 Welcome to today's webinar, Unlocking Community Empowerment, Office Hours with Nathan Newitt from Open Collective. Whether you need advice on navigating complex legal regulations, setting up your open collective account, or tips on optimizing your fundraising strategies, Nathan's expertise will help you make the most of the open collective platform. My name is Billy Bickett, and today I'll be your event host. But first let me introduce Nathan's a New York City-based non-profit programs and small business operations professional, governance nerd, local activist, and ambient musician. He's a radical administrator in service of community resilience and autonomy, currently serving as an ops strategist at Open Collective and a board member for social impact commons. Nathan's writing has been featured in non-profit quarterly and wired, and he presents at panels on topics such as the future of fiscal sponsorship, the solidarity economy, transparency, community engagement, non-profit management, digital security, and DIY zine making. He also enjoys watching competitive roads cycling. Nathan, welcome. We're so excited to have you here. I'm gonna stop sharing on my end and give you the slides for your own use. Thank you so much for that introduction. It's always weird to kind of hear yourself introduce, but I'm so glad to be here with you all. When we talk about Open Collective, it's really quite a large, broad canvas. There are a lot of different ways to engage with it depending on what your needs are. And I'd love to tailor this a little bit to those present, but of course, we'll try and also cover, give a kind of an overview of what's possible using Open Collective in the next, I don't know, probably 10, 15 minutes. Yeah, I'd say Open Collective is, on one level, it's just software. It's a software platform. I say just software, sorry, I don't mean to hate on software, but on some level, it is a website, right? That you can sign up with an account, you can use it to receive money and you can use it to manage your expenses. The third layer of it or the third piece of it beyond receiving funds and spending funds is in the technological aspect is that there's also a kind of legal aspect to it. A deeper administrative aspect to it where you're able to connect with other users, special users that have a legal entity and will let you become part of their business, their nonprofit, their co-op, so that you don't have to start your own legal entity in your country. And I think it's best shown with some examples. So I'm gonna go ahead and share my screen here. I've queued up some pages for us to look at in the Open Collective platform. I mean, Open Collective, if you've never been, it's at opencollective.com and there's some fun language on the front page, but now we're inside the app here. And Open Collective at the core is made up of collectives. These are our community groups with some sort of social purpose, some sort of orientation towards either their local community, a global community, a specific interest, a specific project, everything from open source, technological projects to mutual aid groups that give food, water, cash to people in need, to ideological or research projects or really it's boundless. Parent-teacher association, whatever, almost anything can use this technology. The technology is able to be used for a lot of different purposes. Here we can see a number of the different, some of the largest collectives in terms of the number of contribution or people that have made a financial contribution. So we have log seek. I've actually never heard anyone else say that out loud, so apologies if I mispronounce it, but this is an app. This is an app that people use to take notes and people love it, obviously. It's open source and people contribute to support further development of the project. Destiny Item Manager, this is something for the software engineers out there. They know the value of these types of apps. But then right next to it, we have Bushwick Ayuda Mutua. Ayuda Mutua in Spanish means mutual aid, mutual help. And so Bushwick is a neighborhood in New York City. I'm actually not far from where I live and they are in many ways, very different from these first two that I mentioned or from Webpack, if that matter, but they use the technology in the same way. And they raise money from a broad community of people making it, there are some larger donations, but we've got 2,000 people who have total, in total donated $745,000. These aren't like enormous donations. There's a lot of $5 donations, a lot of $10 donations. And we'll take a look at their profile, as well as babbles as part of this little demo. But just to look through a bit more, see if I want to editorialize on any more of these collectives. There's one other here to mention, which is 1K Project for Ukraine. This is a unique project that used Open Collective to give $1,000 to hundreds, or I think at this point, thousands of Ukrainian families that were refugees from the war on Ukraine. And they worked with people on the ground and raised money here in the United States, also in Europe, for major donors, and then they distribute that cash directly to the refugees in need, using Open Collective. Now I've gotten this far, but I haven't told you the big thing that separates Open Collective from everyone else, the number one thing, which you may already know it, but if you don't, the big difference is transparency. Transparency sits at the core of Open Collective's approach to finance, approach to community. It's the big differentiator for us, and it's a core value. So if we go and look at one of these, so we'll pick, let's look at you to Mutua, we can see they have a profile page. They've got some tags that they've included, some links here, it's a true profile page. We can see that they have, they've customized this profile, the order of things, they have, of course, how to donate at the top, and they've been able to create these different tiers. They have projects, which is a feature where you can create sub-budgets within the collective, so you can set aside money for a particular purpose. Think about financial apps where you can save for a particular goal and like inside Mint or whatever kind of personal finance app you may have used or just budgeting in general, like you wanna set aside money for a particular purpose like the asylum seekers fund. They have, if you are aware of what's happening in New York, then you know that asylum seekers are making their way to New York at a higher level than before. High enough that the mayor and governor and so on, it's in the news. So anyway, they're raising money for that purpose. We also have an events feature. Now I'm gonna be honest with you, the events feature is not super robust, but if you're doing a simple enough event where people are paying for tickets and you have one location and you don't need event-bright level features, it certainly functions well and the money goes straight into your balance. You don't have to deal with moving money from event-bright to somewhere else and moving money between apps, it's always a pain. So we can see they've done, they've had a gala, they've done yoga classes, also someone did a social media fundraiser, right? They've used the event feature for these purposes. But when we talk about transparency, we're talking about transparency of money, not just what's going on. And we can see they're top financial contributors. We can see the individuals that are given the most as well and they have the option to be incognito, they have the option to anonymize their name, but we can see that some people have not, some people are very much out in the open about the amount they've contributed. And we can see here all of their contributors. We can see some of them have given up, given little messages like, please keep up the amazing work or heart from your neighbor at Bed-Stuy-Strong or I don't know exactly what the full thing is here, but everything is confusing these days, but you're doing great, I imagine, something like that. So we can see all these different contributors to Bushwick at Udo Mutua. It is truly community supported and an open collective that's very visible. And that matters to new donors, to future contributors and to community members and beneficiaries. Even deeper, we can look at the budget itself. So we can see, this is just the kind of intro of few of each. We can see some of these contributions. We can also look at expenses and see that they got 91, three packs of soap. If you're ever wondering like what they're doing, you don't need to wonder anymore. What are they doing to your money? They're buying 91, three packs of soap and the name and the amount. They're buying fish for a community dinner. They're buying lunches for their volunteers. And we can go deeper. We can click on view all expenses and keep going. Distributing groceries, paying for a U-Haul to pick up food and gas and doing more soap. They're doing all these different things. Breakfasts, vegetables, personal hygiene items. Right, we can just keep going and going and see exactly where this money, how this money is being used, diapers. So that's the power of open collective. It really makes the community, it makes the collective accountable to its community. And so the more, the less hierarchical, the more flexible, the more fluid the thing is that you're involved in. The more people come and go, the more people come in and out. The more people that are involved, the more valuable this is. Certainly if you're just one person and no one cares what you're doing, and no one cares yet, it won't feel like it's that important. But over time, it becomes quite important that people can see what's going on. And so that's important for an organization like this, where they're also posting updates, by the way. They can send out messages to their donors. That's a nice feature. We can see a bunch of the different things they've sent out and asking for money, inviting to buy merch, inviting them to buy, or come to an event. We can also see that they have, there are pages here for tracking a goal. Their goal is $15,000 a month in sustaining donors, monthly donors, and they're about halfway there. But what I was going to say is, this is as valuable for an organization like, an organization like Bushwake Udimutua that's doing on the ground work, distributing physical items, as it is for a large open source technology project, like Babel. Now Babel is, in certain ways, a completely different type of organization from Bushwake Udimutua. They're all about software development and specifically front-end web development. Babel is a community-maintained compiler, which is a tech term for those who don't know it, for evolving the future of JavaScript, which is the language used to create many of the web pages that you interact with on a daily basis, including OpenEcoactive for what it's worth. But what's similar is, again, a broad community of people from all over the world, in this case, that are interested in the use of funds for a purpose that they all believe in. And so the same things come into play. We've got contributors. We've got showing who contributes. You can see that there are some businesses that are involved in wanting this to succeed, because their websites depend on it, like Airbnb or Salesforce. We see that there are individuals donating as well. We can see who's contributing. And we can see their budget. And they've chosen to use a different budget layout, which is nice. We can see some graphs, some bars, whichever kind of graph look you want to look, like whatever you want to look. You can see that most of the money is going to pay for engineering, which makes sense. This is a software engineering project. We also see some of the other communications costs, marketing costs. And we can see their contributions, what percentage are recurring at one time. These features that can be very powerful. And there's about information, right? And for Babel, this has been very important to be able to show where the money goes, because actually Babel was once accused of, he got into a bit of a, we'll say a Twitter level kerfuffle. Okay, let's be honest. But a bit of a software engineer blog post level thing where people said, where's the money going? There's no doubt. You can see it all right here. You can go right in. You can see exactly where it is. And you can see that there are costs beyond engineering. Here's what they are. Here's what the cost. We do need to communicate about the app for it to be successful. We do need to market it a little bit for it to be successful. It's not all going to go to engineering. With a project this size, we do need someone who's managing it and not writing any code. And these types of things are made visible here on Open Collective. Visible so that people can critique? Yes. But also visible that there's a source of truth about what's happening. And I think that's really valuable. Now, there's some chats. I just wanted to check and see. Okay. Now it's people saying what they're up to. Oh yeah. And Dark Reader. Yes, Dark Reader uses it. I use Dark Reader also. So yeah, there's a bunch of interesting, one of the great things about being part of Open Collective or for you as you, if you get more involved with Open Collective is you just keep running into things that are pretty cool that are using it. I'm just saying, and we've been really actually been shaped by our community as a technology platform. We've absolutely been shaped by Babel, by Bushwick, by their needs because we're an open source project too. And yes, we're a business, but we're also an open source project and part of the long-term goal of what we're doing is building something that can be used by anyone. So as I move to wrap up here, there's one layer that's, can get a bit more complicated, but it came up in the discussion with Pia, last week, which is the idea of a fiscal host. So a fundamental part of what Open Collective does is yes, there's all this technology, the profiles, all the different areas of the app that I showed you just now. And there is a backend that you'll get into when you create your own page, where you set up all of these different things. But the other important piece is, something I mentioned in the beginning also, connecting with a legal entity that holds your activities within it. We call it a fiscal host because it's hosting your finances. You can use it, the app independently, with your own business entity, your own nonprofit. You absolutely can do that to be clear. But what many communities where they're positioned is, they haven't started a business or a nonprofit or something to represent them. They've been doing it with their own bank account, just moving money around with their colleagues, their collaborators. Maybe they haven't really dealt with money and they're having to deal with money for the first time. Or maybe someone wants to make a donation to them and that the person making that donation is requiring they have a kind of tax status. Those are all situations where you'd want to find what in the US is called the fiscal sponsor and more broadly, we call it a fiscal host. And a fiscal host, there are a number of different fiscal hosts that are available on the open collective platform. A number of them we run ourselves and then there are also some close collaborators that also provide fiscal hosting services. And when you create a collective, you'll have the opportunity to reach out to one of these, to apply to one of these through the app, to become part. And of course they'll review your activities making sure it's a fit. But then when they accept, you then can begin operating as if you're already approved by the government. Rather than creating some separate individual thing, instead you're just becoming part of one of these entities and can begin working immediately. They take care of your taxes, they take care of your admin, they take care of compliance, they take care of insurance, they take care of their paying accountants and lawyers. And you get to focus on what you need to do. Whether it's an open source project, like many are with open source collective, whether it is a mutual aid group in the US, like Open Collective Foundation, or either one based in Europe with Open Collective Europe. If you're a climate organization, a climate change based organization anywhere in the world, you can work with all for climate based in Belgium. There's New Zealand based groups, and there are others that I don't even know that much about here. There's collective Brussels, there are all these different groups. For strong communities in the US, there's, yeah, there should be denial of secrets to set themselves up here. There are all different kinds of fiscal hosts that are available. Some of them smaller, some of them larger, some of them prepared to offer what you need, some of them more focused on their specific, some of them are more selective, but just depends. But there are definitely options here that can become a host for your activities. Very quickly, we do have, we are not a neutral platform. So we have these values, impact, collectivity, inclusivity, honesty, transparency, privacy, dignity, sustainability and resilience. And there are certain things we don't allow, hate, bullying, misinformation, disinformation, which is always tricky of course, but you have to draw a line and disrupting the experience of others. So we do have these types of protections in place. We do have, we hope that you can feel our values in that one we've built, but certainly we also articulate them. And in general, I invite you to dig into our documentation to learn more. Okay, hopefully that was a good overview of Open Collective. I'll stop sharing my screen. Ah, okay, I'm seeing some questions. What's the fee structure, please? Fee structure is, as a collective, you are choosing, thanks Kevin, happy to provide, as a collective, each fiscal host has a different fee structure. And so you will actually not be charged by the platform, you'll only be charged by the fiscal host. And the fiscal host is taking a percentage, I would say between 5 and 10%, but that's not just for the technology, right? That's for all of the things I mentioned. The accounting, tax, lawyers, back end infrastructure, that's for all of their services. And Open Collective's income is then through by taking a cut of that percentage from the fiscal host. We have an arrangement with the fiscal host. And then, yeah, in pricing, we'll show the fiscal host pricing. We have an arrangement with the fiscal host. And then on top of that, we do also receive tips, like GoFundMe if you're familiar. Those are our two main income streams. Let's see, the tips are optional by the donors. And then, looks like also is Open Collective only for nonprofits or social enterprises also included. I think it's a bit more nonprofit oriented because of the nature of fiscal hosting. Fiscal hosting is a bit easier to do when you're not paying income tax. So this is getting into the weeds a little bit, but holding a bunch of money for a bunch of different people, a bunch of different income coming in different years and expenses going out into other times, sometimes the money being held for a long time before I'm being spent. It's a little bit easier to pull off in a nonprofit setting because you're not being taxed on the income in Western countries and any other countries that are mimicking that type of structure. That said, there are social enterprises. There are co-ops. There are social enterprises on there. It's all about fit when it comes to choosing the fiscal host or going independent. It's about finding, if you can find a fiscal host, it's able to post your social enterprise that's available and that can definitely work. And honestly, the longer you've been in this business, the more you know how creative you can get with something like this. So I've seen also where there are businesses that have the social impact aspect of their business fiscally hosted and then they have a separate and they'll put some money into it. I don't know, there's all these different kinds of arrangements you can get into and that's something that's often discussed with the fiscal host around whether or not it's a fit. That's a good conversation. Are fiscal hosts rated by the collectives or how do we manage the quality of fiscal hosts? I think that's a good question. And frankly, I think that's an area of improvement for us. There isn't a rating system. And yeah, Laura likes setting up sister of a nonprofit. We don't have a rating system or a review system. That's something that could be interesting. Yeah, and we review fiscal hosts but people are always setting them up and experimenting and we try not to discourage that too much. So there are absolutely a bunch of fiscal hosts accounts on there that are like, wouldn't be that useful to reach out to because people are trying things out. But on the fiscal host page, opencollector.com slash hosts, the ones that are most active and most established are there at the top. And that's usually where I tend to recommend people that they start. Any other questions? Yeah, yeah. So Gavin says in the Rio Grande Valley, there's a huge challenge with stray dogs and the rescue community struggles to hope. Sorry, struggles to cope. Hopefully doesn't struggle to hope. So we can create an app, for example, funded through open collective to attempt to connect the whole community. Certainly there is open collective is perfectly situated to help with receiving funds and spending funds on such an endeavor. You can treat it as a kind of a terrible endeavor like that where you would get donations from certainly individuals in the community and also perhaps local community foundations if you can find those sorts of connections or other entities that maybe local businesses would be willing to contribute. And you can start raising funds into someone like open collective foundation potentially and then spend funds from that directly to your vendors, directly to your contractors, directly on your costs. Absolutely possible. If you're looking at it solely as an app and more like something that could be used in other situations as well, we also have the open source technology angle. So if you're looking more to make an open source app that helps with this particular type of problem that you then want to apply in Rio Grande, you can sign up with open source collective and focus on the code side of it. So there are different approaches, but certainly open collective is situated in place to help with something like that. And generally speaking, any kind of community-oriented new thing, I won't use the word start-up, but we'll say any sort of like start-up community project is gonna open collective is situated to be an option for them. It can really help. I think it helps in the early stages. It has some really obvious benefits in the early stages, but then you also really have a lot more leeway for how you grow. You can grow slowly. You can grow quickly. Yeah, it can be helpful to just be able to set as a founder who doesn't have a background in working with accountants, working with lawyers, and who doesn't have a front capital to throw $10,000 at those types of professionals. And by the way, that is a realistic number, $10,000 in your first year. You can get started a lot more easily. Having this kind of school. I think I was gonna say, actually, I didn't end that sentence correctly. Over time, you still don't want to deal with the accountants or lawyers, even in year two, year three, and you don't have to step into that. You can keep going with this type of support. Any other questions? Okay. Billy, do you have more for me? If no one has any other questions, I think we're gonna thank you for spending time with us, Nathan, and sharing your intelligence and experience with us. I'm just extremely available, and so is our team. You can reach me by support at opencollective.com and just include my name, Nathan, and I can make its way to me. I'm happy to talk through specific situations, but our team also has become very experienced and can help God do as well. Yeah, support at opencollective.com and we're happy to help talk through your situation. If it needs it, we can even set up a call. Yeah, we've worked with a lot of different projects and everyone is unique. So, the devil is in the details, as they say. When it comes to, when you're not doing just an app, you're getting into the legal entity stuff. The devil's in the details, so it's always a conversation. Right on. Right on. Thank you so much, Nathan.