Communication Overhaul

rg_ser33

Fellow Ohmies,

Before I give this feedback, I want to make a caveat. I must admit that I am not a longtime Ohmie. I came across OHM for the first time a few weeks back. I’ve been following (and investing in) crypto since 2017, but I am also the founder/CEO of a fast growing consumer company and so my attention isn’t always put towards the latest crypto projects. I found out about OHM from a Bankless podcast with Zeuss and I was intrigued. I then spent the next 72 hours in more rabbit holes than I had ever been in for any other crypt project outside of Bitcoin and Etherium. I was truly fascinated by the protocol, team, and community and I have since invested a not immaterial portion of my crypto portfolio and hope to continue to increase my position. So I must make it clear that I am only a few weeks into my OHM journey

With that being said, I did want to share some feedback from the perspective of a former worldwide ad agency copywriter turned successful affiliate marketer turned successful consumer founder/CEO running a $100m+, 100+ employee company. While I recognize that DAOs must function differently than companies, I also think they can learn from them as well.

What I have seen so far from Olympus is that the people working on the project have a very diverse set of talents. They are best in class at innovation, tech, community, etc. However, one thing I have seen over the V2 launch is that the communication is lacking. At the time of launch Olympus was a $3b market cap organization. If OHM has the hopes of becoming a trillion dollar organization, it can’t just rely on product innovation and tech, but it needs to have world-class communication, product, and marketing.

It’s hard to imagine a $3b organization of any kind going into a very major migration without any clear warning and information on its site in advance. The communication around the migration was poor. Aside from a few tweets and discord posts, there was no information on the homepage or in the app warning users about the migration in advance. The site was full of bugs showing the wrong APY (which happened to get picked up by congress!) and the help docs on the migration were inaccurate (said users had 2 months to merge) and lacking. The number of different tokens and their purpose was not clearly outlined. In short, there seemed to be very little up-front planning and communication that OHMs tens of thousands of holders could easily access. This no doubt has left a major impact on the price and adoption of OHM in the near-mid term.

To make matters worse, the Discord was full of confusion from the moment the migration started. Hundreds (if not thousands?) of people asked the same questions over and over again, frustrating and overwhelming mods. I personally tried to jump in to help explain things as much as I could, and at some point I called out both in the main discord and DAO discord that something about the communication had to change. I even shared some suggested edits to the site docs as well as changes to the UI to help make things more clear and reduce confusion, none of which were adopted or responded to.

The changes that were made have not been that helpful. The alert placed in the app is almost invisible, as it is in the footer and blends in with the they background.

Nearly a week has passed since this started and the site is still confusing and there is still no central place people can go to understand the migration that is clearly called out from all pages on the site.

My proposal is that going forward, Olympus has a much stronger communication plan relating to technical changes that is lead by marketing & communication experts vs developers. I propose that major changes are not just posted on Twitter and Discord but clearly called out on the website and that the content of the messaging is tested on users (especially normies) prior to any launch or change to ensure that confusion is eliminated. This is especially the case if changes will cause errors or bugs relating to things like APY, rebase periods, treasury assets, etc.

OHM is, in many ways, a world-class organization. But not in all ways (yet). Please do not underestimate the power and necessity of incredible communication as we march towards our goals and think about the possibilities of what we can become 10 years from now.

Thanks for listening OHMies,

Sark0N

rg_ser33 Great post, ser. I couldn't agree more. We need to mature as a DAO and improving internal and external comms is a key part of the process.

RajLondon

İ agree with this sentiment as well. Communication did seem to be a priority with weekly community calls, agora plus twitter spaces to go over the details however it didn't make the mark and the marketcap drop alongside all the confusion is evident of this.

Personally İ feel communication is difficult in the crypto space and we can't seem to get it right as not everyone uses the same platforms objectives are not always aligned alongside time differences/limitations. İ've seen many a project lose traction due to not being able to get communication right.

Fundamentally it is imporant to understand the type of investor and reduce the steps for getting critical information to as many as possible. Therefore my suggestion would be that communcation and engagement would have to remain consistent over a two week period prior to a big change in order to reach as many people as possible alongside marketing and incentivising engagement.

Curiously it seems people are not engaging with the announcements channel in the discord where important information resides. Also there is a only a few hundred that attend the discord calls/twitter spaces and there is thousands of ohmies. We will have to corroborate to find a better solution to find the reach that is necessary. Perhaps take a poll and see how people would prefer to be reached.
İ agree though we need a major overhaul in how we communicate and i feel there was too many assumptions in how this process would work which resulted in mass confusion.

There is many pitfalls for an organisation to become successful long term and nailing communication and community engagement however it's critical for long term success. Unfortuantely this has been lacking. Success is difficult in my opinion because so many levers have to be executed sometimes simaltaneously (communication, growth, engagement, partnerships) and İ know we've had a drive for people joining the dao to contribute to which they get compensated as well. My advice is to keep persisiting in having community calls in different timezones around contributing to the dao, education on the migration and the fundmentals of ohm. We have a lot of talent in the dao and we should be pushing and developing this talent. İ'd like to see new ohmies host community calls educating and answering questions. I'd like to see skills being passed on and developed.

There is a real desire for ohm to suceed from a huge amount of people. We should never become complacent and show leadership at all times. There are many that will answer the call to help and contribute please utilise this. İ feel there is a tendency not to get a feel for community insight or get on top quickly for what is needed.