Code for Philly became a member of the Open Collective Foundation in December 2019 (yes that December 2019) and our experience raising and deploying funds as a community has been exponentially better since. The Open Collective platform has enabled a way more collaborative approach to fundraising that has empowered everyone in our community to help, and the process for directly reimbursing volunteers is far quicker and smoother. You can even use virtual debit cards to pay for things directly instead of making volunteers front expenses.
Take a look at Code for Philly’s collective page here: Code for Philly - Open Collective
Our volunteers and organizers haven’t had to worry about money every since we set up on Open Collective, and we never even made an aggressive push to fundraise since COVID shut down all the in-person programming we originally set out to fund the very month we started.
While losing Code for America’s fiscal sponsorship and having to find another option probably feels like a really intimidating task if it’s not something you’ve thought about before, I can tell you from the other side of it that it is surprisingly quick and easy with Open Collective—and your brigade will be in a better position immediately. Code for America has done incredible work supporting and growing the network, but frankly being a quality fiscal sponsor was never their focus area and they’ve never been particularly good at it. Open Collective on the other hand is 100% focused on applying modern technology and human-centered design to being the best fiscal sponsorship platform possible, and they are constantly delivering on that and innovating. @patcon and I filed a GitHub issue making the case for virtual cards years ago and they implemented it—how cool is that? They work like we do, and do this all day
I for one am incredibly excited to see what the whole brigade network could do on Open Collective
Migrating to OCF is easy
…and can get done end-to-end in as little as a week
- Review OCF’s FAQ on transferring from a different fiscal sponsor
- Go to opencollective.foundation and hit Apply
- Once approved, you’ll need to notify Code for America that you’re switching to an external fiscal sponsor
- There’s a separate MOU for brigades with external fiscal sponsors that many brigades have been under for years
- Code for America can then transfer any balance you have over to OCF
- You will need to pay OCF’s 8% fee on existing funds transferred into the platform—it’s worth it for the value provided and alternatives will end up costing more one way or another
Tips for using Open Collective
- Design some fun recurring contribution tier levels
- When companies post jobs to your community’s Slack, DM them that your community values companies that support civic technology and refer them to your Open Collective page, highlighting that a recurring contribution of any amount will put their name+logo in front of the community as supporters of civic technology
- When companies that have sponsored post jobs, post a note highlighting that they’re supporters of the community
- Use Open Collective to organize special projects that donors can support directly
- Use Open Collective to post event pages that people can purchase tickets to
- Generate virtual cards for recurring fees like hosting/zoom bills
- When pursuing sponsorships from major institutions in your area, take advantage of being able to hand the collective page to internal advocates at the organization
- They can take the URL to their bosses and have everything they need to move a contribution forward at their own pace without any back-and-forth with you
- Highlight that the platform is fully transparent—the funder and the whole community can see the contribution and anything it gets spent on, so no special reporting is needed.