Allowlists Renewed: The Keys To Community Operations

Decision-making and co-ordinating operations are integral parts of all online communities, whether tokenized or not. To keep up with our organizational needs we need lots of customizability at every step.

While previously, tokens were the primary means of co-ordination in our industry - providing ownership, membership, granting access to communities, voting rights, and more rewards - there are now other non-tokenized ways to co-ordinate communities.

By realizing the broader array of methods communities could have beyond tokenization, Guild has moved from simple token-gating to a more flexible approach: to setting up roles for any community functions including co-ordinating and governance.

Guild’s modular access management model of Requirements, Roles and Rewards, allows tokenized and non-tokenized communities to build role structures around a set of requirements to utilize for access. These requirements include onchain actions, interests, internet history, held assets and allowlists.

In this piece, we'll expand on the utility and diversity of allowlists and ideas for specific use-cases and tools to make the most out of them.

In the onchain world many functionalities of apps work around allowlists, including reward distribution, access management, browsing explorers and more. While this hasn’t changed, it has expanded with further automations and features.

Allowlists can be used to identify early adopters, create smaller workgroups in a larger community, build onchain governance without tokens and to plan future airdrops.

Set up any combination of requirements in your Guild for members to pass and get on allowlists automatically. This way we reached a new level of automated permissioning for allowlists. Depending on your goals, allowlists are the ultimate function for multiple reasons.

Allowlists are handy at different stages of a community. Fully customizable allowlists allow greater control over the composition of membership tiers and sub-groups. Guild, in combination with other tools and apps, can help achieve it all.

With Guild, allowlists can be:

• uploaded as requirements to get rewards,

• created as outputs after a completed behavior,

• and exported for further use in more roles on Guild or in other applications.

By combining requirements like onchain assets, social data, and participation, we can grant access to deeper community functions and enable members to get on allowlists automatically.

To get your hands on an allowlist, there are two ways to proceed: either by gathering addresses from blockchain explorers or through Guild.

The blockchain is an open database, we can call at any information on it and export it in some form. With Guild, we can combine this with cross- and off-chain data as well.

Blockchain explorers allow you to collect wallet addresses based on asset holdings and onchain actions on different networks. Some examples include Etherscan, PolygonScan, and Arbiscan. These provide a more manual, less granular but fairly quick solution.

Guild offers a more modular approach to exporting addresses based on requirement combinations within its ecosystem of supported chains and platform integrations.

• Guild’s query engine, Balancy is an alternative tool to gather addresses on multiple chains without already having a Guild yourself. Once requirements are set, you can download or copy eligible addresses in the form of allowlists for future use.

• The Member Exporter on Guild creates allowlists of your members' addresses based on the roles they hold within your Guild. It's an exportable snapshot of your current members in space and time that you can use to build strategies and initiatives on top of. This enables you to set any requirements for members to complete in order to get in a role, therefore an allowlist.

Balancy creates allowlists based on requirements, regardless of Guild memberships, while the Member Exporter creates allowlists based on members' roles.

When exporting members’ addresses, Guild's modularity also allows for the ability to mix and match roles to export to a single allowlist.

We can go even further…

Combined with the visibility feature, allowlists become more useful for a variety of goals. It enables admins to create secret and hidden Guild elements - requirements, roles, and rewards -, visible only to them or to role holders.

Since these elements are “invisible” to the public, they are great for operational or strategic moves, even when creating allowlists. Regardless of the requirements you use to qualify members, secret and hidden roles allow Guilds to identify and target sub-groups and gather member insights.

Think of secret and hidden requirements and roles as filters or labels for your team to use, rather than “tasks to be completed” for the community itself.

Allowlists can be powerful tools for online communities to manage their members and include in strategies. Here are some potential ways to use allowlists, leading to next-level membership management:

1. Early adopters: export a list of your members at any given time, and create a designated allowlisted Guild role to recognize those who’s been there early.

2. Closed roles: prevent new members from obtaining a certain role by exporting the current role holders’ addresses and changing the requirement to an allowlist.

3. Planning rewards: target specific sub-groups within the community, like your biggest advocates or long-time members, and plan future drops with exportable allowlists.

4. Teams: smooth out your operations with Guild by adding core team members and contributors to allowlists, automatically granting them access to all necessary groups, channels and docs.

5. Governance without tokens: gather allowlists and use them for tools like jokerace to handle governance and decision-making with allowlist-based voting.

6. Analytics tools: collect actionable insights on your community and know your members better using curated dashboards with tools like Bello.

7. Keys to access: any social app directed at a crypto-native userbase is able to be gated or used by uploading an allowlist. In Guilds, they grant access to Discord roles, Telegram groups, Github repositories, Google drive files, and blockchain assets.

Allowlists are a vital part in the toolkit of communities. Whether recognizing the pioneers, streamlining operations, or enabling governance, they offer versatile means to enhance community management.

Guild's modular access management model helps leaders to have more insight into who their members are and more agency over community functions. As communities continue to grow and evolve, allowlists serve as the renewed keys to efficient and secure co-ordination and governance.

Guild.xyz is automated access and membership management for your community. Create portable groups, social structures around off- and onchain requirements across applications!

There are more resources and guides here. Join Our Guild to know about new features before anyone else and get the best ideas on maximizing the possibilities in your community!

This piece was co-authored by Reka + Hanna of the Guild team <3