DISCLAIMER: This is a non-exhaustive list of strategies that I observed after joining, with curiosity, dozens of NFT communities.

Please share any feedback you have in mind while reading. I genuinely want to improve this list.

None of the information presented in this document is intended to form the basis for any financial advice — investing in NFTs is a hazardous activity. And you should be careful.

Memes and humour

Memes have the power to represent and convey messages, values and cultural traits in a simple, clever and funny image.

They make members feel in the right place because they identify with a group of individuals that understand a particular kind of humour and share interests, passions or even weird aspects of their lives.

☑️ Create a channel dedicated to memes and jokes related to your project to get people to laugh

☑️ Keep an eye on internal community trends: when something bizarre, strange, or cool happens, create a meme that funnily tells that story

☑️ Get inspired use the most used meme templates

Make contests and challenges

Get members involved in your project: give them micro-tasks and get them to do something together.

Why does it work?

Achieving goals as a team strengthen the relationships between members and make them feel part of a group that makes impactful decisions.

Some examples here:

• Jigscene Puzzle, members collaborate to find all the layers of the puzzle

• The Glue Factory creates a dark/funny series of stories with their NFTs. Members can make suggestions for the stories (their preview video)

• Draw the best custom emoji contest

• Come up with a great meme related to the community

• Cool Cats has a channel where members share their “cool cat” arts

• World of Women asked its members to find and post celebrities similar to their NFTs

• The Doge Pound requested their members to post pictures of Dogs or Lamborghini (connect IRL things help establish emotional connections with the online community)

At the end of the contests and challenges, members vote for the best submissions and community managers reward the winners.

On Sparkwave.xyz we provide tools to create community quests on Discord and Twitter.

DAO — Decentralized Autonomous Organization

Read this article if you want to understand what a DAO is.

If it’s TL;TR, a DAO is a community-led entity where all the decisions are made through the community, not a single or a group of leaders.

DAOs have decentralized treasuries with all the community shared assets (e.g. crypto, NFTs). The pool of funds is visible to everyone, so everyone knows how these funds are being spent.

No CEO can authorize spending based on their whims, and no chance of a dodgy CFO manipulating the books.

In this context, community members feel to be the stakeholders and owners of the community. And this feeling increases the sense of belonging, involvement and support.

☑️ Create a channel where people share their ideas on how to improve the community, how to spend money or propose a special activity to do

☑️ Use Snapshot as a decentralized voting system

☑️ Members propose and vote on ideas

Example of a DAO and why it could benefit community managers and members.

Other DAOs examples https://poweredby.aragon.org

Custom Emojis

Communities are where members talk about passions, concerns, goals and funny things. In Slack and Discord channels, conversations are mainly text-based.

You must provide members with more expressive tools to manifest their unique emotions.

Use custom emojis that represent your brand and tone of voice; take a look at these examples:

Virtual meetups

Create virtual meetups using spatial interface software where members can hang out in 2D/3D metaverses with their avatars. Try one of these tools:

• Bramble.live

• Gather.town

• Gatheround.com

• Orbital.chat

• Topia.io

☑️ Use POAP (proof of attendance protocol) → people love to collect badges “I’ve been there.”

Connect members 1:1

As shown in this Twitter thread, communities are places where members connect because they share goals, interests and passions.

Members love to meet like-minded people: so why not help them do that?

☑️ Build connections between members, not only between you and them

Keep NFT rarity secret (by Adam Bomb Squads)

NFTs have Metadata.

Metadata tells you how rare is the NFT you purchased.

Of course, this is a feature of the NFT that you usually know from the beginning.

Not for Adam Bomb Squads; they kept this information secret for weeks.

And make their members stick around the community with curiosity, discussing the potential rarity of their NFTs.

→ Read more here

Giveaways

The idea is that when you buy NFTs, you become a member of an exclusive community that will reward you with perks, benefits, access to content, join events and live life within the community.

But there is more.

Lazy Lions pushed the “Giveaway” concept forward. Basically, a percentage of their NFT sales goes back to the community every month.

Yes, members earn money just by owning a Lazy Lion NFT. Members want the community to succeed because the community’s success is their success.

This is why they participate and spread the word more. It’s proven that this strategy makes members participate in the community with a new level of engagement and involvement.

On Sparkwave.xyz we provide a set of tools to launch effective giveaway campaigns on Discord and Twitter.

Create Squads

One of the core challenges in Web3 is that as communities become more successful, they also become more inaccessible.

Watch this video.

The solution proposed by @Cooopahtroopa in the video is excellent.

You can also tackle this issue by dividing the community into sub-communities.

Adam Bomb Squads grouped members with similar bombs (NFTs) in squads.

In smaller community sections, members can make more profound and robust relationships. Yes, just based on the fact that they share similar visual aspects of their NFT/bombs.

Get rid of haters, fud and fears. Immediately.

Members of NFTs communities are constantly worried about scams. Rumours of rug pulling or scammers can quickly turn off the community in hours.

☑️ Handle “bad times” with authenticity, and transparency, show them that you’re listening... turn this bad time into an opportunity to build relationships with members

☑️ Tell everyone about the issues of you your project as soon as possible

☑️ Do AMAs to handle fires within the community from the beginning, give members frequent updates about the project and answer all the questions they ask

☑️ Moderate spam and toxic behaviours and limit haters accordingly with your code of conduct

☑️ Create a feedback/help channel where you can listen to members’ voices

☑️ Feedback channel of Axie Infinity community https://axieinfinity.com/

Traditions and rituals

Routine activities, traditions and rituals define the community identity and make members feel at home.

Example: Look at the “🌞-gm” channel on the Latecheckout Discord server. GM means good morning. Every day members wake up and type “gm” in this channel.

Things you need to do (not strictly Web3 related)

☑️ Empower most active community members by giving them recognition (free tokens or NFTs for their contributions)

☑️ Ask questions to learn more about your audience, collect ideas from members, and give them a chance to share their opinions and feedback

☑️ Ask the community what they want or read their conversations

☑️ DM most active members and talk with them — be authentic, in a word, a friend who tries to help them succeed.

☑️ Pull members into relevant conversations by tagging them in the threads if you know who might be interested

"hey @matteomosca_ I know you are interested in this 😏"

☑️ Share exciting content from external social media and add CTA for other members (tag who can be interested)

Onboarding new members

It’s essential to have a well-defined strategy for onboarding new members.

But this will be a new chapter I will share on my Twitter soon.

With 💙 by Matteo Mosca

Founder of Sparkwave — 1000+ true lifetime fans, without paid ads