S4 - Ep. 23 - Grants Canvas With CoachJ

Transcript

welcome to the green pill. network podcast if you're just joining us we're building a coordination a network Society of thousands of hackers dreamers and doers using crypto to bring positive sum digital systems to the world we feature the people who are doing it and we publish a season of about a dozen episodes every couple months this season is lean mean Capital allocation machines in what way is onchain capital allocation going to be weirder more scalable more democratic more precise than what was possible before web 3 how can we build cryptoeconomic systems that precisely allate Capital at scale what are the coolest experiments these are the themes of Greenfield season 4 lean mean Capital allocation machines my guest today is Coach Jay who has held several roles over two and a half years

at gitcoin who's the memes marketing and merch workstream lead was an ecosystem Collective lead and is now a writer and author today we are talking about the grant program design canvas a new free pdf ebook that is your complete guide to launching and growing a grants program so if you're in an ecosystem that has a bunch of capital and wants to create growth in your ecosystem through a grants program and you are someone who has been thrown in the deep end by your ecosystem leads or Dow governance in designing the grants program the grants canvas is for you so basically the canvas lays out the Define design execute and learn stages of a grants program and guides you through the best

practices putting together a grant grants program the canvas is a vehicle for Designing that and so um I think that what this does is it sort of bottles up five years of experience of running grants programs at gitcoin into a PDF that is your guide for running a onchain grants program and hopefully it's useful to you a web 3 Capital allocator who is working on a dow who is working on a grants program or is just interested in the nuts and bolts of practically doing onchain Capital allocation so uh this episode is about the grants canvas and again it was written by Coach Jay of the getcoin ecosystem you can download resource at Grants canvas. gitcoin doco for free and

uh you can purchase a physical copy there if you're going to ECC please remember to RSVP for the grants canvas launch party which will be at ECC the links for that are in the show notes all right without further Ado let's get into Coach Jay and the grants program design canvas enjoy what's up Coach Jay hey GM Kevin I am really excited to talk to you today about the grants canvas what is the grants canvas that's a good question the grants canvas is basically a go-to tool on how to launch and grow a grants program so there's a canvas as well as a book called the grant canvas design and

it was really created to help growth leaders create manage optimize high impact Advance programs without missing any details and it's a really visual modular approach and it actually streamlines this really complex grants program planning process into four really easy phases that we could talk about and then those phases are further broken down into specific building blocks and it really just allows you to shorten the planning process so you can focus more of your time and energy on attracting Builders rather than planning a grants program so that's the tldr the user story that I sort of have for the grants program is that you joined a project that is about to do a token generation event or is trying to plan a grants program and you've maybe done

Community stuff you've maybe been around the ethereum scene for a while and your boss is like hey we have hundred million in Treasury and we have to turn those into growth like can you start a grants program and you're like oh what do I do and it feels like the grants canvas is perfectly it's like a life raft for people who have a bunch of tokens and need to figure out how to do a grants program but aren't sure the best practices it's an all-in-one uh piece where where people can can kind of uh it it'll user you along in in starting a grants program and so you know I'm wondering if you can take us if you can is is that user story The the correct one and if so can you take us deeper in in how you help solve those problems yeah I'd say that that is a pretty

accurate user Story Probably the main one that we're thinking about it's really I would call it for it's for New Growth leaders because it really is a step by like the Playbook especially is a step step-by-step detailed walk through really like Back to Basics just to make sure that you learn everything I know about you Kevin but like when I was going to school like there wasn't like a degree in Grants programs running running grants programs or building grants programs not even courses around that so it's like a relatively new thing in web 3 it's something that you learn just kind of like when you get into the workspace um so it's it's for New Growth leaders and it's also for veteran ecosystem leaders as well they are really detailed deep dives into specific design spaces within a gr programs and

it's for both new programs and existing programs so you can follow the canvas and catch all the details needed to launch a highly impactful grants program right on your first try and it's also a really great tool the canvas itself it's a really a convenient framework for detailed look at every aspect of your grants programs so you can really focus on further optimizing and actually getting the results that you're looking for your grants program and the the example you gave of this kind of like token rich or like large treasury kind of group that is definitely like one key audience and I'd also say like you know particular of interest to the audience maybe listening here this was also created and written for those who are part of maybe Community groups or impact

networks we have a whole section just on fundraising and using unique web three mechanisms to fundraise so that's kind of like I would say the gamut of the uh user stories there just wanted to invite the listeners as they're following along that you can download the grants canvas. gitcoin docco and uh if you want to follow along visually the resource is a very visual book so would invite you to pull that up and poke around at it as you as you listen to coach Jay yeah any other call to actions for people just to be able to follow along visually as we're as we're talking no no additional things gr canvas doy coin. free pdf download of the gr canvas you can pop it right into AO or mural or whatever whiteboarding software you use and um and start playing around with it so uh give me an

overview of the grant canvas I see that there's four phases of of program design in the canvas yeah four phases Define design execute and learn and we also recommend When It Was Written following the these steps obviously if you have an existing program you're not really as interested in reviewing some of them you can skip around where you are but the intention of the design was so that you have to backtrack as little as possible when following the flow and then within each of these phases we can dive into the building block so let's talk about the first probably in my opinion what's like the juiciest phase is called the Define phase and I actually think that this is the phase that probably gets

skipped over the fastest just based on my research and yet has the greatest impact on the success of a grants program so the defined phase is and I would also call the defined phase kind of like your funding allocation strategy and I would Define that as your strategy for allocating funds for lack of a better words so so you start off by setting an objective and as much as we think oh yeah objectives easy uh it was surprising to look around web 3 and uh find how many Grant programs didn't really set clear objectives and in doing user interviews with with folks in the who's who've been in the space now for several years around this this is

constantly what comes up as the number one reason why programs fail is that they don't set strong objectives that actually create clear it for what it is that they're trying to create the change that they're trying to make the growth that they're trying to achieve after you set a really strong objective you'll create measurements to actually track whether or not you're achieving the objectives and how well you're achieving those objectives from the measurement phase you'll move down into really honing in on your audience and typically within kind of the user story that you first described there's two main audience audiences there is an audience of builders that are you know usually trying to be attracted but there's also an audience of any users the beneficiaries of the actual project there's just I've read so many articles

about the reasons startup fail and it's and like always hovering around the top three are not talking to their customers enough or not like really listening to the market so that kind of Falls within there is really knowing your audience and what it is that they're looking for and then the last aspect of this defined phase is uh funding so if you don't have money to distribute into grants program you're not running a grants program and so funding looks at has you really take a look like what is your budget where are the funds coming from is it through a dow governance process are you just you know going to your founder your you know your VCB org maybe just the founder guess to say yes or no or maybe there's some serious fundraising efforts that need to happen so with objectives measurements uh audience and funding

you're looking at your def Define phase I'll just pause there see if there's any questions before I continue so them we're not listening to me talk for 10 minutes straight I mean it's a podcast where you're the guest so happy to have you talk all right so what what I heard here is that there's four phases there's Define design execute and learn there's four phases to having a grants program that actually creates growth for your ecosystem and is effective and uh one theme that I heard you really emphasize is the need to set up your program in the defined stage for success and that defined stage creates the conditions for success in the the latter three stages and so uh if you were going through grants design grants program design without going through the Define phase

first then you're kind of not really setting your team or your ecosystem up for success I could have set it better myself what's next after the the Define phase so after Define we'll actually start designing the grant program and this is I think where people jump to and it's definitely like the most fun uh and maybe sexiest part of it is we start off with the funny mechanisms don't we just love to pick the funny mechanism first and I know that we're gonna it is capital allocation season and I am a mechanism nerd so um but I wanted to call it out this is an anti- pattern the funding mechanism is kind of like the engine in a lot of ways but you have to make sure if this was a car that the rubber meets the road and that it's got tail lights and front lights and a

windshield and windshield wipers and all that thing so like I think that like for me as an engineer I'm recognizing that an anti-pattern is only focusing on the mechanism and not all of the other sort of like soft tissue stuff on top of it exactly we're we can talk about this a little bit more but I think that one of the biggest opportunities of the grand program canvas is that this Grant's design space has been progressing nicely but what's missing is that the design space around Capital allocation has blind spots right now I think that there's a general tendency in we 3 you know I've been in the space now for about two and a half years and there's been an over focus on the funding mechanism part which is understandable like you know we're a

bunch of tech nerds and that I think that the funny mechanism is really where the onchain world gets to really have fun and innovate in novel new ways that you know philanthropic organizations governmental organizations academic institutions they're literally it's like it doesn't even exist as a possibility for them so we get to we end up over indexing on that funding mechanism aspect whereas the design spaces all around it uh get neglected so you know skipping ahead we go from funding mechanism later on you're G to in the in the design phase you're going to design your application and now that we've distinguished that as a design space you know one thing I think getcoin has done a great job at is already defining that design space and creating a tool you

know something gcoin is gonna be talking a lot about uh in the coming months is their Checker tool right so leveraging llms to actually you know run applications through and verify that application reviews are probably the most laborous and timec consuming part of running any grants program and so by identifying that as a design space where problem space where we can design things we've now created a tool that simplifies that process and what lo and behold we've created this like amazing tool for Grants program manager because we've now designed now we've defined that design space right so on the grants canvas I see that we're on the application uh stage of the design space and and just to place back play back the

Checker thought to you uh Checker is a tool that getcoin built in order to use llms to give you feed the llms your elig ility criteria and all the grant descriptions it does a bunch of research on all the grants and it provides you with default acceptance or reject decisions which you can then override and then execute so basically kind of taking the pain out of having to accept and review hundreds of applications in your grants program okay so I'm I'm kind of going out of order here so we finished defined we're on design funding mechanisms and funding mechanisms the reason just sorry sorry to interrupt I was just going to remind the leader that uh if you go to Grants canvas. coin. and download the canvas just as you kind of play jazz all over the canvas having a

visual to Anchor you two is is really helpful it's almost like you know when you're playing a video game there's like a mini map in the corner like that's what the grants canvas is on my screen right here so feel free to follow along by going to Grants canvas. coin. and you can as coach Jay crisscrosses all these things you can uh you can follow them but anyway uh sorry to interrupt I just want to give that listener that grounding go ahead and uh proceed let's keep going yeah so funding mechanisms you're going to choose that based on objectives doesn't that make sense you fig fure out what it is that you want to accomplish and then you choose the fun mechanism to do that right it makes sense what you say it like that it sounds logical but you'd be surprised how many people do not do that when they

design grants programs and they don't know what they're getting into that's it so um we go into a lot of detail about the different uh funding mechanisms the pros and cons there's no right or wrong mechanism to choose it really just depends on what it is that you're trying to accomplish they they all Sue different situations different levels of organizational maturity different budgets different goals Etc so that's the funding mechanism then you actually move into eligibility criteria so that's crafting that criteria use to decide which by which applications are either accepted or denied into the program and then you'll create the application so lots of considerations with applications not just with regards to cool tooling like Checker and stuff like that but thinking about you know questions that

are scalable it's great if your grants program is only getting like 50 applications maybe I don't need a checker tool maybe I can review things manually but once you start getting like a thousand plus applications like no I'm not going to read this two paragraph essay on why I think your project is or is not a public good right it's too much so uh really smart application design is um a huge focus in the design section of canvas so Define design those are the first two phases we ready to move on just looking for the window so I could unmute yes let's keep going okay next is execute so this is where we get into action first thing first I think this one isn't like a one that you need to

spend a lot of time on but it is a roles and responsibilities quadrant just taking like a quick breath to get organized about who is doing what this is where a lot of the coordination failures happen around grants programs so just taking a Time on who has decision rights who's doing what how are you assembling your dream your grants operations dream team is the focus of this uh little quadrant the execute phase then you'll move on to the engagement part this one also is a pretty huge lift it's really all about getting the word out about your branch program how are you attracting that ideal Builder candidate um how are you not just attracting that candidate to being informed about your program but how are you creating the right

Communications to have them feel in uh to entice them to actually apply and then actually creating the support systems to make it easy enough for them to uh apply and actually participate in your grants program and then further supporting them once they've been accepted and uh you need to continue to communicate them and that's just communicating with grantees you you might need to communicate with funders if you're fundraising you know gitcoin uh has been running you know we just finished just wrapped up gg20 gg21 is around the corner uh donors if you're running a quadratic funding round is a huge uh communication play as well so this is what the engagement quadrant is all about and then the last step of the execution phase is what we call dispersement so it's just the payouts

and just sorting out the details like what currency are you paying in what chain are you going to use is it a native token is it a stable coin are there lockup periods kyc AML what are the details around that so it's just a prompt to really make sure you're thinking through all those details and then finally we added in this learn phase uh so there's only two blocks here the first is retrospective the the tldr is just do one just ask for feedback ask the grantees for feedback ask the community for feedback just like take a take one moment to look back see how things went reflect on what worked what didn't work by the way the canvas is also an amazing retrospective tool in the Playbook the gr canvas design Playbook uh we provide

instructions on how you can run a retro using the canvas so you can actually hold in on each aspect of your program and see what worked and what didn't work and then decide on what problems you want to tackle um ahead of your next round so retrospective is one and then the last one is reporting so just figuring out who needs needs to know what information and uh in what format you want to present it in so that you can um get those key takeaways to the right people the right stakeholders to be able to make decisions on how to proceed so that's the canvas in the nutshell Define design execute and learn and then I should probably add at the end rinse and repeat it feels like you've you've kind of just like packaged up all of the things that gitcoin and

the people around us have gotten wrong over the years to give people a way of just knowing the map of the territory before they get into it and like I almost to to mix my analogies a little bit it's almost reminds me of like bumper bowling where it's like I can't get a Gutterball if I'm using the grants canvas on my first grants program design I love that I wish I put that in the book I did not put that in the book but maybe in the next Edition we'll we'll include that yeah I think that's one of my biggest takeaways from undertaking this this process you know we've been talking about grants at getcoin for a long time and having had the opportunity to actually do this research conduct all these interviews and write this book realizing how incredibly complex this uh like running a grants program can be and

being and being able to take it and distill it into being able to answer I don't know about you but probably the most common question we get a getcoin is like where do I start and that's the purpose of the tool it just it gives you that visualized you know layout for exactly where to start and how to proceed I'm curious if you've if you have any crazy stories about about grants programs like things that surprised you in the research process about just what people are doing or not doing as they're running grants programs in this space I think there's a few things that we already mentioned uh choosing the funding mechanism before all that that that's fine one thing I've heard again and again I've seen is just like grants programs that are really actually

marketing campaigns in Disguise uh just choose some marketing kpis instead probably going to be much more effective and um I would say like just to hit this just to like hit this home again the objective setting piece I can't even tell you how poorly some of the objectives have been set across the ecosystem and how often we mix up words even like Mission and objectives which are two very distinct things that actually make a difference in terms of how you're communicating you know what it is that you're trying to accomplish with the program yeah I know there's a lot of there's like I've personally met a lot of amazing people in the web 3 like brilliant Brilliant Minds and I know we're all just like kind of trying and uh even even me taking a look and

like really breaking down like what is an objective like I also was like oh yeah I don't really know what it is now I do I've kind of been making it up as I've been going along this entire time I think we've all kind of I think we've all been kind of doing it right and that's that's the I think that's part of the nature that's why the canvas is also such a cool tool like one of The Inspirations for the canvas was actually you know before this I was in the the startup space as an executive coach that's where the coach J name comes from and um super common at like these accelerators were the business model canvas I'm sure you you're your listeners have heard of the business model canvas it's like 15 years old and it completely revolutionized the way that people can ideate on business ideas

it's like it's all about rapid iteration on business ideas and finding a clear value proposition in like 20 minutes or less and uh it just accelerates the process like big time instead of writing these big honking business plans that are like 20 Pages you can spend 20 minutes and and hit on something that you can actually move forward with and so it's cool we're we're gonna continue to YOLO and E it all out and I'm hoping that and I think we're hoping you know at gitcoin is hoping that this tool can uh help folks Yeet with more success yeah I mean I think the person that I'm thinking of as the ideal consumer of this book is someone who actually I'll just tell a story and I I I will redact

any names but um I was at an event recently uh within the last year in which uh I was an ecosystem of between 20 and 200 people of which there are dozens in the web3 ecosystem so hopefully I'm not doxing anyone but basically the car their charismatic leader came up on stage and made this provocative announcement about delivering hundreds of millions of dollars worth of grants in their ecosystem over and and and good on him because he wanted to fund what matters to his ecosystem and make sure that that ecosystem was successful but you could see the look on like his his Lieutenant's faces of like oh how are we going to operationalize this you know I I I think that like you know if you're if you're the kind of person that that work would be handed off to in a

web 3 based ecosystem and you actually have to turn that Vision into reality then this is this is like your life raft uh or your bumper bowl or your your bumpers and bowling I think is the analogy I used before um in order to turn translate that Vision into action and and hopefully by maintaining this set of best practices getcoins all giving back to the ecosystem but I mean let's be playing here as kind of a marketing vehicle for getcoin getcoin sales grants and growth to these ecosystems so uh that's that's sort of the cross-section of the community that I see it it it hitting and um you know I'm wondering if there's any other personas you have in mind any like archetypes of people that you would like to be able to help I think that we're really just starting with the grants program that your typical growth lead or

grants program manager like I appreciate you kind of calling out the Y and marketing tool but like at the end of the day also like this is a nonproprietary tool it's an open source tool it's under Creative Commons license in the most open form possible so anyone could remix reuse this thing if they want the point is is that at gitcoin like we're clear grants programs work and we're trying to solve problems in capital allocation you know uh one of the reason I joined the space was because I was working with a lot of um folks in the social impact space I was working these like super inspiring Founders Founders who are trying to make their cities carbon neutral Founders who were uh creating like Financial education programs at their credit

unions Founders who were uh giving voices to journalists who didn't normally have voices like just incredible incredible people and like they were just getting constantly shut down by systems that wouldn't just wouldn't fund them and when I heard about the possibility of tackling some of these coordination failures on getting funding into the hands of people who can make the most impact I got like super excited about that and grants right now is the game that we're playing uh there's I think a much larger game that we're going to be playing over the long run but right now grants is where we're focused it's a really exciting

space it's a growing space I think it's because people do see the benefits of it and what we're trying to do with the canvas as well is like we just want to make it easier and uh more accessible to launch and grow grant program like we want to see more grants programs because that means that we're more effectively Distributing like uh Distributing capital and that creates more opportunities for people on the edges of networks and um so I think that's that's all a plus in terms of uh other user stories like to to go back to your question I think like right now we're really focused like I said on the grants program but like super secret

Alpha tip this is a grants program design canvas but it's also kind of just like any incentive program design canvas kind of thing any incentive based program whether it's air drops or whether it's governance delegate incentive programs anytime where there's like an application in order to receive funds you can use the canvas and plan out something really effective that has you reach your goals that has the right people get the rewards and it's all about like maximizing that impact I was mentioning this to you before we started recording but this season of green pill is all about Capital allocation what are the weird more precise more scalable more democratic ways that we're going to distribute capital on chain and I love that you sort of said that this is an

incentivization design program canvas and we're sort of blending the the boundaries between grants which is something that has has existed for hundreds of years and this sort of more abstract non morphic design space of capital allocation and and I just wanted to make some space for you to respond to the thesis of the uh of the Season which was uh we're going to do more weird more precise more scalable more democratic Capital allocation on chain than it's ever been done before anything that that sort of perks your ears up about or any any reactions to that that thesis as someone who's studied the design canvas uh grants canvas for so long I guess my only reaction is is that I think that we're we're just we're we're constantly

making baby steps toward getting to this like Maxima that you've probably talked about on your show a bunch of times and I think the canvas just gives us like a little methodology if you will a way to record what's working and not working I hope that this is definitely not the final version of the canvas I hope someone else out there sees this and invents of other tool or whatever it is that's way better than this but this is like that first step that allows other people to build on it I've heard before like I don't know how true this is but I'm just going to believe it for now is that there's like enough resources on this planet for everyone to live a comfortable you know flourishing life and it really just comes down to

distribution and the effective in distribution of capital not necessarily whether there is enough or not so I see all of these little things as little pieces that build up to something greater that we can't quite see right now but I know that we're heading in the right direction I love that as a North star except I'll call out that to have effective distribution of capital you need effective allocation of capital that's been one thing that we we've been talking about is uh the the minute differen is there but allocation is deciding where to spend the money and then distribution is actually transferring it um that's a good distinction it's it's good to distinguish those two the actual distribution versus how to allocate it I appreciate the Nuance there yeah for sure yeah okay let's get into final

questions if you maximally successful how does this impact the world how does the world change over the next 5 to 10 years uh if the grants canvas is maximally successful five to 10 I mean grant grant program canvas everyone in web 3 who runs a grant program is using this thing and it's it's proliferated well beyond web 3 I mean philanthropic organizations government organizations they catch into this thing they start getting interested in the unique funding mechanisms that we're experting experimenting with here in the web 3 that would be pretty cool imagine governments using conviction voting in order to distribute funding to municipality that sounds like a radical idea we're seeing more grants programs I think that one thing I mentioned the top

of the show I just I think that one of the unique opportunities with the canvas is this design space around canvas around grants sorry it really opens up it becomes more visible and it actually invites more people to contribute and actually start helping us to tackle this this this onchain Capital allocation design space and then I also love to see new use cases Beyond grants forming so beyond even incentive program maybe there's things that I haven't thought of that this canvas could be used for um or iterated on is there anything I didn't ask that you want to say no I guess we didn't start the show by asking how I was doing today but that's more of like a Canadian thing that I do like we just like hey how are you doing and I just say fine even though I'm not maybe that

fine but that's the only thing you miss maybe yeah okay well uh it if our editors could edit that and uh edit some manners into my co-hosting style at this top of the episode that'd be great I want to end by quickly Shing uh I actually haven't talked about this on the podcast before so this will be the first unveil of it but we're looking at during Q2 or sorry Q3 and Q4 of 2024 doing guest green pill co uh Seasons where basically we decentralize the host role me to other people in the community and allow them to go off on their own little Adventure similar to how we had impact season season 3 and capital allocation season 4 and we got got a bunch of great applications from co-hosts that are well known in the ecosystem and can take us on these Journeys and you are one of them so if

you decide to do it which I I don't think that you've committed yet but uh can you shill us the season that you pitched to green pill and uh what you would be covering in it yeah absolutely so it's going to start off basically with a deep dive of the canvas I mean we we really just scratched the surface for all of these different steps these quadrants like there's a whole world of uh objective setting there's a whole world of measur we're talking about key results versus uh leading indicators versus lagging indicators versus uh you know like how are you creating really powerful specific granular measurements to actually get what you want there's just like a whole world of nuance to go into within each of these design spaces and I'm planning to bring the greatest Minds

in web 3 to have conversations about where their head is at in terms of solving these problems um so that's what we're going to talk about love it well stay tuned for That season coming soon TM on green pill Coach Jay thanks for the grant canvas I think it's public good for the ecosystem and really excited for the listeners to check it out you want to shill the the download link in the call to action real quick before we break yes gr canvas. coin. and if you're listening to this uh soon after it comes out we'll be in Brussels as well at ec7 on Monday July 8th we're having an amazing event in the afternoon uh we're going over the canvas but it's like kind of like a really experiential way we got an amazing lineup of people it's a gitcoin and tally event but we've also

got folks from hatch protocol we've got folks from stable lab there we've got folks from protocol Guild metago it's like a really solid lineup and if you've ever been to a gitcoin event there's always good vibes so um make sure to come join us IRL if you can great so the call to action is go to grsc canvas. gitcoin doco download the book for free you can buy a copy of the book which will be physically shipped to you and then if you're coming to ECC check out the link in the show notes to the getcoin Aly Etc party so thanks so much for coming on the podcast Coach Jay this is great pleasure thanks for having me all right we just heard from coach Jay about the grants Candice and the accompanying book I'm excited about him and his work because getcoins mission is

to fund What Matters by decentralizing the knowledge of how to launch a web3 grants program we are doing that we are realizing that mission and we're also playing with capital allocation and actually doing it thanks again for listening to the green pill. network podcast again we feature are the people who are building a coordination a network Society of hackers dreamers and doers using crypto to bring positive sum digital systems to the world like coach Jay and the work that we are doing at gitcoin if you value our work you can go to pods. medgreen pill and collect this episode uh all episodes are available on chain thanks again to MMA on chain for being a top collector of the green pill podcast really means a lot helps us uh

Finance the production of these podcasts which we uh just run at cost and they're really an offering for the web3 ecosystem while you're here if you're not into onchain collecting please hit like rate or review on your podcast player it really helps the algorithms spread the word about the regen and the web 3 movements thanks again for listening I will see you on the next one peace