DAO Series Pt.1: 4 Steps To Building Cross-DAO Relationships

It's no secret that DAO's, and the blockchain space in general are exploding.

People often find themselves wondering how they can get started in DAO's.

Dually, we often wonder about the best approach to building relationships with other DAO's in the spirit of collaboration and friendship.

Naturally, there's a proper, and not so proper way, to build relationships.

Here's my step by step process that I've been using to get involved in DAO's; community management and bizdev in Bankless DAO, to SuperUMAn Ambassador at UMA and Genesis Team Member at Polygon Ecosystem DAO and many more.

Step 1: Source a potential relationship

This is probably the hardest part of the whole process: figuring out which relationships to invest time into (or not).

DAO's are as diverse as people. We all have our own environments we will thrive in (or not). Matching contributors to appropriate environments is key.

Example: When trying to build a relationship with another DAO, having a contributor who doesn't care about being politically correct would not be a good placement within a DAO that takes a stand for gender neutrality. This can cause brand damage to both your DAO and the contributor trying to get involved.

Takeaway: Find an environment to network in that you will thrive within, or send a more appropriate contributor.

Step 2: Bump Elbows, Contribute and collect POAP

Nobody cares about how much you know until they know about how much you care.

With the hard part out of the way, the fun and easy stuff can ensue.

Treat external communities as you would our own.

Involvement doesn't need to be heavy or crazy, social and leadership capital can be built on 60-120 minutes a week.

Attend calls, provide insight or feedback, collect POAP's to demonstrate you're engaged and participating and make friends

Step 3: Suggest solutions where appropriate

If you're in business development, you're familiar with sales and more than likely have your own sales process. I don't want to prescribe how people bring up solutions, so long as it's ethical and maintaining the integrity of the your brand.

Bots and bounties are 2 hot topics and good examples here. If you hear people debating how to solve a problem, which we have a solution for, suggest it.

"Hey [handle] have you heard about _____ which may be a viable solution to solve your issues of ____?"

Step 4: Schedule group calls

Where appropriate, see about scheduling organizational wide collaborative calls. The intention of the calls are for us to get to know each other and find areas to come together or collaborate.

As I've witness with a few of our relationships, organizational wide calls to get to know each other have been a pretty great catalyst to help us find opportunities to come together as an industry.

Sales isn't a priority, what is the priority is learning as much about the prospect as possible to build social capital, establish leadership capital, and earn the right to present solutions to their problems.

It also is a powerful demonstration of the talent and community you may have at your DAO, and a major value add to welcome other communities into your own.

Through helping other organizations get what they want, we are indirectly furthering our mission of onboarding 1 billion people into crypto.

Bonus: Coordinate and Facilitate

As DAOs continues to evolve, there will be a major need for facilitators. Coordinating projects between guilds, guild members and outside organizations is a lot for a single guild. Each guild could have a coordinator which coordinates between the guild and biz dev. The function of a biz dev type guild coordinator would be to keep the guild and outside org aligned, information transparent, and the projects flowing smoothly.

The objective is not to assert dominion by any means. It is, however, intended to take pressure our respected guilds and guild leaders to be more productive as their best selves with less distractions having to monitor communications and address concerns.

This would also take an extra coordination layer in Notion of having some sort of a private CRM where we could easily access and relay information in as close to real time as possible, without having to wait for contributors in different time zones for replies.

Conclusion:

As you can see, this is a simple system which can be applied to virtually any skillset you'd like to turn into work for a DAO, despite being loosely oriented to business development.

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