One cannot maintain and sustain a community without listening to members' needs and wants. Throughout the season, we hold the space with various methods to hear what our members had to say so we can reshape what being a member of Protein Community is about. For this purpose, we reached out to Olivier#8546 to conduct a qualitative research of our contributors and run a survey at the end of the season to better understand our wider community. For transparency, we’ll share some of the insights here:

Positive

• Joining the community is a purpose-led decision, motivated by the “good growth” ethos.
• Protein brand influenced many members to join the community
• Meeting like-minded people and making frens was one of the main benefits mentioned
• Protein Community feels like a cozy, safe place which feels different from other DAOs, an online home where you don’t “need to be a crypto-bro”
• For most members Protein was the first web3 community they joined, “a guided pathway for creative people into the still-a-bit-nerdy world of web3”
• In general, learning seems to be another big benefit for members: we provide lots of resources on Web3 and GG, plus opportunities to discuss and apply them: “without Protein knowledge would be less empirical.”
• Members found it intriguing to participate in open discussions
• We have a great onboarding experience.

Needs improvement…

• Opportunity to get paid in USDC for contributions is by far the most frequent feedback / request we got from our members
• It’s too time-consuming to stay up to date – most members offboard after being overwhelmed by all the discussions on Discord and/or feeling lost about what to do
• Except interns, most members spend less 5 hours a week on the DAO, which includes catching up Discord
• As a result, many members couldn't understand where and how to contribute in S3
• We should work on contributor experience, which includes team-specific onboarding, 1:1 calls with leads, pairing / buddies – we can't expect members to figure out by themselves what to do just by some Discord conversation
• Protein Community needs to be more transparent about our ties with the Protein holdings (Protein Agency and Protein Studios)
• Decision-making felt not transparent enough and it’s easy to miss on important decisions if you only attend weekly calls – moving more conversations to the forum, as well as better documentation that’s easier to access could help
• We should provide more members opportunities to work on their initiatives and gather support for it, “use $PRTN to support great curated ideas and present them to the broader web3 ecosystem”