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Core Team Public Relations (October)

glennaustin

Active member
Dash Core Group October 1st Funding Proposals
DCG is submitting 5 funding proposals for the October 1st budget cycle:
1) DCG Comp (Developers & Operations): $325,000 (https://www.dash.org/forum/threads/core-team-compensation-devs-and-ops-october.40499/)
2) DCG Comp (Administration): $100,000 (https://www.dash.org/forum/threads/core-team-compensation-admin-october.40501/)
3) DCG Comp (Bus Dev / Marketing / Cust Support): $75,000 (https://www.dash.org/forum/threads/...bus-dev-marketing-cust-support-october.40502/)
4) DCG Business Development: $160,000 (https://www.dash.org/forum/threads/core-team-business-development-october.40503/)
5) DCG Public Relations: $40,000 (current proposal)

Note: Over the past 2 months finance has worked on managing, calculating and optimizing our tax liability. We identified a number of opportunities to lower our tax burden during that time and validated those opportunities with tax experts. We developed legal arguments to enable certain tax treatments of assets and transactions that lowered our estimated tax obligations. Ian Rawluk, who recently joined the finance team, was instrumental in driving the effort over the finish line.

As a result of these efforts, we will not need to submit a 3rd tax proposal related to the first quarter of fiscal 2019. We expect our current tax funds to be sufficient to cover us through both fiscal year 2018 and fiscal year 2019.

This Proposal
This is cross-posted at https://www.dashcentral.org/p/coreteampr1018

Background
Public Relations is one of the key parts of the marketing function within Dash Core Group (“DCG”). The purpose of this activity is to gain media attention for Dash, help shape the messaging around Dash, and enhance the public perception of the project. In Q4 we plan to further increase our public relations efforts by expanding into the Spanish speaking market, while simultaneously reducing our overall costs.

In the past, we have worked with several PR companies, and since July 2016, we have been working with Wachsman PR exclusively. Their contract expires at the end of September 2018, and we intend to renew it for Q4 2018 should this proposal be funded.

A report detailing Wachsman’s results is published in the forum https://www.dash.org/forum/threads/pr-status-report.40461/. The third quarter has been our best quarter to date, and August has been our best month ever in terms of media placements, by any metric. Wachsman has worked to get Dash into recently elusive publications such as CoinDesk and CoinTelegraph. Recent coverage in both publications resulted from Wachsman’s outreach efforts in the spring and an in-person New York City media tour coordinated by them in June, during which Ryan Taylor met with reporters in person. They have also achieved prominent features in Forbes and Business Insider, several other mainstream business publications, and our first mainstream television appearances on Fox Business in May and Nasdaq in August. Jesse Platz (Wachsman PR Director) and Fernando Gutierrez (Dash Core Group CMO) did an interview with Dash Watch to share additional information about our PR efforts and Wachsman’s roles:
.

In parallel to the Wachsman efforts, we would like to hire a second PR firm that focuses on the Spanish speaking market in LatAm, in line with DCG’s recently communicated strategy to focus on opportunities in that region. Certain media engagements that originate with Wachsman end up in Spanish speaking media, but their focus is the English speaking market and we believe there is value in developing local media relations across LatAm.

Both PR firms will coordinate so they can amplify each other’s work. Also, given Wachsman’s knowledge of the project and the work they’ve already done with project messaging, the second (LatAm) firm should be able to get up to speed quickly.

What does this proposal fund?
This proposal funds two different companies:
1) Wachsman PR, for the English speaking market. Due to recent Dash price declines, and given our long-term partnership, Wachsman has agreed to cut their fee by 50% for Q4. This means they will be charging $7,500/month instead of their usual $15,000/month. We want to publicly thank them for their effort to accommodate Dash during this difficult budget environment. This new price, given the amount of work they perform for the network, is most likely a money-losing proposition and we recognize they are agreeing to this because, besides being a provider, they are true believers in Dash with a partnership mentality.

2) TBD firm for LatAm. We are considering several options, but first we want to confirm that the network views this planned expansion positively. If this proposal passes, we will negotiate a contract during the month of September so the newly selected firm can start work in October. From the preliminary due diligence we have performed, we believe we can engage a high-level firm in the LatAm market for approximately $3,000/month.

In addition, we are requesting $8,500 to serve as a buffer to account for the potential fluctuation in the price of Dash. The total amount of this proposal is $40,000.

If you have any questions, please direct them to @fernando in this Dash Forum post to ensure we are notified of your request.

Requested funding is as follows for the October 1st budget cycle:
· 210 Dash for Public Relations ($40,000 USD @ $190.5 per Dash)
· 5.00 Dash proposal reimbursement
Total: 215 Dash

Note: Should any funding remain, we will apply it toward future public relations expenses.

Manually vote YES on this proposal:
dash-cli gobject vote-many 7f72aaf63930d8ba2f4e8f0d7d5a79a31a9306aa8fe030530f3299f053ebc971 funding yes

OR from the qt console:

gobject vote-many 7f72aaf63930d8ba2f4e8f0d7d5a79a31a9306aa8fe030530f3299f053ebc971 funding yes

Manually vote NO on this proposal:
dash-cli gobject vote-many 7f72aaf63930d8ba2f4e8f0d7d5a79a31a9306aa8fe030530f3299f053ebc971 funding no

OR from the qt console:

gobject vote-many 7f72aaf63930d8ba2f4e8f0d7d5a79a31a9306aa8fe030530f3299f053ebc971 funding no
 
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