With the implementation of the new Dashboard interface, we are currently in the process of updating our documentation and some pages may be out of date. Thank you for your patience. Please contact our support team if you need any assistance.
An Organization is a profile that represents a company or entity instead of an individual. Companies that become Financial Contributors, as well as legal entities that are Fiscal Hosts, are Organizations on Open Collective.
Have your company show up as a Financial Contributor to Collectives
Enable your employees to support Collectives on behalf of your company
Make bulk transfers so you can send money once and distribute it to Collectives as you wish
Become a Fiscal Host (read more)
Go to your profile menu (top right) and look for the My Organizations section. Click "+".
Once set up, you will be able to select your individual or organization profile when making a contribution.
Go through the process of contributing to a Collective, and you'll be able to create both the individual and organization profile during checkout.
Use the cog icon next to the organization that you want to edit.
From there you can change your Info, add or remove Team members, create or edit your Expenses Policy, manage your Payment Methods, Gift Cards, Connected Accounts, Webhooks and to access Advanced settings.
Don't forget to save your changes!
To access your Organization's contributions, go to the Organization's page and click on Manage Contributions in the navigation bar menu. From there you can access the action options to update amount or payment method, or cancel the contribution.
Sometimes, the Manage contributions
button can be nested inside the Actions menu
Bulk transfer means sending funds via one financial transfer, which you can then give to one or multiple Collectives.
Once the Fiscal Host confirms the funds have been received, they allocate that amount to your Organization, which you (and your team) can then distribute to Collectives as you wish.
Different fiscal hosts may have different processes for bulk transfers. Before sending, please confirm their policies and payment details, and let the fiscal host know to expect the funds.
Set up an Organization
Request an invoice from the Fiscal Host if needed
Confirm the Fiscal Host's payment details
Send the funds via bank transfer or other agreed method
Fiscal Host confirms receipt
Fiscal Host allocates the funds to your Organization's balance
Go to the Collective you want to support
Select the contribution amount you want to give
Select your Organization as the source of funds
Done!
Funds make it easy to give money to projects you care about.
Funds are similar to an organization in that both will let you donate to a collective but funds are designed to hold and display a balance, show transaction history and distribute money through grants and expenses.
If you are more focused on disbursing funds than receiving them, a Fund may be a good fit for you.
Funds allow you to know how much money the Fund has, approve or invite grant requests, and easily request disbursements from your charitable Fund.
Funds provide:
Transparent financial management on the Open Collective platform
A streamlined, single-payer process for supporters
Support for communities operating on Open Collective or elsewhere
A lightweight 'Request a Grant' process for projects issue money to grant recipients
More flexibility with what you choose to publicly show (in terms of expense management)
Protect identities of those receiving grants
e.g. emergency relief aid may not want to be as public
Will still be reported and available to fiscal host
A Fund is a profile designed for one or a few large sponsor companies to move chunks of money under our umbrella and frictionlessly distribute it to as many collectives as they want. Some Funds are in the name of a particular company, while others are focused on a topic.
Big companies call the process of paying for stuff “procurement”. It’s often pretty involved, with contracts, invoices, purchasing order numbers, and bureaucracy—a painful thing to go through repeatedly for small amounts.
It is easier for corporations to make one large payment to one vendor. As an umbrella non-profit, we are set up for exactly this. Funds are a feature on the platform to make the experience even better, and more scalable.
Funds can be created by an organization.
Funds allow for more customization in the transparency of an initiative. This is a great way to issue grants to recipients of emergency aid, human rights activists, and censorship targets, for example, for whom more privacy is essential.
It's also perfect for initiatives that want it to be easier to distribute money outside of Open Source Collective. Funds are the best way to manage your FOSS support fund for projects in or out of your OSC fund since you'll only need to deal with one vendor (us!).
With Funds, we can now offer more flexibility for managing finances and expenses.
A Fund is likely less interested in the 'social' & crowdfunding aspects of fundraising. This type of account will have a more simplified version of our dashboard for those who don't want all the extra features that group-organizing benefits from.
Lots of projects sign up with us because they don’t have their own company or foundation to work through. But you don’t have to be on Open Collective. Any collective—whether they are part of a company, has its own foundation, works with another fiscal host, or is unincorporated—can get contributions from a Fund.
The Funds admins approve what money gets spent on, but when it comes to invoices, purchase orders, payment processing, tax forms, etc, they don't need to worry about it. We take care of all that and interface with the payees. This makes it a lot easier for both of them.
The key to creating scalable, resilient projects is to support the community as a whole in ways that serve the full range of projects and creators. Open Collective liberates corporate support, getting it directly to projects at scale, across languages and ecosystems.
It's up to the creators of the Fund what the process is. Open Collective has a 'request a grant' function that some use to receive proposals from projects. Others use their Fund to process payments for an external program with its own process. Others have an internal team who decides where the money goes and they don't take requests. We carry out their decisions about what the money is spent on and handle the logistics, but the Fund administrators are in the driver's seat.
**Reach out to us for more information if you are wanting to set up a Fund with OC!
For more information about our mission regarding funding and the initial organizations that came on board, please read Pia's release blog.
Open Collective gift cards empower your employees or community members to support the open source projects they love.
See our dedicated Gift Cards page for an introduction to gift cards.
To use a gift card, you first have to activate it on your account from Redeem Gift Card. Then go to make a contribution, and select your gift card when asked for payment. Note: Some gift cards might be limited to specific fiscal hosts or project types (e.g., open source).
You are only charged when the gift cards are used. If you give away a $50 gift card to 10 of your employees and only 8 used it, you will only be charged $400.
Yes, you will receive a proper consolidated monthly invoice from the Fiscal Host.
By default gift cards expire after one year, but you can define your own expiry date. If they are not used by the expiry date, they become inactive and you will not be charged.
No. You can use your gift card to give any amount to one or multiple collectives, as long as you have enough balance on the card.
Both! The person to whom you gave the gift card is the one picking the collectives they want to support. But their donation will show that they used a gift card from your company, and your company will show up as a sponsor of the collective. See for example Triplebyte showing up as a sponsor of Electron.
The simplest option is to use a credit card, as you can set it up by yourself in a few minutes. This works great for small companies and limited usage (2-10 gift cards) but if you're willing to process a large number of transactions we strongly recommend using a prepaid budget instead to avoid credit card processor fees and to limit the number of transactions that will appear on your bank account.
Note: Each gift card charge will create a credit card transaction and currently we don't charge the full amount up-front.
To create Gift Cards for your Organization, go to Edit Organization and then Gift Cards. From there you'll also be able to see your pending and redeemed gift cards.
We currently offer three options for gift cards distribution.
You can give us a list of emails and we'll send the gift cards out, or you can generate gift card codes and send them out yourself.
This section has not been written yet. Help us by sharing your knowledge!
This section has not been written yet. Help us by sharing your knowledge!
Legally support communities that don't have a legal entity
Transparency: you’ll always know what your contributions are being used for, in real time
Get an invoice/receipt for your donations, for easy accounting
One purchasing order or vendor management process for all your donations
Reporting: receive a monthly report that aggregates all your donations
Go to the Collective's page and review their Sponsorship tiers. Choose one that suits the level of support you want to give or the reciprocal benefits you care about. Go through the contribution flow and pay using a credit card.
You can also give a flexible contribution by editing the options on the contribution screen, adjusting the amount and frequency.
Sponsor logos show up on the Collective's page, and are automatically pulled through our Widgets into many projects' READMEs and websites.
Sponsors are organized in order of the amount of contribution, with the highest at the top. If your one-time contribution is larger than a recurring sponsor's monthly amount, your logo will show at the top, but only for that month.
Yes, you can cancel a recurring contribution at any time. To do so, go to 'subscriptions' under your user menu, select the subscription, and, using the three dot menu in the corner, select 'change amount' or 'cancel'.
If you want to set up a sponsorship arrangement different to the pre-configured options, or have any other questions for the admins of a Collective, you can usually contact them using the Contact
button on the Collective page.
Most Collectives are happy to discus alternative arrangements and hear sponsor feedback and requests. We encourage sponsors to start conversations.
We offer tools to help you find Collectives that are providing value for your company.
Yes. You can send us funds with a single transaction, and we'll allocate it to your Organization in the system. Then you can distribute it to the Collectives of your choice.
Before setting up a Sponsorship, we recommend you create an , so you can contribute under your company's name instead of your own.
: discover your open source dependencies
: let your developers, ambassadors, employees, or recruits determine which Collective to support
: search for Collectives on the platform
Yes. If paying via credit card through our automated system doesn't work for your process, please and we can arrange to accept payment.
Yes. Contributions through our platform will automatically generate receipts after payment, but (like the Open Source Collective) can function like any vendor or supplier and provide the documentation you require. If you need an invoice in advance, or for us to register in your vendor system, please .
Open Collectives are under the legal umbrella of their . For most open-source software projects, that's the Open Source Collective.
Most sponsorships arrangements don't require a separate contract to the standard terms, but we offer a if needed. Sponsorship agreements are set in discussion with the sponsor, the fiscal host, and the Collective together.
You bet! See .
Convincing 'the powers that be' in companies to sustainably support open source is not easy. We acknowledge that there are many heroes inside companies who are fighting that, and we want to support them. This is an open toolkit for sustainers making the case for their companies to support their open source stack.
This is an email that Vincent Voyer and Josh Dzielak from Algolia used to start a conversation internally about supporting Open Source. They kindly agreed to share it. <3
Please keep adding them <3
Thanks @opencollect for providing this great service! @fbOpenSource Thanks for all your contributions to OSS 🙌 https://t.co/NxnvC8Xi4f— JS.coach (@_jscoach) November 14, 2017
💸Small yet significant step in the #mobx community. Today I could paid contributor for a significant contribution to MST from our @opencollect!
👏 Tnx to @coinbase @algolia @fbOpenSource & all other sponsors!
🎉It works even when you're not @webpack https://t.co/NJTnMcA8NI— Michel Weststrate (@mweststrate) July 16, 2018
The tooling for open source projects is so good these days!
@github - code
@opencollect - funding
@withspectrum - community
@zeithq - deployment & domains
Seriously amazing! 🙏— Devon Govett (@devongovett) July 9, 2018
Flights and hotel booked! That means I'm ready for @vue_london ✅
Really looking forward to meet all these nice people and especially I'm very happy to meet @Atinux and @_achopin for the first time.
Thanks a million to @nuxt_js, who sponsored the ticket through @opencollect 🙏— Alexander Lichter (@TheAlexLichter) September 10, 2018
This is why we use @opencollect :-). FT Maintainers (non-single-co backed) + Contributor Pool. https://t.co/NxGfe8V8cW— SEAN LARKIN 廖肖恩 (@TheLarkInn) September 20, 2018
Depends on your budget. We're around $10k/y, and we pay out ~5-10% of avail. budget for each large contribution, and small token payments for fixed issues. Federated/open ownership of the books is why we are happy with @opencollect.— Goose (@RickCasey) December 20, 2017
Sponsoring a project is deeper then money, but partnerships working together for common good. #FOSS #JavaScript— SEAN LARKIN 廖肖恩 (@TheLarkInn) October 13, 2017
We strongly believe that someday we could fully focus on #opensource to make @nodejs world better 🚀🔥 @opencollect
👍 enjoy using @nestframework? 🙌 ask your company to support us: 🎁 https://t.co/taYS49lllr pic.twitter.com/L1O9Vf5uhS— NestJS (@nestframework) April 25, 2018
Discover the @nuxt_js Cheat Sheet made with @VueMastery our new official @opencollect partner! 🙌https://t.co/IOqvMORVSZ— Alexandre Chopin (@IamNuxt) October 19, 2018
Woohoo we've just hit 500 followers! Thanks @NEON_UK for being our 500th! (& Extra special thanks to all our @opencollect contributors: we've now got an annual budget of over £1000/year! ☺️) Still a long way to go to #ChangeTheMedia & create #BetterMedia but 2 good milestones!— Better Media (@bettermediauk) October 1, 2018
.@digitalocean is backing @GoReleaser on @opencollect! They have super cheap machines and you can get $10 worth of credit through this link: https://t.co/7GjyX89QxJ— caarlos0.dev (@caarlos0) October 1, 2018
Today we take our next step in open source sustainability: @AirbnbEng is donating $50,000 to open source projects via @opencollect! https://t.co/6sT4syt7Zw ✨🌟✨🌟✨— Joe Lencioni (@lencioni) April 20, 2018
Read Trivago's quotes here
An easy way to surface your organization's dependencies and detect which ones are seeking funding.