The foundation of a strong community is a sense of belonging, shared purpose and, of course, an interesting project that people can get behind. However, we all know that’s only the starting point and a lot of work goes into building and maintaining an engaged community. 

We’re starting to see a host of tools to help founders, brands and community managers solve the challenges they face when it comes to growing, supporting and engaging their communities. 
In this post we’ll discuss some of the key tools and trends within web3 customer support, CRM and community analytics, and highlight a few of the pioneers in the space with a market map.  

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Acquisition & Growth

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After launching a community, growth is usually top of mind: finding and marketing to the right target audience and identifying and reaching out to potential partners. 

Several tools are focused on this piece of the puzzle, both for consumer-oriented and more B2B oriented web3 projects.

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Some CRM tools, such as Absolute Labs and Kazm, not only allow you to track your existing community, but also let you do “outbound sales”, a la web3 of course. What does this mean? Identifying communities similar to yours via overlapping holdings, and then letting you do automated airdrops or cross-channel campaigns.  

For those that are looking to build relationships with other communities and are looking more of a “Hubspot for web3”, 3RM is building an interesting tool to keep track of outreach and they’re also offering a service where they make B2B introductions for a fee. 

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Engagement & Retention 

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After you’ve built a sizable community the next challenge is keeping the community engaged; Qwestive, Dispatch, Blaze and most other CRM-like tools allow you to segment your user base based on specific parameters such as holdings, Discord activity or attending events and then message or reward users based on these criteria.

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Tools like Crew3 and Trantor take a different approach to engagement and let projects set tasks and quests for users to complete and be rewarded with points or tokens.  

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Analytics

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You can’t improve what you don’t measure. Community analytics tools are focused on giving you an overview of what’s going on with your community, as well as giving you actionable insights. 

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One problem that analytics tools like Comoon and w3w are looking to tackle is the fact that as many web3 users are anonymous and spread across platforms, it’s hard to get a holistic view and it’s difficult to know who your users are. Therefore, these tools allow projects to let users link their wallets and social profiles to give a better idea of what type of members are in your community. 

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Most analytics tools also provide some level of wallet insights. For example, tools like Qwestive provide data about your wallet share compared to your users’ other holdings and Sgnal takes into account purchasing power, trends and brand affinity.

Many analytics tools also have features to make the data actionable, such as allowing messaging and airdrops, to help increase retention and engagement.

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Customer Support

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In web3, it’s common for builders to first build a community and then launch a product or service. Once you launch that product, you’ll likely run into many new challenges. Bugs and a never-ending backlog of feature requests aside, customer support is often a major challenge to overcome with a growing community and live product.

While you could simply continue using Discord and Twitter for support, as volume grows, many founders realize this doesn’t scale and is inefficient. 

Tools like Helix and VillageDAO aim to let your team answer less questions and get the community to be involved and answer instead.

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Here at Mava, we embrace the power of community and plan to embed both elements into our product in the future. However, our starting point is providing moderators and customer support reps with a secure and powerful dashboard to efficiently answer questions from any channel. We also plan to add on-chain integrations to further streamline support queries and help you get to know your customers. 

Conclusion

The web3 space is slowly but surely starting to mature and getting more professional. Building hype and excitement will remain crucial for kickstarting a project, but those builders in it for the long term will need to go beyond that and figure out how to build a sustainable community or business. In this article we have highlighted some of the key technology providers community managers can leverage to help engage, track and support their community. 

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