My name is Deana Burke and I’m the planning steward for the marketing working group at the Celo Foundation. I’m excited to share our plans for the upcoming season, in an effort to become a category-defining web3 brand.
If you are unfamiliar with the Celo Foundation’s Season Planning process, I recommend taking a look at @bhavishya’s forum post here.
Working Group Purpose
Expand the reach and awareness of Celo as a L1 blockchain, deepen understanding of what makes Celo a thriving ecosystem, and amplify the work of the mission-aligned builders and founders in the Celo community.
A view of last season
Grew the Celo Foundation’s official Twitter account to 400K+ followers, up from <100K.
Launched the #ReFiSummer campaign, establishing Celo as web3’s home for ReFi builders and founders (#ReFi also trended on Twitter during EthCC!)
Launched Celo Connect, and hosted thousands of people at our flagship event in Barcelona, as well as at our follow-up Celo Connect Salon events in Paris and NYC.
Secured key media and influencer placements with CoinDesk, Packy McCormick’s Not Boring, Girl Gone Crypto, Cryptonauts, Cointelegraph, Yahoo Finance, and others.
Established a robust Twitter Spaces schedule and process, with listeners averaging over 1K per spaces.
Looking outward
The market slowdown has shifted our focus to nurturing the community of builders and founders within the Celo ecosystem. We are focusing areas of work on engagement - both offline through events and online on social media. We are also looking to create a breakthrough moment for the Celo community, which is expressed in the brand evolution work slated for end of Q4 and the related media investments.
Upcoming goals for Season 11
Launch a major brand evolution campaign, currently slated for end of Q4.
2M impressions on social media for launch week
3+ Tier 1 press placements
Increase social media engagement across Twitter, LinkedIn and TikTok, with sustained growth on Twitter.
Foster connections through in-person experiences and attract new people to the Celo ecosystem through events - 20% of event attendees new to Celo.
Increase traffic to Celo’s blog, and increasing open rate on Celo newsletters.
Secure 5 key media placements per quarter.
Launch the Celo Block Party, a quarterly celebration to amplify the good work across the ecosystem
Secure two major media placements per quarter with an aggregate, targeted audience of 1MM+
Your feedback
Please share your feedback on this post! What do you agree or disagree with? What should we be doing more or less of, and how can we improve? Your input matters greatly to us, and will only strengthen the work that we do. We look forward to hearing from you!
Hi Deana,
Thanks for your post!
A few points where I would like to know your opinion:
Does Celo have any plan to increase engagement on Reddit?
Celo is often seen as a VC Blockchain by CT, how can we attract more Crypto People into our fantastic Blockchain if the sentiment is this? Are Crypto People our Target audience?
I think Celo can prosper in parts of the world where the banking system is not so well developed. In fact, I would love to hear if there are any plans to boost the marketing and communication efforts in Africa and Asia?
After the shift to ReFi many people from the community reached out to us, confused about the shift in communication, asking if Celo still aims to connect the 6 billion smartphone users. Many competitors are starting with communication more focused on mobile and smartphone (ex. Solana phone/sdk).
Does Celo completely abandon this narrative or is still alive and there are marketing plans to continue to expand awareness about it?
Hi! Thank you so much for taking the time to read the post and submit such a thoughtful response and questions - I really appreciate it.
Notes below:
Does Celo have any plan to increase engagement on Reddit? We do some management of the Celo Reddit presence, though not nearly as much as we’d like. It’s a resource constraint, as we’re managing comms across many platforms. That said, we are looking to cross-post content to Reddit to increase visibility on that platform, and maybe more active management is something we can ramp up in Q1.
Celo is often seen as a VC Blockchain by CT, how can we attract more Crypto People into our fantastic Blockchain if the sentiment is this? Are Crypto People our Target audience? We are thinking a lot about how to approach progressive decentralization, starting with things like Regional DAOs and also working more out in the open as the Foundation. Crypto-natives are a very important target audience for us, and we need to move with integrity and transparency in order to change their minds about Celo. This is a lot of the work we’re doing now, which will continue with the brand evolution work and what follows.
I think Celo can prosper in parts of the world where the banking system is not so well developed. In fact, I would love to hear if there are any plans to boost the marketing and communication efforts in Africa and Asia? Yes! I totally agree. We have a lot of plans for Africa in particular, as we already have a lot of builders and founders using Celo for their Dapps in places like Lagos. It’s definitely an area you’ll see us lean into a lot in 2023.
After the shift to ReFi many people from the community reached out to us, confused about the shift in communication, asking if Celo still aims to connect the 6 billion smartphone users. Many competitors are starting with communication more focused on mobile and smartphone (ex. Solana phone/sdk).
Does Celo completely abandon this narrative or is still alive and there are marketing plans to continue to expand awareness about it? I think ReFi and mobile-first are actually very interconnected. It’s not one or the other - it’s both! We aren’t abandoning mobile at all - in fact we’re doubling down in that area. We’re working on a blog post about this that will be coming out soon.
Reddit - The Celo Foundation also has an ambassador program – if you have any recommendations for folks to help lead Reddit engagement please intro them. cc: @annaalexa
Local Ecosystem - please see the forum post from @Aliu , @MilaRioja , @meltems and Kyle. You might also want to check out the proposal for the local Africa DAO. I’d love to see more proposals from the community!
We are a Celo Foundation Grantee and are building a podcast for Celo: Unblock.
Would love to help you achieve these marketing goals in the next season @deana
Hi @0xGoldo ! I wanted to FUP re another possibility for Celo Community growth and devs engagement:
I also think that Celo has great use case for countries where the banking system is not so strong. In LatAm we have an interesting mix with countries with low infra but also Brazil as a leading crypto community w/ a very well developed banking system and financial markets structure.
In BR, Celo is real (pun intended with our Real currency and cReal stable asset), and has the rails necessary to grow by the hands of the local community. Projects like LoveCrypto are experimenting with govt. Sandbox, while Bitfy , Coins, Ripio , BitcoinTrade and FlowBTC allow for CICO and real world use cases with Celo, cUSD. cEUR and cReal. Ribon and Impact Market may be the leading charity projects, while we also se a crescent REFI interest not only in Brazil with Detrash, but also in Colombia with the recent MIT Tech Review featured company Unergy.
The comms for these happen in Portuguese and Spanish channels led by the community. You can see a little of what is done here and here (although our people really like Instagram - where you can also find PT and ESP channels).
The reason why I am posting this comment is bc sometimes, due to the language barrier, the initiatives undertaken in LatAm may not be so often seen, while I think there is huge space and opportunities here for the global developer community. Not only regulatory landscape in LatAm is generally welcoming to crypto but a lot of incumbent players (like mobile carriers/banks) are already taking off with crypto initiatives that may be more strategic to pursue due to costs/regulatory and competitive scenario (for a short “now” at least).
Let me know if you want to chat anytime about whats happening here! Here is our DAO proposal
Thanks for your answer @MilaRioja
I indeed agree with you and although I’m not a Spanish/Portuguese speaker, I do recognize the LATM community as the most active local community on Celo
Would be awesome to see a crypto Debit card where users can use Cstables in order to pay at local shops. Recently a friend of mine from Argentina visited me here in Europe and showed me this interesting debit card called Lemon cash (Buy and Sell Bitcoin, Ethereum and USDT - Lemon Cash)
Agreed! NovaDax is an Exchange that had a card and is interested in doing that. TBH this is long due as you can see here. As for Lemon Cash - I meet with them regularly and they now have offices in BR. They invited us to co-host workshops on their new offices and we will kick this off this year. As for them having Celo + stables the matter seems to be what exchanges list cUSD. There is a limitation there (where it is listed currently versus the exchanges they need).
Updates: Just met founder of CoinsWallet yesterday and he said the card feature with Celo crypto top up is available already. I will request mine to try. Let your Brazilian friends know!
