Here are five benefits of using a DAO to organize your community.
1. Shared Community Ownership
A great way to align incentives is to turn community members into owners of the community. This way, when members contribute to the community, they participate in the upside of their efforts. Aligning community members around the group’s mission creates a sense of shared skin in the game.
In a DAO, tokens represent ownership in the community and are often proportional to a community member's voting power.
2. Higher Community Engagement
In a world of nearly unlimited choice when it comes to how we spend our time, a community leader might be worried about engaging and retaining their communities.
By aligning incentives through shared ownership, you increase community member accountability and engagement.
3. Continuous Community Feedback
One of the great things about DAOs, is that all decisions are made by the community, for the community. Because decisions are made by majority vote on proposals, and any community member can make a proposal, you can be certain that you’re getting accurate feedback on what community members actually want to do.
Community-made proposals ensure that all voices are given the opportunity to be heard. This also produces better outcomes for the community, as it provides the opportunity for a greater variety of ideas than one person could come up with alone.
4. Increased Community Funding
In addition to time, community leaders can end up investing a lot of their own ($$$) resources to sustain their community or have to raise outside funds to do so.
There are several ways to structure membership to a DAO, with one way involving members contributing funds into the shared community wallet once they are accepted to the community.
By having community members contribute into the shared wallet, you’ll have a central source of funds to be working from. No more scraping together sponsorship dollars, or trying to get people to Venmo you after an event.
When your community votes on what activities they want to do, you’ll be able to immediately take action because you have the funding to do so.
5. Greater Opportunities to Reward Contributors
If you want to provide an opportunity for community members to get involved and be rewarded for their contributions, a great way to make community members feel seen is by rewarding them with DAO tokens. You can recognize and reward top community contributors who are attending events, inviting new members, helping plan events, and any way that adds positive value to the community.
If you’re thinking about transitioning your community to a DAO, Upstream is here to help!