We caught wind of an innovative program run by Alec Jenkins, the official Team Captain for the “District of Collectors” Washington Wizards Top Shot community. Alec and his community of collectors are taking an analytical approach to using their allocated funds from Dapper’s Team Captains program. On the day crafting officially launches, we thought our OTM readers would be interested in hearing what they’re up to.
This is the first in a series of community leader profiles.
OTM: Let’s start with you telling us a little about yourself. How’d you end up being the Wizards Team Captain?
Alec: I have always been a diehard DC sports fan and a big Wizards fan. I am actually on my 9th year having season tickets. I have also always been a collector so when I got introduced to NBA Top Shot it was a natural fit. I first dipped my toe into Top Shot in February 2021 but didn’t start going all out until Summer of 21 when I saw a Packrip Ewing tweet about the value of collecting team sets. Within 48 hours, I had completed the Wizards S1 team set and purchased my grail moment at the time, the Otto Porter RIB. I have been stacking Wizards moments ever since. I have experience in corporate ticket management and event planning through my job so when I saw the opportunity open up for the Team Captain role I immediately jumped at it. I love the idea of providing utility to team set holders and am a big fan of the concept of providing utility for the community from the community.
OTM: We’ve heard a bit from Dapper about the program, but can you briefly describe the Captains program from your POV?
Alec: Dapper deserves a lot of credit for setting the Team Captains program up. They are giving us a lot of flexibility to create the utility for our communities that they want. We have some general guidelines to follow but are really being given the power to chart our own path for the community through allocating our budgets between giveaways, experiences, IRL events, etc. No two captains will be the same because we are all focused on tailoring the experience to the unique needs of our communities.
OTM: So you guys are doing something really interesting, sort of a subcommunity pilot for both crafting and new user acquisition at the same time. Can you outline the District of Collectors buyback program and how you landed on this approach?
Alec: I have to give credit to the 76ers captain, King Polis from Trust the Moment, who gave me the idea for the buyback program. I took what they were doing and added in the crafting concept to allow Wizards fans to not only trade in S2 moments but use them to upgrade to a Rare Wizards moment.
A lot of collectors were frustrated when TSS was released because it instantly devalued S2 base set moments that were great for stacking due to their 6x Collector Score over S3 Commons. I myself have dozens of Wizards S2 commons I paid $4-$5 for to stack for Collector Score. This program was targeted to those collectors to help ease the pain of those moments dropping to $1-$2 on the marketplace.
The way the program works is you can trade in up to 10 S2 Commons if you have a Wizards S2 set and have them as your favorite team. For each common you send in, you get $4 in Dapper Credit back. If you send in 10 moments you can choose to receive a random Wizards Rare moment priced between $40-$50. The community was really excited about the upgrade concept with 60% electing that option. On Friday I am going to host a live stream of a prize wheel to randomly allocate the Rares and make a community event out of it. I also purchased a couple higher value Rares to throw into the mix.
OTM: And what’s the response been to the program? What kind of data can you share about how your collectors have approached the buyback?
Alec: The response has been overwhelmingly positive. We received over 87 submissions interested in participating. A number of those were disqualified for not having wizards as their favorite. 60% chose the upgrade option while 40% chose the Dapper Credit Option. I think the results show that these collectors love Top Shot and want the ability to level themselves up into better moments. I also did a survey of the community to see how they wanted funds spent. Overwhelmingly the number one thing almost everyone wanted was the ability to win more moments. As of today, I am going to be buying back 409 S2 Common Wizards from the community and will be upgrading 24 collectors into Rare moments. It is likely that we will continue to allocate portions of the budget towards programs like this in the coming months.
OTM: Given the success and positive response from the community, how do you move forward once this buyback is done? Do you have other similar programs in mind?
Alec: We will continue to use similar programs to the benefit of the community. I am excited to see what the final distribution of players is when I tally up all of the moments we received. These moments are going to be used to incentivize new users or Wizards fans to join Top Shot and our community. I plan to bundle them into S2 Starter packs that will be given to Wizards fans on a referral basis from other community members. The goal here is to reward the current community and help grow the community simultanesouly. I am going to look at new ways to use this program going forward. I could see the next iteration being a crafting challenge requiring specific moments to upgrade to a Rare. I know my fellow Captains have a lot of cool ideas and I look forward to seeing what they come up with that I can repurpose for my community.