura Finance. The duties of the marketing team are as per the initial grant request and a review will be completed at the end of 1 year to confirm whether the salaries will be renewed. The funding will be allocated off chain once contractual obligations are confirmed.