The Challenge
I joined SEED Latam through an invitation to help build a proposal for the Ethereum Foundation. The proposal was approved with a full grant to execute across Latin America.
Which is when the actual difficulty started. We now had a funded set of commitments to a major institution, and no communications function, no team and no internal process capable of delivering them. I built all three from zero.
Strategy
Two decisions defined that year. The first was structural: a master plan organised in four-month cycles, mapped directly onto the commitments made to the Foundation. Grant-funded work fails quietly when reporting gets assembled at the end, and I wanted each commitment to have an owner and a date long before anyone asked for it.
The second concerned audience, and it was the harder call. The organisation published highly technical content through Telegram, Discord and Twitter. Those channels reach people already inside the ecosystem, which is useful, and almost nobody else, which was the problem. If the point of the grant was widening access, our communications had to speak to people who had not arrived yet.
Execution
I assembled the team: a community manager, an operations lead, a graphic designer, and myself directing the operation. I designed the internal processes so the team could execute on a schedule instead of improvising every week.
The plan also included going to the provinces rather than waiting for them. The tour we ran across ten provinces, teaching financial education, how nodes work and programming, became the educational track that later fed attendance to Devconnect Buenos Aires.
Then we opened Instagram as a primary channel, with a tone deliberately different from the technical material the organisation was known for. It became where we communicated the initiatives running across Argentina and where we reached people entering the ecosystem: new builders interested in economics, blockchain, and how to program and build inside the industry.
Results
- A proposal that secured a full grant from the Ethereum Foundation for regional execution.
- A communications team built from zero, operating on defined internal processes.
- A master plan executed in four-month cycles against the grant's commitments.
- Substantial improvement in reach and engagement after opening a new channel with a new tone.
- Every commitment made to the Ethereum Foundation was met.
Learnings
A channel decision is never really a channel decision. Moving from Discord and Telegram to Instagram redefined who we were speaking to, and the metrics followed that choice rather than causing it. I see teams get this backwards constantly, optimising a channel that was aimed at the wrong people to begin with.
This project also convinced me that writing the proposal and running the delivery should stay in the same hands. Knowing exactly what was promised, because I wrote the promise, is what made the delivery manageable.