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Dash Core Group June 28th Funding Proposals

DCG is submitting 3 funding proposals for the budget cycle that pays out June 28th:
1) DCG Compensation: 2,472 Dash per month (currently in month 2/3)
2) DCG Marketing: 247 Dash per month (currently in month 1/2)
3) DCG Business Development: 247 Dash per month (currently in month 1/2)

This proposal
This proposal requests funding for marketing and communications. 

With the upcoming Platform release to mainnet, website design and backend work, consumer product launches, reputation management public relations efforts and market saturation initiatives, it is essential that we begin allocating significant funding toward marketing activities. While we try to use marketing options when possible (such as social media efforts), many other marketing tactics require full funding in order to have a presence and to test and learn in order to identify successful approaches.

Use Of Funds From Previous Proposal
Approximately $100,000 of the previous money has been allocated and spent since the first marketing proposal was funded earlier this year. The funds from the last proposal were used to primarily pay for our presence at conferences and foundational work needed in order to begin performing basic marketing activities. Before we can efficiently deploy direct marketing expenditures, we first needed to upgrade current tools, methods, technologies and processes to ensure the spending was directed based on data about our users and how they interact with our online presence. As a result, we upgraded many of the data collection and analysis tools, choosing to work with tools and suppliers that may not be the least expensive, but are considered the best-in-class so subsequent spending is more effective. Funds are currently being spent on the following:

1. Analytics Audit and Implementation - Our current website was built piecemeal. Before spending on any marketing activities that drives back to our website, the website needs to have a proper Google Tag Manager, Firebase, and Google Analytics implementation to measure results effectively and determine the value of those marketing activities. We do not currently have any tags or conversion tracking on our website which leaves us in the dark as to how people are currently utilizing our website and will not provide us with the information we need in the future in order to gauge the success of any upcoming marketing campaigns. An agency has been identified and retained to develop a reporting structure, a conversion strategy and to develop and place tags across the website. The work is still partially completed, but we are already starting to gain initial insights into where traffic originates and the flow of users through the website. When this work is completed and we gather more data points, we will gain valuable insight into how to best convert website visitors into Dash users. 
2. Social Media, Newsletter and Blogging Solutions - Coming into the company fresh, our new Head of Marketing - Arden - identified several inefficiencies, or lack of relevant technology solutions, in our current outbound marketing set-up. After a thorough review of our blogging capabilities, our social media posting efforts and any type of outbound marketing, she recommended a solution to establish a scalable, effective and powerful outbound marketing program. Hubspot has been identified as that tool and is currently being implemented. There is an ongoing monthly fee for such a product.
3. Graphic designer/web developer - Funding is also allocated for a graphic designer/web developer to enhance our website, build new landing pages for specific inbound purposes, and create marketing materials that align with our business development goals. This individual is supporting a long list of one-off design projects as well, to build our library of marketing assets, many of which will be used as part of partner-specific or ongoing campaigns.
4. Money2020 & Consensus attendance, along with Money2020 booth, buildout & conference materials - It has not been possible to attend conferences and meetings due to both COVID and a lack of funds. We are evaluating a range of booth size and location options for a booth at Money2020, and have earmarked funds for the buildout and required materials creation. Money2020 is traditionally the strongest conference for feeding DCG’s business development pipeline, and often leads to significant integrations of new services to the network. We plan to have five representatives attending Money2020 this year, so money is already set aside for travel, accommodations, ground transportation, and meals. Other conference attendance and opportunities are also slated to come from this budget as we move through the year.
   

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Use Of Funds From This Proposal
Proposed use of funds from this proposal:
Combined market test with Doral/Weston/Miami (largest VE and LatAm concentration in the US) and Caracas and Valencia in VE - Plans include a “Cuidad Dash” program for these geographies, guerilla and grassroots marketing efforts, media, public relations and other Dash-related marketing efforts. The goal is to further penetrate into LatAm communities and introduce Dash to crypto novices. These campaigns will be set up in a manner that will enable us to measure the resulting traffic.

Rich content creation - We will need promotional videos for DashPay, Platform, and DashDirect, along with other forms of rich media (graphics, animations, voiceovers, etc). High-quality rich content is expensive, but it is valuable to align with our goals of establishing ourselves as the leader in the crypto innovation space. High-quality content also makes every expenditure we make more efficient, because it can have a tremendous impact on key metrics such as click-through rates, social media engagement / sharing, and can result in a more positive impression on the audience we do reach.

Urgent SEO/web optimization work - A website audit revealed that our mobile site speed scores are not up to par with Google’s standards. This can affect our rankings on mobile as Google heavily weights their search engine results toward sites that do meet their performance standards. The site performance issues severely limit our ability to appear as a valid result for relevant searches. Funding will be used to for urgent contract work needed to optimize and compress image sizes, create header metadata for the very important H1 & H2 tags on our most important pages, create new sitemaps for search engines to crawl and other imperative efforts to make sure our site will be in better condition by the time DashPay launches.

Written content - When people are searching for Dash or dash-related topics on search engines, negative articles and content pieces appear prominently in the current initial search results. We are looking to build a content bank that will help to “push down” old, negative content about Dash and present new, favorable content to take its place. This will be a multi-month effort with enough content to be created to significantly influence Google’s search results. We do not have a content plan in place currently, and this initiative will be critical to help create a more favorable search climate for Dash to ensure people seeking information about Dash will not continue seeing primarily old and negative content. We believe we can improve conversions from search results into site visits by improving the search results.

If you have any questions, please direct them to Arden Goldstein in this post to ensure we are notified of your request.

Requested funding is as follows for the June 28th budget cycle:
· 244.5 Dash for marketing expenses ($41,000 USD @ $170 per Dash)
·     2.5 Dash proposal reimbursement
Total: 247 Dash

The exact same funding request applies to the July 27th budget cycle.

Note: Should any funding remain, we will apply it toward future marketing expenses and related taxes.