The challenge

I joined Protein in 2021 to help redefine and re-launch Protein Community, a network of around 5,000 creatives, thinkers, strategists and cultural leaders. Most members were introduced to the Community via Protein's other businesses: a global brand consultancy and co-working & events space in Shoreditch.

This community lived on Mighty Networks and had relatively low engagement - the topics of interactions centred around Protein's culture reports, and responding to surveys for the Agency's projects. There was a desire from the founder to engage with this audience on a deeper level and attempt to rally them around a collective goal.

Approach

After analysing the current platform and having conversations with members, we decided to transition to a new community platform, Discord, as it allowed for much more organic discussion and collaboration. In addition, we created a digital currency ($PRTN) and distributed it to around 100 members who had engaged the most across Mighty Networks, social media and in-person events. They were invited to an online launch event with four key speakers, and workshops over two months to collaborate on what should come next for the Community. In the run up to launch, we provided a short curriculum to educate existing members about what this change meant and how they could participate.

Due to it being a small team of three, I was involved in almost every aspect of launch. My focus was on ensuring the transition was smooth and the new platform felt intuitive, this meant designing an onboarding flow for members, producing educational content, creating guides, designing the layout of channels and groups within the platform, and designing and facilitating the first 3 workshops.

Impact

The initial workshops were attended by over 30 people, including researchers, strategists, founders (the founder of Monzo) and others interested in using web3 for good. We received over 500 applicants to join in the first few weeks based on our initial communications and raised a pre-seed round of £250,000 in November to fund and support Community projects. The Community exists today with 300 members in Discord, we collectively ran a 6-week regenerative accelerator program with 3 community projects. We're now engaging with organisations inside and outside of web3 to use web3 to form regenerative relationships with people and planet.

I'm still part of the core team building Protein Community. My role involves day-to-day running of the organisation, community and brand strategy, design of assets, web design/build (via Webflow), workshop design and facilitation, and everything in-between.