Funding Options

Direct donations are not the only way a Collective can receive revenue

We encourage Collectives to get creative about funding channels beyond the standard reward tiers. Get inspired by these ideas, and come up with your own! The Open Collective platform is flexible enough to accomodate all kinds of creative approaches.

Check with your fiscal host to see if these options are available to you.

Ethical Advertising

Speaking to niche audiences, like developers, in their own environment is one way OSS can leverage the tangible value it provides companies. Examples include CodeFund, Carbon Ads or referral fee solutions like Triplebyte.

We wrote a blog post about this if you want to know more.

Swag Shop

Give something to your contributors for their donations—swag! Sell t-shirts or other items and put the funds in your Collective budget. Collectives have been using threadless, bonfire, teezily and cotton bureau.

Usually, you can set up sales revenue to go directly to your fiscal host via Paypal or bank transfer. Then the host can credit the amount to your Collective. Different hosts have different policies, so reach out to them and confirm.

As this is a manual process, hosts generally prefer aggregating transactions and crediting less frequently (such as once a month). Get in touch with your fiscal host for details.

Affiliations

Some projects can participate in affiliate programs. For example, Material-UI receives funding from themes via Creative Tim Affiliates. A contributor could also start a workshop in Academy and choose to return a % to the community.

VIP Support

Some Collectives have a Base Support Tier that gives Sponsors access to support hours per month in exchange for a yearly contribution. Babel is one of them. Priority answers to issues is also something you can offer sponsors. The new Open Collective bot should make that easier to manage.

Sponsored Bounties

Your Sponsors can set up bounties for features they want. We interviewed JHipster about their bounty program if you want to know more.

Voting Rights

Webpack has been experimenting with their voting system. They give Sponsors special influence when voting on prioritization of their roadmap.