Summary
Dealing with voter fatigue and finding the right onboarding incentives are points of struggle for every DAO. The fact that DAOs do not have any information on their non-participating members makes the puzzle harder. DeepDAO believes that it is possible to understand $SSV token holders down to their interest categories and activity patterns to point toward measures to improve voter participation.
We propose conducting a data-based segmentation of $SSV token holders to find out the largest segments of non-voters, voters with decaying participation scores, etc. to point toward the right onboarding steps/incentives for them.
How to address this
Governance activity in different DAOs provides valuable insights into the characteristics and preferences of wallet holders.
For example, taking a closer look at 0xjean.eth, we observe a strong inclination towards identity products(from participation in DAOs like Proof of Humanity, Sismo, etc.) and Public Goods (from participation in DAOs like UBI DAO, Gitcoin, etc). This presents an opportunity for any other DAO 0xjean.eth is a member of to leverage this interest by introducing DAO participation badges or an initiative focused on public goods.
Similarly, we can identify other categories of mass interest and introduce new initiatives to the DAO. For instance, let’s consider the scenario where out of the 3k+ $SSV holders, we identify 1000s of individuals highly interested in NFTs, public goods, education and research, and identity solutions. With this information, SSV DAO may consider establishing sub-DAOs or guilds, each with a yearly budget, to advance the SSV DAO’s mission in these specific areas.
Note that we aren’t directly incentivizing governance participation but trying to introduce genuine initiatives that make participation more attractive and useful to a wider audience.
Methodology
At a high level, this analysis consists of these main tasks:
(1) DeepDAO provides a DAO-profile for each $SSV holder. However, before proceeding with this analysis, we will perform extensive quality assurance to ensure that every $SSV holder is accurately represented, and their activities are aggregated as comprehensively as possible.
(2) The interest categories of participants differ greatly among DAOs. To factor this in, we’ll sort the set of token holders by their DAO participation scores and take the top n’k addresses to manually find out several interest categories that best segment them. These categories will be utilized to segment the top m’k addresses (m>n) in order to confirm that we have the most actionable and specific categories representing $SSV holders. We will repeat these steps until we discover satisfactory interest categories after which we’ll classify $SSV holders into these buckets.
(3) We will employ a similar methodology as described above to determine the optimal activity categories that segment $SSV holders.
(4) Clean the lists above to label bots and potentially malicious actors: our research identified voting miners’ activity across the DAO ecosystem.
(5) Based on DeepDAO’s domain expertise in Web3 and governance, work with SSV DAO’s community and growth staff to define the right incentives / onboarding steps for each segmented group.
- Some examples of interest labels are: NFTs, DeFi, Investments, Gaming, gig work, public goods, identity solutions, labels based on governance app etc. “Interest” is defined as membership or activity in a DAO category over a threshold.
** Some examples of activity labels are: persistent voter, long-term dormant address, non-voter, an address that used to participate, an address that is getting less interested in participating over time, etc.
Data & Metrics
The data we’ll be using for this analysis can include:
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SSV DAO governance data (Snapshot)
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DAO profiles of all $SSV holders which include:
- A DAO score based on the volume and time-period of their DAO activity, along with a rank (among the other 6.8M+ profiles on DeepDAO.)
- Granular governance data, including their votes and proposal history, across the DAO ecosystem, spanning multiple governance frameworks and blockchains.
- Their delegation data (as a delegator & delegate, on multiple DAOs across Snapshot and Governor.)
- Their participation data across multiple DAO categories (DeepDAO categorizes over 1000 DAOs into 13 categories, more than any other DAO data aggregator)
- Their participation in airdrop mining and other unorthodox activities.
- Other data from DeepDAO API to check for effect of voting coalitions, predicted governance activity, trends (for eg, how treasury trends correlated with the community’s engagement in the DAO), etc.
Deliverables
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A report with analysis of all governance participants of SSV DAO, and non-active $SSV holders. This will answer questions like who are the primary participants, which are the largest segments of active, and inactive participants, which segments have the highest attrition / retention, etc.
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A CSV file with all $SSV token holders and their category interests, as reflected by the DAOs they vote in.
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An action plan report, to understand the best strategies for optimizing DAO participation, based on our findings and incorporating suggestions from SSV DAO DAO through brainstorming sessions.
Milestones
Milestone 1:
DeepDAO dives deeper into $SSV holders and finalizes the optimal labels & interest categories.
Time required: 4 weeks from the start of the project
Milestone 2:
DeepDAO hands over deliverables (1), (2) & (3)
Time required: 4 weeks from Milestone 1 completion
Funding
We request a total grant funding of 15,000 with the following breakdown: 33% ($5,000) after Milestone 1 and the remaining 67% ($10,000) after Milestone 2.
About DeepDAO
DeepDAO is the #1 discovery and analytics engine for the DAO ecosystem. We aggregate, list, and analyze financial and governance data for over 12.5k DAOs and millions of governance token holders, and voters, across different chains and governance platforms. DeepDAO is widely recognized in the ecosystem, and media as the go-to source for data about DAOs.