Goals Cleanup
Published on July 31, 2024 by Shannon Wray
As part of the crowdfunding redesign campaign, we are planning an infrastructure upgrade for fundraising goals. Our working assumption is that goals can play a major role in the relationship between Collectives and their contributors.
Goals can:
Goals can:
- Enable Collectives to come into internal alignment about what they want to do and how their actions are aligned with their purpose.
- Enable Collectives to express to their contributors why they are asking for contributions and what they intend to do with the funds they receive.
- Inform contributors about how their funds will be used
- And ultimately (this is a long term objective), for collectives to demonstrate that they used the funds responsibly.
There will be a second announcement - This is a first announcement intended to give you a heads-up. You have ample time to decide if you need to take action and what action to take. We will publish a second announcement when we schedule this work (which will be a few weeks before we make any changes).
In order to build the user experiences required to deliver all this we need to upgrade the goal infrastructure itself. The planned upgrade may lead to two minor disruptions for some existing collectives:
- Deprecating tier goals.
- Cleanup recurring goal periods.
1: Deprecating Tier Goals
We will no longer support tier-goals. Goals will only exist in relationship to collectives, projects and events.
If you have any active tier goals, you have a few options:
If you have any active tier goals, you have a few options:
- Do nothing. The tier (that currently has a goal) will continue to work and accept contributions. However the goal itself will disappear from the admin settings and the progress indicators will disappear from the public facing presentation of the tier.
- Move the goal. If the collective/project/event in which the tier is configured does not already have goals, you can:
- Setup a goal within the collective/project/event to reflect the goal.
- And then remove it from the tier.
- This way your goal will continue to be represented and contributions to the tier will advance the goal. - Transform the tier into a separate project. If the tier-goal represents an important objective for you and it already has a history of contributions. We can help you transform it into a separate project with a goal. The history of existing contributions will be migrated into this project.
Please contact our support team if you need help with this.
Goal progress - We are aware that goal progress on Open Collective is currently unclear. This is one of the things we are going to address. However we will be able to do this only AFTER this preparatory cleanup effort. Until then goals progress will continue to function as is.
2: Goal Recurrence
It is currently possible, within a collective/project/event that has numerous (stacked) goals to set for each goal a different recurring period (monthly or yearly). Going forward this will not be possible. If you have numerous goals in the same collective/project/event they will all need to have the same recurring period (monthly or yearly). It is and will continue to be possible to have different recurring periods for different collectives/project/events: you could have, for example, one project that has monthly goals and another that has yearly goals.
If you have a collective/project/event that has numerous goals with different recurring periods, please know:
- The recurring period that will be used during the cleanup will be the one set on the first goal in your list of goals. If, for example, the first goal is set to “Monthly” all the goals will be set to “Monthly” (including goals that may have been separately set to “Yearly”).
- The information about subsequent goals will not be saved in the cleanup process and will therefore be lost.
- Therefore, we recommend that you review your goals and make sure:
- That they are all set to the same recurring period. Doing this will ensure that no other involuntary changes will take place during the cleanup
- Or, at least, make sure that the first goal is set to the recurring period you wish them all to have.
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