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Sponsorship Evaluation: Circus City

For Circus City the sponsorship was hugely beneficial for a number of reasons, it enabled the festival to run a dedicated hub for the first time, in the same location as the Dash Help Desk, generating a sense of community and giving them a public facing boxoffice.



In addition because the artists’ drinks were paid by the sponsorship this allowed CC to be more generous in other areas of hospitality, giving everyone who worked at the festival a much better experience. The sponsorship also paid for greatly extended marketing which served both CC and Dash as both logos were always present on all publicity material.





This sponsorship was deemed to be very risky and experimental by the wider professional arts community, in bringing the sponsorship to a successful conclusion the CC and Dash team have therefore successfully made the case to a much wider segment of the arts world that Dash is a viable alternative to national currencies and a useful technology for transitioning away from physical cash and the costs associated with it.



Speaking about the benefits of the sponsorship Lina highlighted the fact that the CC team and artists got to learn about Dash in a really detailed way. It was also very apparent that the transparency of the funding process was very welcome: in the arts funding choices are often made in secret and the organisations waiting upon decisions are not in conversation with the bodies that fund them. With the Dash treasury process there is transparency before, during and after the proposal, feedback is possible and welcome.



Being able to get the message about Dash across to a wide range of audience members and arts organisations highlighted that the CC team is great at what they do: implementing an audience engagement strategy. Every audience member needs to a communicated with on the right terms and pitching Dash is part of that. Circus City as an organisation now has increased confidence in dealing with a sponsor, because the team found their own solutions rather than following instructions they were able to find the best way to sell Dash to our audience.





It was also great to get a response from two of the content creators in the Dash community with Mark Mason from Dash Force News and Dash Instant visiting us and conducting interviews. For CC the sponsorship felt like Dash was taking a risk with a bit of a maverick idea, with these visits and the response to them online it felt like there was a genuine interest from the Dash community, this felt good because we were trying to do a really good job.



Response to the Sponsorship

The evaluation process for Circus City, required by The Arts Council England will take several months so the team is still in the process of collecting all of their data, however the Dash sponsorship has allowed them to roughly double their audience reach this year. That means approximately 200,000 people will have seen the Dash logo for the first time and in a positive context.



The response was overwhelmingly positive from the general public, the artists working at the festival and the wider arts community. There was a real hype around the sponsorship and having a bar that accepted cryptocurrency. There was a great deal of curiosity from everyone about how Dash works and a desire from the artists to be able to use Dash at more festivals.



The artist involved in the festival loved that they were given Dash rather than drinks tokens which lose all of their value if left unused, quite rightly they regard free drinks as part of their payment and resent losing out on this value because they happen to work hard on delivering their performance rather than at the bar.





The international artists were also happy not being given GBP that would be almost useless to them once they have left the country, at best currency exchange bureaus take 5%-20% when exchanging notes and don’t accept coins, so to them Dash represented a great store of value.



The scale of future integrations could be much larger in GBP value when per diems can be paid in Dash. During CC each artist is paid a per diem of €25-50, this is the common range for festivals across the EU and is paid in cash when they arrive. The artists expressed a desire to receive their per diems in Dash if it was easy to spend in multiple locations. CC also had significant cash handling costs which could easily be reduced using Dash.





The management team behind CC are incredibly happy with the way the sponsorship worked, being able to work with an ethical and liberating technology like Dash allows for everyone to be fully invested in the project. Usually sponsorship in the arts has to balance ethics and finance in opposition so it was a genuine delight to have these aspects of funding aligned.



In a change to the original proposal, where there would have been a short presentation about the sponsorship at a Swedish circus forum, and as a reflection of the increased fiat value of the unspent funds Lina B. Frank (CC co-director) and I will be working together to spread Dash adoption in the european circus industry. There has already been significant interest from a network of festivals across the Baltic region and that is just from our first week of meetings.



Recommendations for Integrating Dash

The proposal process represents significant barriers to entry for most arts organisations in terms of risk, financing the 5 Dash fee and having the capacity to engage with the proposal process. It is highly unlikely that the success of the CC sponsorship will lead to an influx of proposals from other arts organisations. In most other countries it simply would not be possible to receive direct funding from a cryptocurrency because there is heavy regulation of organisations that receive public funding.





For integration to work across a network of EU festivals there needs to be a team with competence in both Dash and engaging the target audience, Lina and I are the leading team in the field in this respect. We are now building on the success of the sponsorship and the positive response from the artists to create a touring network of festivals that use Dash for artists’ per diems and payment.





Following the success of the sponsorship we feel confident that we can help festivals who run their own bars and/or food stalls to integrate Dash into their festival, creating a micro-economy within the festival that serves everyone involved.





All of the currently unspent funds will be used to further this goal, we are at the very beginning of this process so I’d like to end by outlining something of our vision for how this would take place.



Low Cost Practical Integration

The most basic integration would reply on installing wallets for artists and having phone wallets at the bars and food stalls, all with long spending pins only known to the Dash/finance manager and with a record of all recovery phrases kept securely offsite.





This means that funds can only be received and not spent by staff. It also means in the event of a phone being stolen the funds can be withdrawn from that device by using the recovery phrase on a backup phone. If independent retailers are accepting Dash they can choose to receive Dash or the fiat value on a daily basis thanks to me having a fee free way to go between Dash and fiat.



This model for integration is based on the method we used for CC, partly because there was not a viable POS for GBP. Training staff, the managers time and the cheapest viable android devices are the main expenses in this model and the short time frames involved minimise the impact of price slippage.



POS/ATM Integration

Using NFC enabled cards combined with POS such as the ones created by Festy or General Bytes would enable a very smooth experience. Having a 2 way ATM would also enable people to top up their Dash or sell it and receive the currency of their choice. Purchasing an ATM and dedicated Dash POS system would represent significant expense to any one festival but I am looking into the possibility of purchasing the equipment needed with the remaining funding and making it available to festivals who wish to integrate Dash.



In this model Lina and I would pay for the POS system outright, keeping the costs down and enabling the festivals to experiment with using Dash to pay artists with as little friction as possible.



With this model the technical barriers are greatly reduce for the participants as swiping NFC cards is common practice and the festival can easily issue prepaid cards which in turn can be topped up from the ATM, thus answering two of the immediate questions: where can I spend Dash & where can I buy more?



Conclusion

The entire process of this proposal has been a learning journey for me and I have watched the Dash community grow and mature rapidly over the last 6 months as the price has hit new highs on almost a monthly basis.



For me the ultimate goal has always been to put this incredible technology we call Dash into the spotlight and into the hands of people who can use it to change their own lives and make the world a better and more connected place.





I’m happy to say that at the conclusion of the this project that my work has only just started and I am more optimistic than ever about the future Dash is helping to create.