TL;DR : Brand refresh and website design continues, Marketing Town Hall planned for Mar 1, Marketing Discord channel is live, partnership announcement with The Graph, upcoming workshops announced for social media training and public speaking.
Branding Efforts
Busy week this week but we’re happy to report we’ve had a ton of feedback coming in from various folks across NEAR’s ecosystem and we love that you’re reaching out to us. KEEP IT UP. 
We’ve made it even easier for you to leave feedback on our new Brand Collaboration portal called Open Brand. 
We also thought we’d share some soundbites we’ve heard the past week about NEAR’s branding efforts:
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“We need a brand that is distinctive and stands out.”
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“No more rainbows and squares please.”
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“We don’t take ourselves so seriously. It’s ok to have some fun with our brand but maybe not Nearkats.”
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“I like the Nearkats. They are weird but you remember them.”
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“Keep true to what devs like such as https://www.heroku.com/ and https://github.com/.”
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“Too many colors and movement is distracting for devs. Use movement sparingly. We care about finding information.”
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“Brand websites like Cosmos and Algorand are too busy but brands like Red Hat and Polkadot’s 3 color scheme is good. Keep with three color scheme.”
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“No skyscrapers or glass. We are still a start-up and not corporate.”
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“$NEAR’s meerkat (so-called nearkat) doesn’t give a good image of the brand. Meerkats are on high alert not to be eaten. That is, a coward or small… NEAR has a grand goal and has to go further, and an image like General fits better than a Meerkat…What I’m trying to say is that if branding using object is needed - it should be more future-looking object with a strong image…”
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“The starting point for all businesses is the public. Branding (image making, etc.) that can give trust to customers is essential.”
About the brand process: We’ve moved to the next stage with the Brand Agency and we have a Discovery Workshop kicking off next week. (You’ll hear more on this next week.) This next stage will involve more research and internal idea generation. We’ve expanded the Brand working group to include a few more folks from DevRel, community, engineering, and our partners building on NEAR.
Stay Connected
Looking for more ways to connect with us? Come join us on our new Marketing channel on Discord! (In fact, our entire marketing team will be moving over to Discord by March 1.)
Events & Experiences
Interested to know what events NEAR has in the pipeline? Curious what the marketing team does and how we can help? Come learn what the marketing team has in store for 2021 by attending the Marketing Town Hall on March 1 from 10:30am – 11am (CST). Register here at NEAR Marketing Town Hall | RingCentral Events. Password is: NEAR2021.
Partnerships
ICYMI, this week we announced The Graph added support for NEAR for Indexing and Querying, PVP Validator joined as a Node Operator, OWC announced Batch 2 and we ramped up our efforts with Blockfolio. We also signed off on a marketing partnership this week with an esports project and are working through some upcoming campaigns with Figment.
Housecleaning
Are you a team member looking for internal marketing docs and not sure where to find them? Good news! Our team has also been doing some long overdue clean up this week on our Marketing Team Notion and AirTable pages.
Attention all who post on any NEAR Foundation official social media account - starting the first week in March, we’ll be rolling out mandatory Social Media training. 
We’ve been working with our legal and compliance teams to ensure we’re keeping up with industry standards and we’ve identified a few areas where we can improve.
Attention community members and NEAR employees looking to improve your pubic speaking skills - come join us for our upcoming Public Speaking Workshop in mid-March (Date TBD). We’ll have sign ups at the upcoming Town Hall on March 1. Looking to improve your elevator pitch on NEAR or get comfortable speaking to audiences of all sizes? This workshop can help!
Community Highlight
We also want to give a huge shout out to 4NTS Guild for their series Humans of NEAR. Also announced this week is that the NEAR Medium Account will be co-owned by some key contributors of the NEAR Ecosystem Community so be sure to check it out: NEAR Medium Account.
Thanks for your ongoing support!
The NEAR Foundation Marketing Team