Rewarding Your Web3 Community: How to Give the Right Incentives

“Money Motivated — Many jump into crypto for the lucrative investments it can offer. While these communities can help inform new-comers about your project, and will often work in your project's best interest as they are investors, they can quickly dry up if the token price drops.

“Belief Motivated — This type of community tends to be very strong. They believe in your mission, vision, and goals, and will help drive all of it forward. This is also where the best contributors and collaborators can be found.”

Obviously, you would like more members of your community to genuinely believe in your project and to be passionate in supporting it. But growing and engaging your Web3 community means being strategic and pragmatic. The community may have a bigger voice in Web3 and a say in the direction of your project, but ultimately, it’s still your project, and you need to find the right way to manage their behavior and expectations. That’s why it’s called community management, after all.

How, then, can you design programs that will incentivize community members to act in ways that will benefit your project?

“More than just establishing a Web3 community, you must establish a primary goal. Of course, you can have secondary goals, but one of them should be your top priority.”

“Working side by side with some internal and external stakeholders, conducting good research (asking and listening to get to know your audience well), and collaborating may help to clarify the business's most pressing needs that the community can assist with.”

“It is critical at this point to align your community goals with your project goals.”

“Let's look at an example. If you are building a DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization), it is important to bring people closer and, as a result, some of them may turn into brand advocates, in addition to investing in your DAO.”

What, then, are the examples of incentives that will motivate your community members to take your desired action?

“One of the central tenets of Web3 is putting power back in the hands of people, and transforming the creator economy to become a decentralized ownership economy. In turn, Web3 seeks to transform what incentives look like, by establishing a layer of ownership into incentives. Think about it: the likelihood of a new customer becoming more invested as an ‘owner’ or ‘member’ versus a purely financially transactional ‘user’ makes sense. The most common incentive used today in Web3 is the token airdrop. These tokens give people a reason to try, join, or participate in a community, while unlocking a token of value.

One of the ways Cryptopia rewards its community is to give TOS as contest prizes. This is a good strategy because it attracts the right people to these contests. After all, the ones who will value TOS are the players, as this is the in-game currency.

More than just financial rewards, however, Cryptopia is also giving recognition to its members and raising their social status in the community. This is in line with the strategy of transforming a holder mentality into a contributor one.

At the end of the day, each Web3 community is different, and you will have to really get to know your own community to tailor your campaigns to their tastes and needs. It’s not at all easy to get it right, but it’s definitely rewarding when you do.

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