ICON Pinas: November 2020 Transparency Report
Hello ICONists!
Can you believe this year is almost over, already? It seems like only yesterday when ICON Pinas first registered as a P-Rep for the ICON Network! Though, one could argue that time is passing by rapidly because we’ve been so busy working to grow and promote ICON awareness every single day.
November was a fun and eventful month for ICON Pinas, so let’s get to it!
ICON Pinas Quick Recap
✅ Featured guest on Binance Filipino AMA.
✅ Completed We Are ICON Pinas! event.
✅ Hosted ICON Pinas Merch Craze! event.
✅ Hosted ICON KABOG! event on Telegram (2x/week).
✅ Hosted ICX News Ngayon Quiz Time on Facebook (1x/week).
✅ Progressing the ICON Pinas Merch Store website.
✅ Increased followers on Telegram from 5,533 to 6,923.
✅ Increased subscribers on YouTube from 1,576 to 1,867.
✅ Published 7 full videos on YouTube.
✅ Increased followers on Twitter from 3,077 to 3,203.
✅ Published 1 article on Medium.
✅ Ran several Bring Me An ICONista! marketing events.
✅ Ran several Giveaway marketing events.
Featured AMAs
Binance Filipino AMA
On November 20, the ICON Pinas team was featured on a live AMA with Binance Filipino.
Binance Filipino is a leading crypto exchange + community on Telegram.
As always, like with all of our past AMAs, the main focus and objective with these events is to promote ICON awareness to as many new audiences across the globe as possible.
Featured Events
We Are ICON Pinas!
During the early part of November, our team spent time going through all the entries of the We Are ICON Pinas! community event from the prior month, selecting individual clips to be featured in our promo video, shown below.
We believe this promo video will serve as a fun introduction to our group, which hopefully will help us attract new members to the growing ICON Pinas community.
ICON Pinas Merch Craze!
Our big holiday event kicked off in November, which is ICON Pinas Merch Craze! This is only the first round of events, but we’re hoping to see lots of creative entries come in.
The top 10 contributors will each win an ICON Pinas t-shirt!
Also, we owe a special shout out to ICON Pinas community member @matT325, who was our source of inspiration and the original creator of ICON Pinas merch.
Our team of admins was overjoyed to put together the following video, and also ship out a t-shirt to @matT325.
With that being said, we’re looking forward to shipping out even more ICON Pinas t-shirts to community members next month!
ICON KABOG!
Our team continues to host ICON KABOG!, featuring our quiz master miss Charlotte, twice per week (Friday and Saturday night), on our Telegram chat.
Here are some agendas for a few ICON KABOG! events that took place in November:
ICON KABOG! has become a featured event and core staple each week for the ICON Pinas community, doing much to help us build camaraderie and boost engagement from active users on Telegram.
Our team remains excited and is very much looking forward to hosting many more ICON KABOG! events in the future. Moving forward from here, we’ll continue looking for new ideas and ways to spice up ICON KABOG! to keep it fresh and interesting for all community members.
ICX News Ngayon Quiz Time
Similar to ICON KABOG!, our team is also finding success with ICX News Ngayon Quiz Time, which is hosted weekly (every Saturday) on our Facebook page.
Each week, there is a quiz (5 multiple choice questions) on the latest episode of ICX News Ngayon, and a reward of 100 PHP via load (or ICX tokens) is rewarded to community members who are able to answer all the questions correctly.
Here are the announcements of winners and corresponding questions + answers associated with each event:
Boosting engagement on Facebook is important to our long-term goals on this social media platform, and ICX News Ngayon Quiz Time is proving to be an important piece in helping us to solve that challenging puzzle.
Social Media
Telegram Growth
There are currently 6,923 members on the ICON Pinas Telegram chat, which increased from 4,159, previously.
YouTube Growth
The ICON Pinas YouTube channel now has 1,867 subscribers (up from 1,576, previously).
YouTube Educational Videos
In total, 7 new YouTube videos were published by our team in November:
- ICX News Ngayon Episode 23: Make Crypto Simple With ICONFi
- ICON Pinas Merch Craze!
- ICX News Ngayon Episode 22: Band Protocol Signs an MoU With ICON!
- ICX News Ngayon Episode 21: Danal Fintech Joins the ICON Network
- ICON Pinas Merch Craze! MatT You’re the Inspiration!
- ICX News Ngayon Episode 20: ICON Contribution Proposal System (CPS) Is Coming Very Soon!
- We Are ICON Pinas!
The videos listed above were also uploaded onto the ICON Pinas Facebook page.
Twitter Growth
On Twitter, ICON Pinas experienced some more modest growth this month, as our followers have increased to 3,203 (up from 3,077, previously).
Medium Educational Articles
In November, our team published only a single article on Medium:
Instagram Growth
We currently have 127 followers on Instagram (up from 124, previously).
Similar to the last few months, not much needs to be said for our progress on Instagram at this time. Quite frankly, until we can go back outside to take regular photos, ICON Pinas will not prioritize growing our Instagram page.
Instagram growth remains more of a long-term plan for us at ICON Pinas.
Facebook Growth
At the conclusion of November, the ICON Pinas Facebook page has achieved 57,056 likes and 57,187 total follows (down from 57,164 likes and 57,292 total follows, previously).
In recent months, our team has not been active with FB marketing ads, as our focus has shifted elsewhere, prioritizing other approaches for growth (e.g., merch craze events, giveaways on Twitter, stronger focus on Telegram and YouTube growth, etc.). Our lessened marketing activity on FB explains the decrease in both the number of likes and followers this month on the ICON Pinas page.
We do feel that having an active presence on Facebook is important, but in terms of marketing budget, at this time, we’re quite confident that concentrating our spending and efforts on some of the other social media platforms (which will be covered in more details in the subsequent section) will ultimately prove to be the right decision.
Marketing Campaigns
ICON Pinas Merch Store
In an effort to enhance our community building efforts (particularly in the Philippines), ICON Pinas is in the development stage of designing an online merch store. More details will follow next month.
For November, we are happy to share with everyone that we’ve located a preferred printing shop, as well as narrowed down the type of colors and brand of t-shirts we want to produce and distribute to community members.
Shown below are a batch of t-shirts we printed for our admins, which viewers of ICX News Ngayon might have noticed, beginning with Episode 21.
In addition, our team printed out a number of DAOcolors t-shirts for community members (i.e., BetLords) who were instrumental in helping the ICONbet developers (@Geo_Dude and @shikamarumind) refine and improve the game during the design phase.
Further down the line, being able to offer up merchandise designed by community members themselves, will be the ultimate goal…
We will be sure to provide more updates as they become available.
Bring Me An ICONista!
In November, ICON Pinas continued hosting the Bring Me An ICONista! referral event, periodically, on Telegram.
You never know who you’ll get with these type of events (results can be a mixed bag at times), but we still think it’s worth the effort to host them since gaining high quality members is so invaluable.
At this stage, it also should go without saying just how important we feel it is to attract new users into our Telegram chat — This is the social media platform where our team and community are most active and engaged.
Giveaways
Furthermore, team member Jenny has been experimenting with giveaways on Twitter, as a means of attracting and encouraging an entirely new/different audience to learn more about ICON.
The results have been positive thus far…
And as always, we are open to trying out new ideas and approaches so that we can keep on growing ICON.
Spending
ICON Pinas was very fortunate to have our second Grant Application approved by ICON Foundation in October, which continues to help our hyper-growth efforts TREMENDOUSLY.
Again, many thanks to ICON Foundation for all their support, because without their help and support, none of what we achieved to date would have been possible!
Also, many thanks to our voters who continue to support us through the ups and downs! Your loyalty means more to us than you know!
Total monthly expenses in November included the following:
- Merchandise (materials, printing, shipping) = 23,746 PHP (~494 USD)
- Marketing, events, and community tips = 69,976 PHP (~1,454 USD)
- Node and infrastructure support = 45,146 PHP (~934 USD)
For a subtotal of: 2,882 USD
Our team printed + shipped a lot of ICON Pinas t-shirts this month, to both staff and community members. One could argue that merchandise is a form of marketing/advertising (and we would agree), however given that this was our first month doing this, we thought it made sense to separate out these items and expenses.
Salaries paid out in November included the following:
- Contractor services = 45,035 PHP (~936 USD)
- Core-team total staff wages = 33,695 PHP (~700 USD)
For a subtotal of: 1,636 USD
For contractor services, this pertains to the money being spent to design the ICON Pinas website and online merch store (which is still on-going). An additional lump sum payment will be due to the same contractor, upon completion of the project.
With all that being said, our team is long ICX tokens (we truly do believe in ICON), and we try our best not to sell any of our own personal holdings on exchanges/market, as much as possible. Outside of selling ICX tokens to pay for necessary services and staff salaries, any remaining rewards accrued (i.e., income earned via ICX tokens) were staked.
P-Rep Ranking
At the conclusion of November, ICON Pinas was ranked #22 among global P-Reps on the ICON Network.
At month’s end, ICON Pinas has racked up 4,798,767 votes (an increase from 4,251,655 votes, previously).
Similar to past months, at this time, we would really like to say THANK YOU and give a special shout out to our voters — We owe a deep gratitude for your trust and confidence in our team!
Please note: 1,000,000 of our votes in November came courtesy of ICON Foundation, via grant approval, which we are ALWAYS most humbled and grateful to have received.
We sincerely hope that after reporting this month’s transparency report, ICONists will agree that we’ve been a very productive P-Rep team that is well-deserving of all votes we’ve received to date.
ICON Pinas is most passionate about ICON (this is the ONLY blockchain project we focus on!) and we are dedicated to working as hard as we possibly can to help accelerate growth and mainstream adoption.
Thanks for reading. Salamat po!
You can learn more about ICON Pinas by following us here:
Telegram: https://t.me/icon_pinas
Twitter: https://twitter.com/IconPinas
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/IconPinas/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCqkwvlG2636SqqtjOYAxOhQ
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/iconpinas
Medium: https://medium.com/@iconpinas
Disclaimer: Cryptocurrencies, are EXTREMELY volatile! These assets are also very speculative in nature, and no one should ever buy any without first conducting their own thorough research + due diligence. Never put any more capital at risk than you can comfortably afford to lose all of!
As ALWAYS, proceed most carefully, and if you have any questions, please consult a professional financial advisor.
