Enter September! Hello NEAR fam, we’re back with the NIA Progress Report for August. It’s been an absolute honor working with several participants in the NEAR Ecosystem as we finally accelerated things into second gear. We are grateful to everyone in the NEAR Community for their support and the NEAR Core Team for their guidance. Here is a quick summary of what we have been up to and where we plan on going:
Highlights:
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After onboarding the iconic Ikhimaz www.instagram.com/ikhimaz onto the NEAR NFT Ecosystem last month, we are happy to announce that as promised, he has launched a second themed store on Mintbase and started minting high-quality audio-visual NFTs (link: https://www.mintbase.io/human/ikhimaz.near/minted) Big shout-out and gratitude to NEAR’s resident Creative Sensei @starpause for getting involved and walking Ikhimaz through all the technical stuff, and introducing him to all the opportunities available to creators on NEAR Protocol. Jordan was also kind enough to grant us access to the creators’ playbook to strategize artist onboarding and engagement in a cohesive way. Ikhimaz is currently also participating in the NEARchan Guild’s DTIYS Open Challenge (https://paras.id/publication/nearchan-dtiys-challenge-611bf4759fd83432071ee2d0) showing very active involvement.
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NIA has started working on a proper collaboration with Ikhimaz, to produce a first of its kind NFT experience for the NEAR Community. More details about the project will be shared in due time since the plan is to have a surprise drop. It will be dedicated to the NEAR Developers, BUIDLers and ecosystem contributors and eventually open-sourced to be used by the NEAR Community!
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Continuing with our outreach efforts we were able to set up a podcast episode between NEAR Protocol Co-founder @illia and Kenneth Garofalo, the Research Analyst and Integration Manager at Staking Rewards, the world’s most popular dashboard and research platform dedicated to Proof of Stake blockchain projects (https://youtu.be/MdYfZ9xtBHc).
The immediate impact of the podcast was an increased user interest in NEAR Protocol as highlighted by Staking Rewards in their “Top Trending Assets of the Week series”. NEAR was able to become a trending asset on Staking Rewards for the first time ever and continued the strong momentum for the second consecutive week as well. NEAR is still a top trending asset on Staking Rewards as of writing. Humble gratitude to Illia here, for personally connecting with me and Kenneth to make it happen despite having a super packed daily schedule.
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The idea here is to reach out to professional domain experts, educators and community service platforms and to foster long term partnerships instead of chasing influencers for a one-off transactional deal. -
NIA is also in talks with the Staking Rewards’ content curator Allan and Growth Manager David to have a ‘network review’ and a detailed ‘ecosystem feature’ published about NEAR Protocol to act as a handy guide to NEAR for the Staking Rewards community members, to absorb them seamlessly in our ecosystem.
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Even though NIA members have decided unanimously to not have any Official social media account for the Guild because of the nature of our work, we decided to set up a Medium channel https://nearintelligence.medium.com/ as promised in the last monthly report. We will continue posting our content and communique to the community there and all the official Guild reports on the Governance Forum, with links to the Medium channel.
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Staying consistent with our expansion plans and vision for growth, we have published the Preliminary Roadmap for the NIA on our Official Medium channel and we will keep updating it regularly: NEAR Intelligence Agency Roadmap (Preliminary) | by chronear | Medium
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We kickstarted our experiments with NEAR Community Surveys last month with the first ever experimental Community Survey aimed at gauging community interest across a range of parameters which we have curated internally and received a fair amount of insight and interesting crowdsourced data which we will continue running along with new data as we progress on this front.
The experimental survey was one of the biggest community highlights of the week Key Ecosystem Metrics and Analytics Weekly update August 9 as highlighted in the Key Ecosystem Metrics and Analytics Weekly Update Report from the first week of August. Can’t wait to share the real data and infographics from our experiments, along with the contribution (traffic funnel) to NEAR’s Social Media numbers, which @JMaenen was kind enough to share with us. Because of the limited bandwidth currently at our disposal we decided to spread it out over September and hope to successfully finish all the necessary trials in a few weeks. There are currently four different approaches to outreach and surveying under consideration, this is to get a full range of assessments and options before we officially roll out Community Surveys.
Why is it so important to us? How will it help in enhancing NEAR’s outreach and how will the community benefit from something as mundane as surveys? How are NEAR Community Surveys going to be different? We have tried to answer these questions here in the context of our goals, without disclosing too much yet, since this is an ongoing process: Experimenting with NEAR Community Surveys | by chronear | Medium -
NEAR Scout, another one of our social media optimisation experiments has been showing steady growth and the stats are very encouraging. We are well on track to publish a playbook for digital outreach based on our learnings from NEAR Scout’s performance and data from our various “social media outposts” across different communities and projects which we use to track competitors. The aim is to sustain and grow these metrics and replicating it on the NEAR accounts:
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NIA members continue to support up and coming projects on NEAR Protocol by way of offering community building, outreach strategizing and testing and reviewing services (Cheddar, Flux Protocol) while some have signed themselves up and voluntarily participate in active community moderation activities for NEAR’s official Telegram channel as well.
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We are working more closely than ever with the NEAR Degens for maximum impact on some of our focused activities. As one of the members of the Degen Council, I have the advantage of working in unbounded collaboration with the Degens and mobilizing them in any desired direction. This also gives me exposure to areas and performance indicators for the Degens and NIA members, helping us in devising strategies to improve the metrics. The social media impression range for instance is quite large, ranging from 10k-150k for individuals. Several of these factors prompted the idea for bootcamps.
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NIA is planning on conducting three community bootcamps in October. Two tailor-made for the Degens and OWS Contributors and one for the NEAR Community:
With the tailor made bootcamp for social outreach, we plan on supercharging their social media metrics and equipping them with the right skill set and project knowledge to optimise their social media presence and making NEAR a part of their daily conversations in the real world as well.
With the open bootcamp cum orientation session focused on the technical stuff and aimed at funneling more community members to the NEAR Certified Developers Program by giving them an overview of the NEAR infrastructure and educating them about the endless possibilities for BUIDLers on NEAR Protocol.
These bootcamps will have a host of esteemed speakers and course mentors, each one of them a domain expert and pioneer in their field. This will be one of the biggest community-driven single community building event in NEAR Protocol’s glorious history. We are already working on the structure of these bootcamps with @ross from NEAR Core, who is going to spearhead this initiative with the NIA by networking us with potential mentors from NEAR Core and by adding a growth hacking element to the mix to achieve multifold results in terms of NCD Program sign ups, community growth and social media throughput enhancement. Timing it around the second half of October is our goal. -
We have rebranded the NIA website and moved from https://nearintelligence.com to https://nearintelligence.agency in order to better reflect our goals and for fundamental transparency about our efforts in all intent and purpose.
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We are honored and proud to announce that @JMaenen from NEAR Core has also joined the NIA Advisory Board and we now have three advisors, @rimberjack @Ozymandius being the other two. Joep is a social maven and with him on board we hope to achieve greater strategic and quantitative throughput in the coming months under his expert guidance. He has been very helpful and always approachable!
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Conversations have been initiated with fellow Guild leaders to seek their help wherever needed and offer our services whenever needed. October onwards, the monthly highlights are going to be full of partnerships being formed between the NIA and other ecosystem contributors, from Guilds to Individual Creators and from NEARverse projects to even other players in the blockchain space
NEAR Intelligence Agency can be reached out at https://www.nearintelligence.agency and I am @chronear on Telegram, would love to talk about all things NEAR and brainstorm on ideas together, feel free to reach out to us!
NIA Doing Impressive Work:heart: