Edition #5

[MAY] The Importance of Infrastructure

Ashwath Narayanan
June 01, 2023

It’s finally warm outside & I couldn’t be more excited. If you’re new here, welcome! — every month, I put together a round up of news, highlights, tests and things we’re exploring around the creator economy as it relates to the progressive space at Social Currant.

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I also share more about what we're up to at Social Currant, my interactions with creators and how you should be thinking about working with creators. so, let's dive in.

Some highlights from the work we're doing at Social Currant:

In addition to speaking at Vidcon this year, we will also be showcasing our tool to help nonprofits match with creators more effectively. If you’re interested, come say hi — we’d love to get your feedback. We’ve also got an extra industry ticket, if you’re in town (LA) and want to join / want to send someone - just reply!
We were grateful to chat with the Center for American Progress about some of the needs in the space and things we’re learning, which we’ll cover more broadly in this months newsletter. TLDR; we believe in the need for infrastructure and are trying to build it!
Ellie graduated, I turned 23 and a lot of important personal updates on the team!
Conscious Lee was on the Great Battlefield Podcast, talking about his experiences as a creator and why he does what he does. Check the episode out here.
We’ve been shipping product fast with the addition of our new full stack engineer, Sisir. This month, we’re working on a number of pushes like a settings page, campaign details page and more. Grab a screenshot and give us some feedback by signing up for a demo with our CTO here.

Why we’re building a platform & the importance of infrastructure: So before we dive into our spiel, here’s a little bit of history:

September 2020: Founded Social Currant as an agency focused on helping impact orgs reach young people more effectively.

May 2021: Did our first creator campaign for a progressive nonprofit - Community Change.

November 2022: We worked on our first official election cycle, helping orgs like NextGen America, Make The Road, NDWA, and many more.

December 2022: Start thinking more actively about infrastructure in this space and now build a tech platform.

We’ve spent over two years doing creator work manually, processing over a million dollars in payments last year to over a thousand creators. As we saw the increasing demand with the election cycle, here were some of our main learnings:

POWER OF NETWORK: The more work you do with creators, the better & easier it gets. It sounds straightforward, but everytime we did a campaign, the next one become a lot easier because we had built the network. As a result, at scale, we had access to thousands of creators and could activate pretty much every niche for our clients — extended our access to them. However, organizations starting from scratch can’t do the same.
IT’S A LOT OF WORK: It’s a lot of work processing contracts, payments, 1099’s and so many small steps and we needed automation.
YOU DON’T KNOW WHAT YOU DON’T KNOW: We didn’t know the stories creators had to share until we asked, and we were able to ask thousands of creators what they cared about before matching them with causes.
DATA: We were at many times, operating from a place without data. How fast are creators responding? What’s the average time to product content? Audience? Demographics? A lot of times it was hard to have concrete data because a lot of the work was housed in email, DMs or typeforms. That needed to change.
SCALE: The final learning was that creator work is hard to scale. If in the last weeks of the election, someone had invested at even 10% of what the investment in TV or Digital Ads would’ve been, the entire system would break. There just wasn’t enough ease to effectively run thousands of campaigns easily. We knew that had to change.

As we learning this, we deeply saw the need for infrastructure in the space to enhance the investment that we could drive in PEOPLE. Here’s what we mean by infrastructure:

A place where we house all sorts of information about creators who are in or want to come into the progressive space. We want this database to be opt-in, where anyone can find their ideal creator.
The tools to automate the busy-work of creator operations like contracts, payments, 1099s and more.
The ability to work with thousands of creators in a digestible manner if needed and scale programs.

We’re on a mission to get people working with people and to do that, we’re trying to make the creator space easier to navigate and easier to navigate at scale.

Creator Economy News I’m Reading:

Meta is working on a Twitter clone. First reported by Lia Haberman, check out their plans for a text-based Twitter alternative here.
WPP is doubling down on creator marketing and influencers. Read more about how things are going for them here.
TikTok is working on a potential label, similar to paid content around disclosing that you’ve used AI to generate the video. Check their plans around AI generated content here.
Montana attempts to ban TikTok, becoming the first state do so. More from Axios.
Reddit joins Instagram in trying to compete with Discord by launching a channels feature.
We’ve also known that short form & shopping are a deadly combination with TikTok doubling in on shopping and Meta focusing on it too. However, Amazon is now entering the short form shopping game by launching a new TikTok like shopping feed. Check it out here.

Some ideas we're testing/looking to test. I'd love to chat with you if you're interested. Grab some time / reply!

Newsletters, Discord Communities, Patreons & More: Last month we talked about owned communities. This week, we want to test them more. If you want to collaborate with creators that have their owned communities, give us a shout.
Rapid response: In the last month, we’ve launched a number of rapid response campaigns - activating creators in less than 48 hours to respond to a lack of education around happenings in Congress. We’re still continuing to test this as a way of getting information out in a quick, easy to digest manner. Want to test with us? Send us a message.
Twitch: We’re really actively thinking about Twitch streams and working with Twitch creators to reach their engaged audiences!

FAQs from the month:

When thinking about creators, what are some ways we can collaborate outside of just the typical sponsored post? We think about this one a lot. Here’s some ideas:

Speakers: have creators speak at events, host events etc.
Content: Need content quickly? Ask creators to produce.
Ideas: Creators are CREATIVE - ask for ideas, challenge them with concepts and pick their brains on getting messages across in a cohesive manner.
Press
Engaging your team

There’s many ways to engage creators — it doesn’t have to be just a sponsored post.

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If you made it all this way - thank you! For reading, trusting creators and me. I'm building Social Currant to make an impact and you all are a part of this journey. Until next month!

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