About that Fundraising Operator Position
So you’ve elected @Wikist and me to be the Fundraising Operators. Now what?
In terms of start date, we have been told that the DAO will have a budget for this position “around one month after the start of Season 1.” So we are thinking we’ll start around the first week of September. That will work well for our schedules too, giving us time to wrap up some other work we are doing and devote more of our capacity to this position.
In the meantime, we thought it might be helpful to share our work plan, the deliverables that the DAO can expect from us, and a bit about our backgrounds/qualifications/approaches to this work.
Please let us know what you think in the comments! We look forward to working with you and hope to begin the dialogue here.
Our Plan
Broadly speaking, we are going to be focused on:
- Building fundraising infrastructure
- Producing guides to D_D fundraising
- Empowering D_D members to raise money for projects
In Season 1, @wikist and I do not intend to actively engage in fundraising. We want to lay the foundation for the DAO to successfully raise funds over the long term. We see alignment with the Tasks to be delivered in the DAO Operators Proposal more than the KPIs in that proposal.
We are motivated to set the DAO up for long-term success more than we are motivated to get the $CODE incentive rewards outlined in the proposal.
As such, we will be focused on the following:
Month 1
- [ADDL. SCOPE BEYOND DAO OPERATOR PROPOSAL] Better understand DAO members’ challenges, problems, and needs as they relate to fundraising. What we discover will inform the rest of our work and could cause us to reprioritize the rest of the work on this list.
- Roles: Chuck and Wikist team up to survey DAO members and facilitate dialogue.
- KPI/Deliverable: Memo outlining the most common & acute pain points we uncover.
- Create the legal infrastructure for projects looking to apply for external grants.
- Roles: Chuck will lead on design and build of legal infrastructure, with D_D legal support. Wikist leads on documentation, with Chuck support.
- KPI/Deliverable: Memo detailing the rights and responsibilities for D_D projects, subsidiaries and affiliates seeking outside funding.
- Develop a standard agreement between the DAO and projects which receive DAO funding or other resources.
- Roles: Chuck leads engagement of legal support. Wikist leads DAO stakeholder engagement. Chuck leads on the creation of the agreement.
- KPI/Deliverable: Standard agreement drafted, shared, revised, and finalized
Month 2
- Establish a documented process for qualifying projects for grant applications under Developer DAO banner.
- Roles: Chuck leads the process for qualification/rulemaking, with Wikist support. Wikist
- leads on documentation, with Chuck support
- KPI/Deliverable: Flowchart drafted, shared, revised, and finalized
- Establish a documented pipeline of grant sources and build relationships with those granting entities.
- Roles: Chuck and Wikist co-lead on pipeline design with decentralization in mind and not making ourselves the bottleneck. Chuck leads on strategy for cultivating D_D’s relationships with grantmakers. Wikist leads on research and documentation of grant sources
- KPI/Deliverable: Airtable CRM created and populated with all D_D funder relationships
- Establish an internal database of the projects and initiatives that will allow organizational visibility and better coordination.
- Roles: Wikist leads CRM database design and build, with Chuck support
- KPI/Deliverable: Airtable database created and populated with all D_D projects and initiatives.
Months 3-4
- Create guides and info resources that support internal projects who are looking to stand up their own infrastructure (i.e. multi-sigs) and entities (i.e. legal structures).
- Roles: Chuck leads on design of guides and resources. Wikist leads on documentation and storage of guides and resources.
- KPI/Deliverable: 5 guides / info resources created for internal projects
- [ADDL. SCOPE BEYOND DAO OPERATOR PROPOSAL] Strengthen D_D member competencies for fundraising, including: research, cultivating funder relationships, requesting funding, writing grant proposals, budgeting, and reporting.
- Roles: Chuck leads on facilitating workshops. Wikist leads on scheduling, documentation, and storage of resources
- KPI/Deliverable: 10 workshops/AMAs/office hours facilitated in S1
- If time and capacity allows, actively support DAO members in fundraising.
- Roles: Chuck and Wikist team up to empower D_D to raise funds.
- KPI/Deliverable: TBD
As per the DAO Operators proposal, this position will be funded at $8,000 per month. @Wikist and I have agreed to split this $3,000 / $5,000 for the first month, with the option to revise our respective compensation in future months depending on the relative value we are bringing to the DAO. If we receive any $CODE, we will divide it in the same proportions as the USD.
About Us
Chuck
Before going full-time in web3 in May 2022, I was a professor of social innovation, program director, and strategic advisor to the Do Good Institute at the University of Maryland (UMD). I’ve been involved in building the Do Good Institute for over a decade. During that time I have helped the Institute to raise over $100,000,000 from public and private sources and built an accredited, self-sustainable graduate program in nonprofit management and leadership. While earning my Master of Public Policy (MPP) at UMD from 2011-2013, I created the Do Good Challenge, which has become one of the university’s most important and popular annual events.
In January 2022 I co-founded Bankless Consulting, a Delaware C corporation that was incubated in BanklessDAO. As a Director and the founding CFO, I have built BC’s business operations including its legal and regulatory compliance systems. In our first six months, we have signed over 15 client contracts. I have been the Project Manager for three of these contracts. I stood up a Grants Team in Bankless Consulting to get grants for BanklessDAO projects. 4 of 5 grant applications I’ve been involved in submitting in 2022 have been successful. One of these grants seeded the creation of Bankless Research.
From 2013-2017, I was building nonprofit programs that empowered teachers and principals to elevate their voices in public policy for Bloomberg Philanthropies’ education policy think tank, America Achieves (which closed in 2020). I personally raised over $4,000,000 in grant funding from private and corporate foundations for the programs I directed.
Before going to UMD to get my MPP, I was a primary school teacher in St. Louis, Missouri. While teaching fifth grade I started an after-school sports club to teach boys the principles of teamwork and sportsmanship (and have fun playing sports!). I raised money from rich people in St. Louis to buy equipment and tshirts for this club.
I studied Economics at the University of Notre Dame and thought I’d work in finance. This changed in 2008-2009 (during my senior year of college) when I became disgusted with Wall Street corruption. I could not believe that the US government was bailing out bankers at the expense of homeowners and taxpayers, and I did not want to be any part of that.
Some things about how I approach work:
- I am a professional working full time in web3. This is how I earn a living to support my family.
- I am working in web3 because I want to build the future and make an impact in the real world.
- I am an operator by nature. I am naturally attuned to building structures, systems, and processes.
- I am also an educator by nature. I believe in people. Your growth is my success.
- I get shit done. A lot of it. People call me tenacious, relentless, intense. Point me in the direction you want to go, and we’ll get there. Probably faster than you anticipated.
- I am very disciplined and do not work well in a chaotic environment.
- Discord fries my brain and I limit my exposure to it as much as possible.
- I am good at cultivating relationships with people who want to support the mission I am working to advance. You might call this fundraising. I call it building partnerships.
Wikist
Before going into the web3 I was working for 5 years in the third sector helping developing entrepreneurial attitude in the Youth with local Polish organization, that was strictly cooperating with league of national Polish businessmen called Business Centre Club.
During that time I was organizing events and coordinating integral operations. That also meant helping the fundraiser team achieve funding by smoothing their obstacles inside of the organization and helping them establish processes for fundraiser activities. We have partnered with dozens of organizations for our events, which were focusing on education towards different age and interest groups.
I have finished Master degree in Management of Business Development at the best business school in the Middle & Eastern Europe Kozminski University, which I finished as the best student of the year.
I am passionate about self-organization and decentralization and have published articles in renown Polish research papers around this topic.
I am also active in the space of Web 3 by creating the first Polish DAO - UNIMIND DAO, which goal is to create a community of educators around the topic of Web 3 in Poland. I am making educational content for this purpose on regular basis.
I also had a short adventure when me and my co-founder started a blockchain project for education. We were aiming at creating the best educational platform in the space, but after an initial funding that we have got, we started to disagree on the topic of strategy for the business and parted ways.
As you can see my previous experience is not as rich as Chuck’s but from the start of my contributions to the DAO I was working with passion towards making our community succeed in the field of grant funding. I feel honored by the fact that I am able to cooperate with Chuck on Fundraiser role in the DAO and my goal for this cooperation is to not only act with all my power to bring the required infrastructure, databases and ultimately funding to the DAO, but also to learn from the best, so I will be able to pass the knowledge further and make Developer_DAO self-sustainable in the long run.
