At the heart of every outreach initiative is the audience. In our case it’s the NEAR Community. With the NEAR Community Surveys, NIA aims to achieve greater community participation, steadily and organically — while staying true to the spirit of surveying and insight gathering. We believe that lending our ears to the NEAR Community is the best way to serve them and this has been our guiding principle.
The Idea:
Surveys and polls have always been viewed as traditional and time-worn practices to gather user feedback and crowdsource opinions. The idea behind NEAR Community Surveys is to break free from the unimaginative and hackneyed surveying methodologies, and putting the community at the driving seat. What if we could make surveys and polls effective tools to not just gather insights from the community but also to grow the NEAR Community itself and mobilize the Community towards network goals?
- How do we plan to achieve that? Making the Community feel at ease, encouraging ecosystem participants to fill out the survey by adding incentives for participation. Incentives don’t necessarily have to NEAR tokens or NFT airdrops every time. We are building a unique reward structure, one that would be a first of its kind experiment in itself.
- But won’t offering incentives invite spam and bogus responses by non-serious or fake respondents? Yes and we can confidently say that we have planned out fool-proofing our methodology to tackle such acts since the element of spam comes with the package. Questionnaires and studies that carry incentives, always entail a certain amount of responses that are either outright spam or aimed at gaming the procedure to get the reward. We have planned to put not one but multiple “hurdles” in place so that even if the fake respondents get past one of the counter-spam measures, it will be nearly impossible for them to submit their responses.
- How can surveys be of any help in achieving NEAR Protocol network goals? Great question! Surveys in isolation can only achieve so much and that is almost always collecting data, feedback, opinions or insights. We plan to couple our surveys with case-specific “Clarion Calls” and tasks which would require the community or respondents to first participate in the given activities, or do the said tasks and then share their experience or opinions in the survey. NEAR Community Clarion Calls are actually going to be regular community events, focusing on different components in the NEAR Ecosystem at a time. We plan on them to drive community engagement like never before and we are fairly confident of adding value to NEAR Protocol’s outreach efforts, as we officially roll them out as a full-fledged Guild activity in the coming weeks.
- This is an evolving idea, which would involve a lot of editing and thought experimenting as we keep learning from our social metrics assessments. The motivation behind this initiative is to use surveys as growth hacking tools for community building and raising protocol awareness. While our overall goal is to build a dynamic, comprehensive and flexible database of opinions, much like a database of quantitative units, and to connect it with the rapidly changing trends in the crypto sphere, with time-specific and case-specific correlations to derive optimum and least flawed assessments of the prevailing community inclinations at different intervals during the market cycle, and pertaining to various other conditions, sui generis.
In short: For the greater good, business surveys should evolve from merely being means of data collation to becoming tools for marketing, community building and creating awareness about the product. This should be the norm for all business participants in Web-3 economy. Surveys are powerful tools for insight and data collection but they can be supercharged and loaded with a tonne of growth hacks like community clarion calls or specific calls to actions in order to drive more users to contribute towards community building, usability assessment and stealth marketing.
