Cycle Two Reflection 

• Business Model: The founding members of the Open Finance Consortium are currently subsidizing the transition into a non-profit. They have requested that we create a new business model to expand our income and guarantee financial sustainability. We have developed a new business model in which host organizations pay based on the two parameters that best reflect the utility and value of the platform: the number of active collectives and the number of expenses processed. We built a pricing page (not yet released to the public) that communicates this business model, and we are using it to present and discuss it with existing organizations and new potential customers.

• Organizations Marketing Page: We have also built a new marketing page targeted at organizations (not yet released to the public), focusing on the platform and its capabilities. This may seem obvious, but from its inception, the identity of Open Collective has been bound to its large fiscal hosts and their social missions. Now we need to tell the story of the platform itself, its capabilities, and value propositions in a way that can attract new organizations to it. This is also in alpha testing (not yet released to the public). 

• White Labeling: We’ve also researched a white-labeling solution that would enable organizations to map the platform onto their own domains (e.g., finance.mydomain.org). We’ve identified key challenges to making this happen and built a prototype to assess the feasibility of various solutions. We now have a foundation that we can build on in future cycles. 

• Dashboard Accounts Tool: Collectives will now find an “accounts” tool representing the collective as a list of accounts. This may seem redundant for collectives with only one crowdfunding campaign and no projects or events. However, if you are a collective with multiple crowdfunding campaigns and uses projects and events, we hope this can be a refreshing view for you. The accounts tool also comes with a new trick: internal transfers. You can now easily move money between collective accounts. If you’ve ever wanted to set aside some of your collective funds towards a specific project, well, now you can, simply and directly. You can create a new project, transfer funds, and then pay expenses from it. Then, when the project is complete and you have some leftover money, easily transfer it back to your main collective account. 

• Grant Submission Form: At the end of the previous cycle, we released a beta version of the new expense submission form (see “preview features” to turn it on). We’ve now complemented that with a separate form for grant request submission. The entire project is still in beta testing (please do give it a try), and both have been redesigned with many obvious and subtle improvements. 

• Updated the PDF library used to generate platform documents
  
  
• We conducted a series of design workshops to transform the off-platform bank connections prototype from an MVP into a tool we feel good placing into the hands of additional organizations (based on feedback from initial testing with live data and use cases). 

Cycle Three Overview 

• Transaction Exports: A while back, we introduced the ability to “edit added funds,” which hosts requested. The implementation strategy presented some accounting frictions (when, for example, funds are edited around the transition of a month). This cycle, we are looking to improve this behavior by reviewing our implementation strategy, improving export, and enhancing documentation. 

• Off-Platform Transactions: Over the last few cycles, we’ve developed a tool for connecting hosts to their banks in order to bring off-platform transactions onto the platform. The responses to the experimental tool have been positive; we’ve collected feedback from users, performed an extensive design review, and are now implementing new and improved designs to transform this from an MVP into a feature we feel confident releasing. The provider we started with provides good USA coverage, but is prohibitively expensive in Europe. So we are also researching additional providers to offer better European and hopefully international coverage. 

• Default Accounting Categories: We’ve been experimenting with home-grown learning models for automatically applying accounting categories. We feel confident in packaging this offering as an optional feature for hosts who wish to automatically use the proposed categorization for their expenses. 

• Funds & Grants: We’ve had funds and grants as an experimental feature living in the background (funds are mixed in with Hosted Collectives, and Grants are mixed in with Expenses). Based on feedback from numerous hosts, we are looking to make funds and grants a fuller and prominent platform feature.

• Dashboard Modify Expense: During recent cycles, we released first a new expense submission form, followed by a new grant submission form.  While they are public beta-testing (please give them a try!), we are taking on the last related piece of the expense submission puzzle: a tool for modifying expenses inside dashboards. A user must go through the entire (old) expense submission flow to modify an expense. This is cumbersome and introduces unnecessary risks (such as an expense changing after being reviewed and approved). We designed and implemented a prototype for this during the last cycle in 2024. Now we are fleshing out that prototype into a complete solution. When this is completed, we will be able to release the full set of new tools and retire the old ones.