Becoming a Fiscal Host

Why become a Fiscal Host?

By becoming a Fiscal Host, you can enable Communities to accept and disburse money in full transparency, without the Communities having to create their own legal entity and bank account. Communities can then pursue their activities, be accountable to funders, and automatically keep good records.

Fiscal Hosts provide an umbrella structure for multiple Communities to operate. If you only want to have a single Community plugged into your own bank account, create an Independent Community instead.

What kinds of things are Fiscal Hosts used for?

• Open source projects or similar unincorporated distributed collaborations

• Decentralized organizations with semi-autonomous teams or projects

• Movements with chapters or subgroups

• Meetup networks with many local groups under one umbrella

• Citizen groups in a geographical area

• Foundations that give grants to unincorporated projects

• Advocates who want to help certain startup ventures get going, such as cooperatives

• Incubators or accelerators supporting many early-stage teams

• Hosting a single Community to enable transparent budgeting

Who are Fiscal hosts?

• HQ/umbrella organizations with Communities for each of their chapters.

• Organizations that support an ecosystem by hosting Communities in a specific area/vertical/topic.

• Charitable organizations that host Communities that align with their mission.

• Organizations that host different Communities in a certain city or country.

Things to consider when becoming a host

• 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 Communities?

• 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 Communities?

What are the legal liabilities?

As a Fiscal Host, you are responsible for the financial activity flowing through your bank account. You need to make sure that your Communities are not doing money laundering or other nefarious activities. You don't want to open the door to just anyone to create a Community under your umbrella. Think about some policies for determining whether a Community is a good fit.

We give you the tools you need to manage applications by new Communities. You can specify your policies on your host page, and if a Community wants to join you'll get a notification with the option to approve them 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 Community admins, 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.

Requirements

To be a Fiscal Host, you need:

• A legal entity

• A bank account

• Payment processor merchant accounts (Stripe, Wise, PayPal), if you wish to use the integrations and automations which rely on them (optional)

• Someone to serve as admin (or multiple admins)

Fees

Donate PR is free for Communities, and for Hosts who do not charge a Host Fee to the Communities they Host. If you do opt to charge a Host Fee, then 15% of that revenue will be charged as the Platform Share. I.e, if you charge a 10% Host Fee and your Communities bring in $1,000, Host Fees will be $100 and of that 15% ($15) goes to Donate PR.

This model is designed to keep fees low for users without revenue and share back with the platform from revenue created on the platform, enabling us to continue to build and improve Donate PR for everyone.

More info about pricing.