Becoming a Fiscal Host
By becoming a Fiscal Host, you can enable Projects to accept and disburse money in full transparency, without having to create their own legal entity and bank account. Projects can then pursue their activities, be accountable to funders, and automatically keep good records.
You can be a Fiscal Host for lots of Projects, or just for your own Project.
- Hosting a single Projects to enable transparent budgeting
- Hosting multiple Projects which have separately earmarked funds
- Decentralized organizations with semi-autonomous teams or projects
- Movements with chapters or subgroups
- Local networks with many groups under one umbrella
- Citizen groups in a geographical area
- Foundations who give grants to unincorporated projects
- Advocates of a way of working who want to help startup ventures get going, such as cooperatives
- Incubators or accelerators supporting many early-stage teams
- Donate PR Chapters are general-purpose hosts that you can create in your own region. This is our way of developing Donate PR as a decentralized organization.
- HQ/umbrella organizations with Projects for each of their chapters
- Organizations that support an ecosystem by hosting Projects in a specific area/vertical/topic
- Charitable organizations who host Projects that align with their mission
- Organizations that host different Projects in a certain city or country
- Bitcoin/Ether wallets who convert donations into fiat money and store it in a Project’s wallet
- Have you looked into the tax implications in your country of being a fiscal sponsor?
- Have you thought about a system and policies for onboarding new Projects?
- Do you have a Stripe and PayPal account set up, and a bank account to connect them to?
- Do you have admin capacity to validate and payout approved expenses for your Projects?
As a Fiscal Host, you are responsible for the financial activity flowing through your bank account. You need to make sure that your Projects are not doing money laundering or other nefarious activities. You don't want to open the door to just anyone to create a Project under your umbrella. Think about some policies for determining whether a Project is a good fit.
We give you the tools you need to manage applications by new Projects. You can specify your policies on your host page, and if a Project wants to join you'll get a notification with the option to approve them to join your host or not.
Donate PR is designed to make it easy to validate every expense as part of the two-step approval process. The first step is approval from the Project admins (core contributors), who check if the expense is a legitimate use of funds to further the project, and then it goes to the Fiscal Host admin to check that the paperwork is in order (like receipts) and nothing looks fishy. Only then do you actually pay out the funds.
To be Fiscal Host, you need:
- A legal entity
- A bank account
- A Stripe account
- A PayPal account
- Someone to serve as an admin
Individuals can be Fiscal Hosts using personal bank accounts, but you will be personally responsible for any tax and legal implications.
Last modified 3mo ago