Hi all! Congrats to the Grants Council on another complete Season and much gratitude for all the hard work.
NPS of finalists > 9/10: Achieved an impressive score of 91.7, demonstrating high satisfaction among finalists and meeting the KPI.
I’d love to see us take an expanded view of builder satisfaction here. Beyond NPS, I’m curious how builders who participated in the process would reflect on clarity, communication, operations, scope, funding amount, and a variety of other more specific dimensions for feedback. This would give us clearer feedback for how to improve in S7. Overall NPS is not very actionable.
I also think it’s crucial that we’re getting feedback from applicants who were not funded to compare against. How should the Grants Council collect this feedback to improve on what may have been a frustrating experience for some builders in the ecosystem?
Intent 3: Increase active developers by 150:
Metrics introduced in Season 6 (e.g., active addresses, gas fees generated) will track progress. With 122 applications approved, achieving this milestone seems realistic, pending reports.
Want to emphasize the importance of being able to track these metric-based outcomes in the future so we can understand whether token allocation is effective in advancing the goals of the Collective.
There are definitely legitimate constraints to measuring impact: tokens are locked, bandwidth for the council is scarce, no data infra team, etc. As we iterate towards better measurement of outcomes, we would love to see the GC/M&M be creative about low effort, low-budget, qualitative ways of representing impact in the absence of hard data. What about a status report of all grantees? Demo day videos from each grantee showing what they’ve built? Summarized effects that grants have had on the various projects supported? If any of these efforts are underway, retrospectives would be a great place to highlight this work.
We want to see the Collective develop to measure outcomes, rather than process. I think it’s crucial that all Councils be able to express to Token Holders and broader Collective the specific ROI it’s generating for the Governance Fund. I’m optimistic about improving our ability here in Season 7.
Improvement: Define a single, measurable, and on-chain metric for the Grants Council mandate. This metric should provide a clear path for decision-making and success evaluation, such as the number of active contracts deployed, unique developer addresses interacting with Optimism, or cumulative gas fees generated by funded projects. This will focus the council’s efforts and ensure alignment across all members.
Strongly agree here – step in the right direction! Would expect to see the GC play an active role in making sure metrics are clearly defined, making sure projects understand these success metrics, and the GC is collecting relevant information to support the analysis of projects’ impact. And agree with MattL’s points above about about stronger coordination between Foundation Growth team and Grants Council – aligning on metrics is a great first step here.
Problem: Many developers were unaware of the Grants Council or how to engage with the program. This likely limited the number of high-quality applicants, particularly in newer or underserved segments of the ecosystem.
Solution: Recruit a business development professional to increase awareness and engagement with the Grants Council. Promote the program through developer-focused events, partnerships, and direct outreach.
I’m not sure that adding headcount for business development is the right approach here. I’d instead suggest a strong focus on clarity of process, clarity of purpose, public documentation, public surfaces that describe Grants Council cycles, mandate, and function.
Even if we drive the best builders in the world to Grants Council processes, experiences like this will discourage them from contributing to the ecosystem.
Simplify the application process further to make it more intuitive for participants, particularly for protocols unfamiliar with governance.
Strongly support and agree with this improvement for next Season. I’d like to see this be a focus, and documented more clearly. Specific feedback I’ve heard from the community includes:
- Clarity on which grant to apply for
- Better communication tools (e.g. email notifications) on Charmverse
- Clear instructions for Q&A, office hours, troubleshooting, and support
- Cleaning up the application itself, fewer more targeted questions
In my opinion this should be a major focus for the upcoming season, before any internal structures, additional roles, etc.
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The Grants Council has been foundational to the development of Optimism Governance and the Token House’s grant allocation process. But after allocating 20M+ OP, it’s challenging to understand the impact that have been achieved as a result.
It’s highly likely there has been some positive impact, but the Collective should be able to measure and understand it. This is a critical capability to develop if we are to iterate, improve, and prevent builder experiences like these.
As Grants Council operations become more independent, it’s crucial that the Council can stand on its own to run a clean process, support builders effectively, and measure and report on impact to the broader community.
Very appreciative of your hard work and look forward to improving as a Collective.