Communication/MarCom.md

## LEDGER Marcom Strategy and Growth Hacking Plan

## INTRODUCTION/VISION-VIEW

In terms of Marketing and Communication Strategy (MarCom hereafter), LEDGER can be thought of as an 'attractor' involving four main communities froming LEDGER's community of communities: citizens and consumers, developers, policymakers and business communities together with all the stakeholders populating these networks.  In effect, it would be pretty farfetched to argue that LEDGER can become a game changer in the market without the contribution of these communities and related stakeholders bases. Therefore, special emphasis will be put on how to engage such parties. Given the resources and timespan of the project, the latter are fundamental to effectively contribute to the marketing, communication and dissemination of LEDGER’s values as emerging from the Strategic Research and Innovation Work Programme and the descending business value proposition.

Contrary to most Push Marketing practices endorsed in the conventional market place, LEDGER’s MarCom strategy shall aim at pulling in and securing the involvement of the proper parties, i.e. those who can understand and appreciate LEDGER’s ethos values and business value proposition.

Pull Marketing practices and techniques will be rolled out thakns to the dissemination of project's deliverables within the four communities, and related stakeholders bases, mentioned above.  In particular, LEDGER as an attractor is a dynamic process in which these four communities, and related stakeholders, will converge over time to provide a space for direct engagement and production of optimal exploitation strategies around LEDGER outcomes.

Marketing activities will be organised at the light of the marketability needs of each vertical in order to promote a collaborative economy framework wherein each contributing party will acknowledge a direct and impactful engagement.

Each vertical framework will leverage both the network outreach capabilities of evaluators and mentors. Moreover, marketing will be strictly intertwined with following the trail of dissemination activities in order to underpin MVPs with real world communities and meeting their real needs.

Indeed, in the SRI Work Programme deliverable we have covered a wide range of results  that all confirm that there is a need for both software development and business models that take into account the non-neutrality of digital infrastructures in the enhancement of their respective narratives.

In this context, non-neutrality results from the interaction of academic, policy, development and market forces, still promoting practices and techniques to achieve short-term thinking, compulsory growth, increased income disparity and decline in social capital. In this context it is important to remind that all affect each of these communities.

These factors contribute to the inability for the four communities to have a common voice to advocate an emancipatory agenda to liberate them from the shortsighted constraints mentioned above. By contrast, when it comes to the advantages for citizens and consumers together with policy and business sectors’ awareness of the importance to serve society with their endeavours, LEDGER aims at promoting open source models that take into account sustainable growth for the social good.

Accordingly, the MarCom strategy will be addressed to these communities as they make the overall perimeter of initial LEDGER impact.  The driving force will be the firm determination by the consortium to achieve successful outreach within all the four communities listed above. Successful outreach is measured to the extent to which LEDGER’s decentralised development ecosystems can be appealing to the citizens and operators working to let them meet their needs and desires in terms of decentralised data governance.

## METHODOLOGY

The methodology will follow the rationale for open source projects’ development, whereby individuals from all four communities will choose how to contribute with their knowledge to parts of the LEDGER platform. The goal in this case will be to provide LEDGER with topics and themes for contribution. In turn, the members of the various communities will, at their discretion, decide how to engage with their talents in order to provide their best skills.

*PLEASE ADD STUFF HERE, WE NEED TO AGREE ON METHOD AS DYNE.*

## EXECUTION

### CITIZENS AND CONSUMERS

First, citizens and consumers communities are confronted with issues that too often do not account for the ‘negotiable divide’ impelling onto them. Both policymakers and business communities are not always in tune with the needs of citizens and consumers in that the latter have to account for market dynamics that do not allow to take care of the problems affecting the former.

With LEDGER, both marketing and communication strategies will need to account for this lack of presence from the poles that affect them the most in their potential for choices that would empower and assist them in re-appropriating the  socio-economic outcomes of the data and value belonging to them.

Hence, citizens and consumers will be endowed with knowledge and tools to face the negotiable divide in order to let them have a voice in the process of emancipation from socio-economic models that do not serve their needs and desires.

From a better understanding of both rights and duties of e-citizenry and e-commerce practices to the possibility to engage with LEDGER’s online communication platforms, both citizens and consumers will find ways, through social media and real world channels, to take part to the conversation affecting their ability to bargain for the kind of services that they purposefully aspire to enjoy as a right or to buy from the market.

### DEVELOPERS

Secondly, developers will be periodically informed about the state of the software stack developed within LEDGER from LEDGER GitHub’s channels (LINK TO LEDEGR GITHUM AS FOR T1.6 STATED IN THE THE PROPOSAL). by leveraging on community dynamics, they will have the possibility to further influence the direction of development and will be heard in terms of their needs when they relate to how decentralised data governance should grow within the different vertical use cases.

PLEASE ASPASIA AND JARO CONTRIBUTE TO THIS (Secondly)

### POLICYMAKERS
Policymakers are the communities that have a remarkable negotiable power in terms of project outreach outside the MVPs lab environment. Thus, at the policymaking level, LEDGER MarCom strategy will target both individuals and groups who have a stake into the outcomes of the project.

LEDGER will therefore encourage marketing, communication and dissemination activities to influence opinion and decision making processes within the policy domain by directly informing and attending to events promoted first and foremost by the Commission and relevant Directorates General, esp. those relevant to the implementation of solutions to problems affecting LEDGER’s verticals.

### BUSINESS COMMUNITIES

LEDGER success will be measured in terms of uptake of its MVPs by the market populated by citizens and consumers enabled to access business models that serve their needs while avoiding to ask anything in exchange without their previous knowledge and consent. As a result and thanks to FBA and BLM’s leading roles, consumers and business communities will be involved as a central dissemination and communication channel to promote and grow LEDGER’s values and value proposition. Both are structurlly interwoven, in that values cannot be framed independently of the value proposition underpinning them. This will in fact be the primary marketing and communication strategy for the project, because it is, to our knowledge, the aspect that mostly characterises LEDGER when compared to other in ether public or private endeavours in the decentralised data governance areas.

Indeed, business communities are getting more and more aware about the topics and importance of the agenda that LEDGER is embodying. In turn, they are central for the uptake and upscaling of MVPs from LEDGER in that they can enjoy the adequate position and community outreach for large scale adoption of LEDGER’s venture builder solutions.

*PLEASE FBA AND BLM CONTRIBUTE TO THIS*

## IMPACT

Because of its decentralised and innovative nature,  LEDGER MarCom's pragmatic impact cannot be measured in a linear and progressive way a priori. By leveraging from the evaluators and mentors communities, together with consortium partners, LEDGER will aim at building independent and autonomous groups which will endorse LEDGER's model and value proposition in order to disseminate in their civi, policymaking, developmental and business practices in a decentralised way and throughout the six verticals animating MVPs production.

More than quantitative KPIs, MarCom will aim at involving communities and individuals who have a prior engagement in their activities which overlaps, completely or in part, with LEDGER’s values and value proposition. The updating and further dissemination of LEDGER’s output should count on communities who have already an ethos that is compatible with decentralised data governance.
In this context, LEDGER aims at providing a decentralised development ecosystem, which can serve the rods communities’ needs in terms of both technical and marketability standpoints.











#### USEFUL GUIDELINES FROM THE PROPOSAL

Management & Growth (M1-M32) [Leader: FBA, Partners involved: DYNE, BLM]

The main objective of this task is to set up the on-line space for interaction among the different audiences attracted in the previous tasks. This Community of Communities will be hosted in the FundingBox platform that already counts with features for Community Management and moderation through live chats. This task also includes the setting up of the 'Digital Thready for Public Funding Management'. The FundingBox platform architecture has one layer on Open Call Management System that will be enriched with DLT technologies to bring even more transparency to the whole process of open call management (WP2) and milestones review (WP3 and WP4) processes of LEDGER (see explanation in section 1.3.b.1. Furthermore, this platform offers other layer capable to manage communities, including communication spaces, info on events, threads, Q&A, etc... that will facilitate the set-up of the web-based community.

Indeed, the experience of integration of these FundingBox platform layers with enriched DLT technologies is the one that will allow to get a ‘LEDGER Digital Thread for Public Funding Distribution’ to be licensed as Open and Free Software at the end of the project (WP5). This is the key basic aspect that differentiates LEDGER from other traditional “one-stop-shop” platforms, and which is aimed at creating a real privacy-by-design alternative to the  dominant data-driven platforms.

Concerning on-line mobilisation of the community, FBA will lead a MarCom Joint Strategy and Growth Hacking Plan [D1.6] split in two sections:

	.	1)  The marcom strategy itself: for agreeing joint actions and tools for Marketing, Communication and
Dissemination of LEDGER providing to all partners and potential external collaborator stakeholders (i.e. like LAB members) a common view and methodology to optimize the communication and dissemination efforts within the ecosystem. 
	.	2)  The growth hacking plan, a tactic to achieve the highest distribution of contents with minimum budget. Strategies included in the growth hacking tactic that will be considered are: writing posts related with webs that are already a reference; addressing specific people in twitter through a trigger (e.g. a direct message to the CEO of a SME eligible for funding); making direct references to people or SMEs that may be interested in the open call once they are running as well as other foreseen community dynamization actions [See Section 2]


In order to ensure the evolution and strength of the brand and the exchange between the different members of the community, fluent contact must be kept: a weekly time slot to meet on-line will be saved by one representative of each partner to work on these challenges. The meetings will be chaired by FBA.
Concerning content curation and community management it will consist on sharing news, use cases and best practices, a continuous task coordinated by DYNE acting as the Chief Content Officer (CCO) of the platform.

The content curation strategy will be agreed with FBA, as community manager within the e MarCom Joint Strategy and Growth Hacking Plan [D1.6]; this will establish the scope and boundaries of the content to be promoted within the LEDGER platform, including the procedures to select content curators (LAB members will be invited) and to promote content in the website, like DLT technologies, promotion of related ecosystems like DECODE and NGI, The project partners will act as the first curators of the Platform, so, the first collections of content will be provided by FBA (funding opportunities and services provided by LEDGER and other funding opportunities related to DLT); DYNE (technologies, use cases, best practices and technical services offered by LEDGER, like DECODE DLT tools and platforms) and BLM (events, meetups and business services offered by LEDGER). DYNE

GitHub group dedicated to the project and facilitate the participation of the community of developers by will curate a assuring the quality of the documentation and its accessibility from different disciplines.