Design Club's mission is to help children learn design thinking as a life skill. To do this, we enlist the support of industry mentors (UX designers, service designers, user researchers and other professionals).
We already ask a lot of our community. Our mentors volunteer their time in the evenings or at weekends to run or help out at free Design Clubs in schools and public spaces.
Our community is awesome, but the past 18 months have been tough. Many schools and weekend venues have been closed. We've experimented with online delivery, but remote learning is never the same. It's hard to create the sparks and understanding that come through real life connections.
These difficulties are compounded by problems our volunteer mentors have been facing in their own lives due to Covid-19: job uncertainties, family issues, financial and health worries.
Where does Coil come in?
We know people are reassessing their lives and their values because of the pandemic. We hope this is bringing about a seismic shift. We're wondering how Design Club, and our mission, can help facilitate that process.
As I mentioned in our first grant report, many in our community are already engaged in the idea of a healthier internet. And we know they're values-driven because that's what motivated them to volunteer with Design Club in the first place.
Maybe it makes sense for us to tie the positive potential of Coil and Web Monetization into a broader campaign - something around designing a better future. But what's the best way to make this really resonate with our audience? Our community are tech-savvy but they're not necessarily technophiles.
Questions for other grantees
- How are you promoting the benefits of Web Monetization and Coil to your communities?
- If your community is creator-led, like ours, how have you convinced them to sign up as a Coil creator, when the benefits are still minimal?
- Have you had any success with persuading people to subscribe to Coil for the "greater good"? If so, how?
- What types of premium content are you offering to convince people that a Coil subscription is worth it?
We'd really value your help! Please share your experience here in the comments - or follow me to direct message.
Thank you!
Top comments (10)
This seems perhaps the most important question in the community, and of course many of us are trying in different ways to address it. We've found it helpful to visualise a 2x2 grid with 'creator' and 'consumer' on one side, and 'inspiration' and 'incentive' on the other and place different initatives accordingly (the word 'consumer' sounds passive and isn't ideal, but 'viewer/audience' excludes readers/listeners and I havn't got a better term yet) - some spanning multiple boxes.
As you say, with negligable income from WM at present, there needs to be a strong focus on the inspiration side ("something around designing a better future"). Arguably we're at the stage in uptake where that's the strongest pitch – and it is a strong pitch, given both the trouble creatives have to get paid, and the limited options centralisation gives to media consumers. The pitch seems somewhat similar to creative and consumer.. ie 'a better web' – and of course many consumers create, and all creatives consume.
Still, the practical incentives probably shouldn't be dismissed, and will most likely differ more than the inspiration pitch between creative and consumer.
For instance, years ago I took the time to open a wallet account with GateHub because I was promised 2000 Ripple/XRP if I did. I wouldn't have done otherwise. It was a promotion back then and amounted to around $5 at the time. It was quite a suprise many years later when I read a news story, logged in and saw it had grown over 200 times. But 'cash' is low-hanging fruit and will appeal more to some groups than others. Perhaps the most obvious – at creator end – is bundling signup with another service, tool or platform, ie offering additional value, viewers, functions, etc. That's why developments in the API to support tip-jars and one-off payments are appealing as it would increase the reasons why creators should setup a wallet and payment pointer.
Thanks Nic. I like your 2x2! It's very useful to hear how you're approaching the problem and I appreciate you taking the time to post this thoughtful response.
Regarding the questions:
Thanks Radhy. It's good to hear about your project. Wish you all the best of luck with your official launch and look forward to hearing how it goes!
Many thanks!
For the Hyperaudio for Conference project I've thought about this quite a lot, it's definitely a challenge! I like your grid Nic! Similarly I think our approach will be to both inspire and incentivise.
We are planning on investing some time on content that will explain the benefits of signing up for Coil/wallet/download the extension and explaining in a straightforward (and fun?) way how to do this.
We have a number of different types of users that will benefit from web monetization – conference organisers, speakers, people who remix and people who share conference content can all receive a share of WM funds.
The conference organiser can also decide to make certain content viewable only to people with Coil membership. The benefit to them is that content is more likely to be remixed and shared, which can raise awareness / visibility for their conference as a whole.
On the creator side ...
I wonder if people's curiosity could also be tapped with some careful messaging. In our case, if people were registered with our platform but not set up with Coil, we could remind them that with a payment pointer, they could have been compensated.
Totally not thought through and quite possibly not feasible, but maybe we could keep track of what they would have earned and even put those earnings aside until they add a payment pointer to their account.
Last thought on this – as it's relatively easy to insert a payment pointer into most systems, maybe we can encourage "good causes" to publish their payment pointers, so that people can select from a list. This doesn't necessarily solve the issue of creating more consumers, but could raise general awareness.
Thanks for taking the time to comment Mark. I agree awareness raising is the key!
@lwlkarama these are some interesting questions i think we should answer.
Love this! I took your first question and made it our weekly discussion topic, see here: community.interledger.org/chrislar...
Brilliant Chris - thank you!