Top Tips for Running Successful Whitelist Spot Giveaways

I don’t know about you but I’m bored of communities giving out crappy NFT project whitelist spots that nobody cares about, making their giveaway offering look trash! If you are on the team for a web3 community that does this – have you noticed a trend of giveaway entrants dropping week by week and aren’t sure why?

Or, would you like to run giveaways that will receive maximum engagement from your community members?

Then grab a chair and have a read of this bad boy. I’ll be going into detail on how to successfully run whitelist spot giveaways that will have real engagement and so much of it that other communities will be like “wtf is their secret sauce, man?”.

Go for the jugular of the more premium projects, or not lol

I say “or not” because at the current point of time I am writing this, most of you will have the same amount of luck in finding the next moonshot NFT project as much as Sam Bankman-Fried will be able to find the courage to apologise for being an absolute dick fart, but here we are.

In all seriousness though, why would you want to give away 50 whitelist spots for an NFT project called ‘My Feet’ which has 50 followers on Twitter, no Discord, and their art is just pictures of some dude’s feet? It’s not going to make it.

Don’t waste your members’ valuable minting time and money with lame-ass giveaways – try to find promising projects like early-day Azuki or KPR and reach out for some spots.

Your members will love you for it and if they win the giveaway and manage to mint something that goes to a 1 ETH floor price, they’ll never forget and tell their mates, and it gives you something to be proud of… “we did that”.

“Yeah, but surely running lots of giveaways is a good thing?”

If you can get spots for multiple major project giveaways on a weekly basis, then do it. If you can’t, then don’t – just run them as and when you manage to nail one. Most people don’t care about the number of giveaways, they’d much prefer higher quality over loads of giveaways for projects that mint and go through the floor, surely?

Don’t fall into that category of communities that run sooooooo many crap giveaways that people just lose interest in even checking your giveaway channel, because they know it will be full of 💩. Because then you can say au revoir to your engagement.

How to flirt with projects to get whitelist spots in the first place

You either have connections, or you don’t.

If you have a foot in the door with someone on a target projects core/collab team – well done, give yourself a pat on the back for being a wicked networker and read on anyway!

• Find a decent project – hyping community, good art, wicked utility, roadmap, competent team, etc – all the usual things that would make you want to invest in an NFT project.
  
  
• Do your research – don’t just barge into one of the teams DMs and ask for spots off the bat, take note on how big the collection size is, how long they have been building for and note down some things from their website or what some of their team are saying in public chat or on Twitter.
  
  
• Open comms and flex your research – this will help you build relationships faster and let them know you are actually spending time looking into the team and their project – not like the million other collab managers “pls can we have spots ser we are a good community”. Do this and I guarantee your chances of securing spots will 10x. Don’t get a reply from a DM? See if they have a ticket system in their Discord server, reach out to someone else on the team, try Twitter – there are always multiple ways to try reach out. Do them all.

• Spice things up a bit – try asking the project if they have any fun ideas to make the giveaway a bit more special, asking for input from people who are already doing you a favour will stroke their egos and maybe even give you more spots, who knows, their artist might offer to make you a custom giveaway graphic with one of their characters – you don’t know until you ask!
  
  
• Nail the details and carve them into stone – make sure both parties are agreed and settled on the requirements before you go off shouting about the giveaway. Check if its DTC (direct to contract) or role-based, what channels you can run it on (Twitter/Discord), start and end dates/times, what the requirements are for entry and get a final number of spots they are willing to give.
  
  Make sure to send any copy to them before posting it too, just in case you left a typo in there or some information about the project is incorrect. Some projects provide templates for giveaways which will save you the hassle.

Load up your giveaway cannon!

You got the spots, shit is signed off. Run it! Nah, just kidding. There’s still some stuff to do. Why not prepare a nice graphic for Twitter using a combination of the project’s art and your branding?

Maybe an animated gif/video to really grab people’s attention when they see it on their Twitter feeds. We all know things that move on timelines get more interest and engagement than things that don’t.

If you have a good graphic designer/animator, this should be easy to do. If you don’t, talk to me, I can definitely help.

Use a tool or platform to manage your giveaways

I literally cannot stress how important this is, do NOT use Twitter Picker or Discord Giveaway bots unless you have absolutely zero choice. Using a proper giveaway tool will save you so much time. I highly recommend Alphabot, it’s free to use at the moment so make the most of it. I actually wrote a thread about it (no, they don’t sponsor this lol):

I’ll be releasing a more in-depth post about how to really make the most of Alphabot later on, so stay tuned. Actually nah I’m not that mean, so in a nutshell…

Using something like Alphabot has too many benefits – you can set up the giveaway, requirements, running time, graphic and details all on their platform. You can even connect it to your Discord to auto-post the giveaway when you click publish as well as announce the winners for you.

It requires zero human input and will save you so much time, not to mention allow you to be as transparent as possible to your members. The winners are picked automatically and there’s no going back.

The beauty with Alphabot is the fact that it handles and tracks the giveaway requirements for you as well. Entries won’t count unless someone has connected their Twitter/Discord and Alphabot has picked up the fact that they have joined a server, followed an account, liked or retweeted a post on Twitter etc. Cool, ennit?

Probably the best alpha you will get: to really take your giveaways to the next level with Alphabot, get everything ready, DON’T publish it yet. Draft a tweet with your sexy animated graphic and 🔥 copy. Quickly tweet, grab the URL for said tweet, edit the Alphabot giveaway and make that a RT requirement then publish it to your Discord. This makes SUCH a big difference, if you don’t do this I’ll be fuming with you.

Follow up and say your thank yous, don’t be a knob

Damn, congrats on running one of the best giveaways your community has ever seen. This isn’t the end though. Make sure to follow up with the project and hand over the wallets/discord users so they can give your winners the role they need (if it is role-based, make sure to make this clear in the giveaway terms that people need to join the project’s Discord) or add them DTC.

Thank your members for taking part in the giveaway, give them a hint of the next major one to build anticipation and most importantly, say thanks to the project for giving you the spots in the first place. People move around a lot in web3 so a ‘thank you’ will go a long way if one of their team ends up working for another major project that you want spots for in the future!

Good luck for your next giveaway, not that you need it now 😜.

If you found this useful, chuck me a follow on Twitter – I post some gems on there too!