The next two years are about maturing the OC Inc. platform and connecting our teams so that we can scale our impact in the years to come.
The next two years are about maturing the OC Inc. platform and connecting our teams so that we can scale our impact.
We are working towards a world where transparency and collectivity are the norm. Our vision is a world where all groups can access the funding they need to do their work, regardless of their institutional status. Our role is to provide administrative, legal, and financial tooling for unincorporated groups to raise funds. We want Collectives to be able to focus on their mission without having to do tons of paperwork, open a bank account, or create a nonprofit or other legal entity.
In this post, we will review what Open Collective Inc. does, share the history and context that has led us to this moment, and then present our strategy for 2023-2024. The strategy is a guide – not a roadmap – and will be updated and refined in conversation with our internal teams and our community. Let us know what you think on slack, on mastodon, on twitter, or on instagram.
What is Open Collective?
Open Collective is a fundraising platform and a network of nonprofits and other Fiscal Hosts that support 15,000+ groups around the world. A Fiscal Host is a legal entity that lends its legal status and bank account to an unincorporated group, which we call a Collective. The image below provides a general overview of how fundraising + access to nonprofit status and more come together. Note that each Fiscal Host determines the percentage that they need to take to sustain their staff and do the paperwork so that Collectives can focus on their mission.
We are proud that our communities raised over $43M in 2022 (and $88M since 2016) with fully transparent budgets. Below, you can see some of our most active Collectives.
History: OC Inc. from 2015-2022
- From 2015 to 2019, OC Inc. launched and built a platform, team, and a business model dedicated to social and financial impact in the open source community and beyond.
- In 2020, we achieved product-market fit with money management and fundraising platform + fiscal hosting as a service. We did this by incubating a small cohort of Fiscal Hosts. Open Collective Inc. has grown +5x in the past 2 years and two of the nonprofit fiscal hosts that OC Inc. incubated — Open Collective Foundation and Open Source Collective — each grew 3x in 2022 alone. We went from: ~$17k/month in 2019 to ~$150k/month today; supporting ~3,000 Collectives in 2019 to ~15,000 Collectives today; a small team to a larger team – growing from ~5 people to ~25 people working across the Support, Operations, Engineering, Design, Community, and Product teams at OC Inc.
- The next phase is about getting ready for scale. We are focusing on maturing and streamlining our platform and improving how we work across teams. This is fundamental if we are to pave the way into a world of transparent budgets and fiscal hosting in the service of collective livelihoods. We believe that we are poised for immense growth; what we have achieved so far will seem like a drop in the bucket; and so we want to be able to scale in a thoughtful and sustainable way.
STRATEGY 2023-2024
The next two years are about maturing the OC Inc. platform and connecting our teams so that we can scale our impact.
