<aside> 💬 Gitcoin is increasing trying to engage its Grantees. However, right now, there is no space for Grantees to find relevant information, ask question, and of course, meet each other. Let’s change that!

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Background

In GR15 PGF set forth a goal to kickstart a sustained effort to engage grantees for overall grant program success: Experiment with providing non-monetary support to grantees through relationship building and knowledge-sharing opportunities.

There was an idea proposed to have Telegram groups for Grantees. While this would allow Grantees to connect, it could cause a number of challenges:

• Having many different individual groups would take a large amount of time and dedicated facilitators for each, which may be possible but is inefficient
• Telegram and Discord is not optimized for Grantees connecting with each other, more for one-off questions. The groups could easily turn into question groups, where the facilitators would likely be answering the same questions/sending the same resources over and over again, and Grantees would mute the group. See: Regen crypto group, Greenpill group, ImpactDAO group as examples

Introducing: Heartbeat

Heartbeat is a new communications platform that is ideal for managing communities. With Heartbeat, we could operate a light-weight community of Gitcoin Grantees.

What Heartbeat would allow us to do:

• Provide information to Grantees:

  Perhaps the best part about Heartbeat is that information is separate form conversation. In the “Docs” tab on the left-hand side of the screen, we would be able to integrate with Notion to put all Grantee onboarding/claiming information. No more looking through the website and old Discord messages— all of information relevant to grantees will be in one place.

• Have grantees in one place:

  Right now, we have no way to massively contact Grantees, and no “home” for them. Heartbeat would be the place to find and communicate with Grantees.

• Grantees connect with each other:

  Of course we can have channels that Grantees chat in, but Heartbeat has 2 other features that would effortlessly connect Grantees:

  • Directory: Grantees can find each other based on interests, locations, etc. This is useful for Gitcoin as well!
  • Matchups: Matches Grantees together on a monthly basis for an optional 1:1 meeting based on their interests

• Provide support:

  There can be a channel dedicated to questions, where grantees can ask for support of any kind!

• Host events:

  We could host a Grantee community event perhaps once every other week or once per month. Perhaps we could host more during grants rounds— like info sessions on how to market your grant.