Wildlife and nature

Animal shelters and rescues

Theater and dance

Rivers, parks and trails

Hunger and food

Schools and learning

Housing and homelessness

Community health

Mental health

Mentoring and foster care

Legal help and rights

Jobs and money help

Atlanta

The Triangle

Everywhere

The Collective Workshop

Royal Animal Refuge

Asian Americans Advancing Justice-Atlanta

Georgia Advancing Communities Together

Atlanta Writers Club

Cobb Collaborative

Bosleys Place

Jewish Fertility Foundation

Welcome! 👋 This is our space to provide tips, product updates, and inspiration to help grow your Space on Collective. ✨ You'll hear it all straight from fellow nonprofits and the Collective team.

Get the most out of Collective by seeing what's new and noteworthy as we are building it!

Why we are building Collective, in many posts.

Meet the people bringing Collective to life

Start here! 🏁 These posts are written to demystify what it takes to successfully build, refine, and hit the ground running on Collective.

Small feature updates and suggestions for getting the most out of Collective 😎 (in 30 seconds or less!)

Give

Murphy Cline-Snider

A few months into posting regularly, every organization hits the same wall: the feed works, but it's just one long scroll.

Somewhere in that scroll is everything a new donor would need to understand your gala. Somewhere else is your whole Instagram history from the tutoring program you ran last spring. A visitor would have to scroll past a year of posts to find either one.

Collections are how you pull a themed set out of the scroll and give it its own page.

Here's how to build the first one.



Create the collection

In Library, open the Collections tab. If this is your first one, you'll see an empty slate with a single button: Create your first collection.

Give it a name. Keep it short: forty characters, about the length of a good headline, is the limit. Winter Fundraiser 2026 works better than All Our Fundraising Events From This Past Winter.

An emoji and a short description are optional but worth adding. The description is what a visitor reads at the top of the page, so a sentence about what's inside earns its place.



Add posts, one at a time or a dozen at once

There are two ways to fill a collection, and which one you use depends on whether the posts already exist.

If you're building from scratch, open the collection you just created and switch to the Manage Posts tab. You'll see every post in your library split into two sections: what's already in the collection, and what's available to add. Click to toggle any post in or out.

If you already know which posts belong together, go the other direction. From the Posts tab, select the posts you want (five, twenty, however many), and choose Add to collections. You'll see every collection you've made, with a checkbox for each. A post already in some of your selection but not all of it shows as partially checked, so you always know what you're changing before you save.

Either way works.

The second is faster once you have more than one collection to keep sorted.

Skip the cover photo if you don't have one ready

A cover photo is optional. If you don't set one, Collective uses the most recent post's media as the cover automatically, so the collection still looks finished the moment it has posts in it.

You can always come back and set a different cover later.

Nothing breaks if you do it now versus next month.



Put them in the order visitors will see them

Once you have more than one collection, a Reorder option appears above the grid. Click it, and small arrows appear on each card so you can move things up or down.

Put the collection you want people to find first, first. For most organizations that's whatever is active right now: this quarter's campaign, not the archive from two years ago.

We especially love this function for processes or chronological steps, like a donated furniture rehabilitation process or eight steps to equitable and affordable housing.



What a visitor actually finds

Open any collection and you land on a page built around what's inside it: a cover image, the collection's name and description, and if there's a recent post, a preview of it laid right into the header so it's the first thing anyone sees.

Below that, visitors can filter by post type (video, image, link, text), sort by newest, oldest, or most liked, and search within just that collection. They can switch between a grid and a list view depending on how they like to browse. None of this is configuration you do ahead of time. It's just there, working, because the posts are.



A collection is a folder with a face. The Winter Fundraiser posts stop being buried in a scroll and become their own small, browsable page, one you can point a new donor to directly instead of asking them to scroll and hope.

The first one takes ten minutes to set up. The next one is mostly just deciding what belongs.

Curating your Collections

(We realize that it's pretty meta to write a post about writing a post... what better way to show proof of concept?!)

Your Space is set up. Your contacts are imported. There's a New post button at the top of your left sidebar.

This is the moment that matters.

Most organizations sit with it for a minute before clicking. Here's what to do when you do.



Set up before you write

When you open a new post, a settings panel loads on the right side of the editor. Two decisions live there that shape everything before you type a word.

Post to profile controls where the post appears:





Toggled on: the post appears on your Space and in feeds, visible to anyone who visits



Toggled off: email only — delivered to your contacts' inboxes, not posted publicly

Audience controls who receives it:





Everyone: sent to all your contacts



Select program(s): sent only to contacts associated with specific programs

These two settings together determine what you're actually making. A public post to everyone is an announcement to your whole community. An email-only post to a specific program is a direct note to the people most invested in that work.

Decide these two things before you write, as they might change the context of what you post.



Write a subject line that earns the open

Whether your post is public or email-only, it gets a subject line. This is what lands in inboxes and decides whether anyone opens it.

Two patterns that work:





A specific moment: "We hit our spring fundraising goal yesterday." "The new garden plot is ready."



A direct claim: "We're changing how we measure impact." "What the last cohort taught us."

A good rule of thumb: if you can't say what the post is about in eight words, the post probably isn't ready.

We believe a subject line isn't just a title. It's the invitation to open.

Make the first paragraph the whole story in miniature

Most supporters will read the first 80 words. Some will keep going. Write the post assuming the first paragraph is the only paragraph that gets read.

State what happened and why it matters. Trust the reader to do the rest.

Keep it short & spruce it up

For a first post, shorter is better.

The risk of a long first post isn't that people won't read it-- it's that you'll spend so long writing it that you never send it.

A post that can send out and teaches you something about your list is more valuable than a polished post sitting in drafts.

Add in in-line visuals to add interest to the post. You can embed videos that you upload or link from YouTube. You can also add in a linked button or upload an attachment for readers to download.



Save drafts and come back

If you're not ready to send, click Save draft in the top right of the editor. The post saves automatically as you write, and you can get back to it anytime from Library in the left sidebar. Select the Drafts tab to find everything in progress.

Nothing goes out until you click Publish.



Send it, then watch the results roll in

When your post is ready, click Publish in the top right of the editor. If your post is public, it appears on your Space immediately. If it's email-only, it goes straight to inboxes.

A few hours later, open Insights in your left sidebar and select the Content tab. You'll see who opened, who clicked, and who replied. Here's something to look forward to: the first post almost always teaches you something about your list you didn't know before you sent it!

Each post on Collective will feel easier and easier. Next time, you’ll know something about your content, audience, or yourself that you didn’t know before.

Writing your first Post

The first time you set up Collective, the thing that surprises most organizations is how little there is to do.

You don't build your page. You import it.

Most of what you need already exists somewhere: a website, an Instagram account, a contact list, a team. Setup is mostly Collective reading those things and putting them where they belong.

To get started, go to the getcollective.org and choose "Get Started" in the top banner.



Find your organization

The wizard opens with a search field. Type your organization's name or EIN and Collective searches public records to give you a head start: your registered name, address, and basic details already filled in.





Type your organization's name or EIN in the Search for your nonprofit field.



Select your org from the results and click Continue.



If Collective can't find you, choose Can't find it? Enter details manually and fill in the fields yourself.

This step takes under a minute for most organizations. If your EIN doesn't return a result, try searching your full legal name.

Starting from public records means you're correcting details, not typing from scratch.



Drop in your website URL

The next step is where the real shortcut happens.





Enter your website URL in the Website URL field.



Click Analyze Website.



Collective reads your site and pulls your mission, programs, team, and photos.

Most sites get reasonable defaults in about 30 seconds. You'll still want to review what came through: swap a hero photo, reword the mission paragraph, confirm program names are right. The structural work, the part that usually takes an afternoon of copy-pasting, is done.

If your site doesn't parse cleanly, select Skip and fill in the fields manually. Either way, you're correcting, not starting from scratch.

Your website has already written most of your Space. This step just moves it over.



Connect Instagram

If your organization has been posting to Instagram for years, this is where that library lands on your Space.

Connect your account, choose your import window (all posts, the last year, or a manual selection), and confirm. Your posts come in with captions, photos, carousels, and videos intact.

Once imported, new posts you publish to Instagram will sync to your Space automatically and appear in your Recent Posts section. They won't be placed into specific Collections or program blocks on their own: that's a manual step. If you want posts curated into a particular Collection or program, open the post after it syncs and assign it from the post settings. Posts written natively in Collective can be assigned to a Collection or program block before they go live.



Add your team

The Team step is quick. Add the people who'll use Collective alongside you:





A display profile for a board member or team member you want shown on your page, without login access



An email invite for a staffer who'll log in and use the admin panel



A link to someone who already has a Collective account

Most organizations add one or two people here and come back for the rest later, which can be accessed on your Collective Space once it's created.



Set your colors

The Colors step shows you options pulled from your website scan, with a hex field for manual input and a Detect from logo option if you'd prefer Collective to read your brand color directly. Pick the one that matches your existing identity.

Your Space uses this color for buttons, accents, and highlights across your page. Get it right here and you won't need to think about it again.

One color choice shapes everything your supporters see.





And that's it! Ten minutes in, you have a Space with your mission, your content history, your audience, and your team.

That's the actual setup.

The next step is bringing in your audience.

Your Collective Space, in 10 minutes

When designing our Programs feature, it was important to us to make it easy to show off an element of an org’s larger mission and allow supporters to specifically subscribe to that plank. Programs are the lifeblood of what a nonprofit actually does, and we wanted to create spaces that facilitate not only program-specific communication, but funding, too.

For example: a literacy nonprofit might run an after-school tutoring program, a summer reading camp, and a volunteer training pipeline. Three programs, three audiences, three sets of impact, potentially three diverse funding needs.

Initially, we designed Programs to outline that smaller element of an organization and really be a vehicle for senior staff to add a note about the program, directly to supporters. Then, we took a step back and asked, well, what is possible? We redesigned this feature to have editable and movable blocks, along with systems blocks populated with your content from other areas of your Space.

What should you choose as your first program? Here’s what we recommend:

Start with the program you already talk about

The program to set up first is the one you already describe in grant applications, in donor emails, in conversations with board members. The one your monthly donors know by name.



Start from a draft or type in a URL

When you create a new program, you have two ways in.

If Collective found programs on your website during setup, you'll see draft programs already waiting. Pick one and most of the fields will be prefilled: name, mission, sometimes a cover photo.

If you're starting fresh, paste in a URL and Collective pulls what it can from that page.

Either way, you're editing, not filling out a blank form.

Collective Goes to Work

You'll move through eight steps:





Import from website. Collective reads a URL and prefills the name, mission, and any photos it finds. You confirm or adjust.



Name and URL slug. What the program is called, and what the URL ends in. Short names work better than long ones.



Mission. Two or three sentences about what the program does and who it serves.



Add staff. Which team members run or are associated with this program.



Link existing posts. Tag posts you've already published so they appear on the program page immediately.



Connect a contact group. The supporters, members, or families connected to this Program. Connect an existing group or choose “Skip” for a new group to be created and aligned with this Program.



Set up donations. Optional. If this program has its own fundraising goal, set it here. Supporters see the progress in real time.



Create program. Review everything and publish.



How the page is built

Once the program is created, you can customize it from Layout & Blocks. There are two kinds of blocks.

System blocks pull in content automatically. Latest Post, Recent Posts, Staff, Members, and Impact Statements are all system blocks: they stay current without extra work. Publish a post and it shows up. Add a staff member and they appear. You can show or hide any of them depending on what makes sense for this program.

Impact Statements are a system block too. Collective drafts them from your program description, and you can edit the cards directly from the block editor.

Content blocks are things you add yourself: a Link, a Media Gallery, Rich Text, an Embed, or a File Download. These are for anything specific to this program that doesn't live somewhere else in your Space already.

Both types can be reordered by dragging.



What your Program comes with

When the Program goes live, it has its own page on your Space: a dedicated URL, a feed of tagged posts, a connected contact group, and a fundraising goal if you set one.

Every post you tag to the Program shows up there. Every donation gets attributed to it. Every new member who joins gets added to the contact group.

It updates as you work.

A few things worth knowing





Programs are about people-- cover photos with real humans perform better than those without.



An achievable monthly fundraising goal builds more momentum than one set for the year.



You can come back and edit any of this! None of it is set in stone once the program is live.

That's the first program. The second one is already faster.

Your first Program

A donation interface is meant to start a relationship, not close a sale.

That should be obvious. Yet almost every donation online is built to do the opposite: take the money and end the interaction. We already know a better model works, because the creator economy spent the last decade proving it.

Patreon turned an audience of fans into real businesses with one move. Instead of asking people to buy something once, it asked them to join, to back a creator every month in exchange for access, community, and a seat close to the work. The tiers carried genuine value, so paying again wasn't a chore. It was the entire point. More than 10 million patrons now support creators this way, and they've sent over $10 billion through the platform, almost all of it recurring.

That is a genuinely new fact about how people behave. A decade ago, "subscribe every month to a person whose work you believe in" was not something most people did. Today it's the default economic relationship of the entire creator world, and north of 90% of the money flowing to creators arrives that way, month after month, on purpose.

We believe that this makes what occurs in the nonprofit sector hard to explain.

No one has a stronger claim to that kind of relationship than a mission-driven organization. A creator offers entertainment. A nonprofit offers a cause someone has built their values around: a food bank, a school, a cure. The bond runs deeper, the reason to stay is bigger, and the impact is unmistakably ongoing. If any relationship on earth should run on recurring support, it's this one.

And yet at the average nonprofit, recurring giving is around 13% of revenue. Fewer than one in five supporters ever joins in the way that, in the creator economy, nearly everyone does.

This isn't a donor problem. The sector is excellent at keeping the people it manages to set up as recurring: monthly donors are retained around 80% a year, give for close to eight years on average, and are worth roughly twice a one-time donor over a lifetime. The relationships work beautifully once they begin.

The problem is that they so rarely begin, and we believe that the status quo for interfaces available to organizations is a large reason why.

So we built Collective's giving experience around the move the creator economy got right: turning a one-time ask into an invitation to join.

On Collective, we have taken donor education seriously. We think organizations should have the option to communicate what giving at a particular level means to them, and could mean for the donor.



Tying each gift to a concrete outcome is the highest-leverage choice on the page. Across experiments with more than two million PayPal users, Stanford researchers found that showing a donor a concrete figure for what a gift does — "$1 provides two people clean water for a year" — nearly quadrupled the rate of giving versus showing nothing, and beat written descriptions of the same impact by close to 60%.

The same research found the part that matters most to us. A better first giving experience made donors come back and give again for as long as eighteen months afterward. Get the start right and the relationship does much of the rest on its own.

This is what makes recurring natural instead of forced. The work a gift pays for is almost never a one-time event. A garden gets watered every week. A student gets tutored all year. A shelter keeps the lights on in December and January both. When a giving level is tied to ongoing work, an ongoing gift is just the honest version of it, and recurring stops being something you have to talk a donor into. It becomes the obvious shape of a commitment they already want to make.

The most meaningful relationships in a person's life should work like the ones they already pay for every month. For nonprofits, they never have, because the software to run them didn't exist. That's what we set out to build.

Next in the series: what a supporter actually comes back to — the content and community that live inside a Collective space. After that, how to run the whole thing from your own site.

The giving experience on Collective (Part 1: Checkout)

We've spent a lot of time iterating on the design of the Collective Space over the last couple of years. Our goals have always been ambitious: to build something where anyone, tech literate or not, can (within 60 seconds):





understand the big story of an organization,



see which people make it happen and want to join them, and



be enticed to engage with the most important content.

You can think of a space as a single page that brings your work, your programs, and your people into one place. Whether you run a food bank, a youth arts program, or a community garden, it gives a first-time visitor a real sense of who you are, and gives your longtime supporters somewhere to come home to.

First impressions matter

The top of your space is your organization at a glance: your name, your mission in your own words, a cover photo or video, and the quiet proof that something cool is happening here.

The “Home” tab is what everyone will see first: supporters, volunteers, staff, everyone. That means that it is your most important opportunity to tell your story and orient people around who you are.

One large call-to-action is common across the internet today. Our main one is to “Get Connected” — we thought it was more representative of the feeling that most mission-driven organizations want to foster, that each person is not just connecting with the org, but also the mission and the other supporters.



People come first

An organization is its people: the staff who show up every day and the supporters who keep the work alive. Most websites bury both behind a logo and a mission statement. We wanted the opposite, so a good chunk of your Space is given over to the humans involved.

We went all in on showing people as people, not data:





Your staff appear as real profiles, each with a photo, a name, and a role, so a visitor can see who is behind the work and want to join them. For bigger teams, you can filter them by Leadership, Programs, or whatever groups make sense.



Your community shows up too, every supporter as themselves. Anyone who has given carries a small donor badge, and the people who have stuck around for years wear a marker for it.



Testimonials sit right alongside them, short notes from members in their own words about why they give. It is the most honest endorsement a newcomer can read, because nobody wrote it for them.

The point of all of it is the experience. A newcomer scrolls through and sees real people who care about this work, some of them for a decade, and wants in. A longtime supporter sees their own face among them and feels less like a line on a list and more like part of something.

People give again when they feel found, not when they feel processed. This is the part of your Space that makes them feel found.



Full control over storytelling

Even though we are starting with Instagram as being the only social media platform we integrate with, Collective will always be designed to make any type of content perform better — photo dumps, newsletters, long-form think pieces, short videos, whatever.

To achieve that, we went all in on control.





Your featured post will always appear at the top of the page. This is a good way to showcase something timely, or content that really tells your story the best.



The program cards are links to your programs built on Collective, with opportunities for people to join them directly.



Each collection is a horizontally scrolling list of posts that you define. Perhaps they are relating to one specific impact area, type of content, or event series.

Make it yours

Put those three together and you have something a website could never be: a home that stays current on its own, your best work reaching the people who care, and a community that can watch itself grow.

It's already there, waiting, the moment you bring your work in. All that's left is to make it feel like you.

How we designed the Collective Space

The future of social impact is being written right now. Just not where most nonprofits are looking.

If you're watching your social media reach decline while donor acquisition costs climb, you're experiencing the same digital shift that hit content creators three years ago. The difference? Creators adapted. They found a better way forward.



What creators discovered (and why it matters for nonprofits)

Content creators and nonprofits have more in common than you might think. Both build communities around expertise and shared values. Both depend on relationships and spreading messages.

Here's what creators figured out: Purpose-built platforms consistently outperform general social media for community building.

The data tells a clear story. Facebook's organic reach for pages dropped to 2.6%, while Instagram hovers around 4%. Meanwhile, creators who moved to specialized platforms built sustainable, growing communities that general platforms never delivered.

Take Bari Weiss, who transformed her newsletter concept into The Free Press—now a 50-person operation with over 1 million subscribers generating millions annually. Or Edwin Dorsey, who earned over $300,000 in his first year on Substack without a pre-existing audience.

These aren't outlier success stories. They represent systematic results from choosing infrastructure designed for their specific needs.

Smart creators didn't just improve their content strategy. They changed their infrastructure entirely. They moved to platforms built specifically for direct audience relationships, predictable revenue models, and community engagement tools designed for their needs.



Nonprofits have distinct needs that general platforms aren't designed to serve:





Deep donor relationships beyond surface-level engagement



Volunteer coordination and management systems



Impact storytelling that drives meaningful action



Sustainable funding models independent of platform changes

The future of nonprofit digital strategy isn't better social media optimization. It's platform independence.

Building the nonprofit platform future

This gap in purpose-built infrastructure for nonprofits is exactly why we're building Collective.

We watched the creator economy prove that specialized platforms create exponentially better outcomes for mission-driven communities. Yet no equivalent exists for nonprofits—organizations with equally specific needs and missions many times more important.

Just as Substack gave creators newsletter infrastructure and Patreon enabled subscription communities, nonprofits need digital infrastructure designed specifically for social impact organizations. This isn't about incremental improvements to existing tools. It's about fundamentally different infrastructure built for mission-driven work.

The choice facing nonprofit leaders today mirrors what creators faced three years ago: optimize for a system working against your goals, or build infrastructure aligned with your mission.

We believe that the organizations that choose platform independence will define the next decade of digital social impact.

Nonprofits should care about the creator economy

You’ve probably noticed the rise of run clubs, those groups of people weaving through city streets in matching shirts, logging miles together after work or on weekend mornings. At first, I couldn’t understand why anyone would pay to join one. Running doesn’t require much planning beyond lacing up your shoes and finding a route, and it’s one of the few sports you can do almost anywhere, alone or with friends, at no cost at all.But the more I learned, the more it made sense. People aren’t joining run clubs because they need help learning how to run. They’re joining because running with others changes the entire experience.There’s energy in a crowd moving in the same direction, accountability when someone expects you to show up, and most importantly, a connection when you celebrate milestones together. That run could be the first 5k, a personal best, or just showing up on a rainy Tuesday because you know someone else will be there too. The miles matter, but the real draw is the community built around them.This is where nonprofits can take a page from the run club playbook.A one-time donation is a bit like showing up for a single run. It’s meaningful, but it ends there. The real opportunity lies in building a sense of belonging where donors feel like part of the journey, see the people behind the mission, and connect with others who care about the same cause.When that sense of community exists, giving becomes more than a transaction. It turns into a relationship, something people want to return to because they feel like they’re moving forward together. The mission becomes the route everyone follows, the staff are the pacers setting the rhythm, and the donors are the runners who keep showing up because they feel part of something bigger than themselves.So as you think about how to engage supporters, remember this: people don’t just want to give; they want to belong. Give them a reason to show up, not just to give once, but to be part of the story you’re building together. At the end of the day, it’s not just about the finish line, it’s about who you’re running with.

Donors Want to Join Your Mission, Not Just Fund It

There’s an odd but powerful parallel between being a fan of a sports team and supporting a nonprofit. I’ve been a lifelong San Antonio Spurs fan. If you follow the NBA, you know the last few years have been rough for us, but like many fans, I’ve stayed loyal.When I think back to what got me hooked, the championships or the winning streaks drew me in, but the people and the culture kept me hooked. The Spurs are known not just for basketball excellence, but for professionalism, character, and a team-first mentality. None of that success would’ve been possible without the right people in the right roles. Even as stars retired and our winning faded, I trust they’ll get back to the top; not because of hype, but because of the organization behind the scenes. The people who built something worth rooting for.The same idea applies to nonprofits.Donors give when they believe, and they believe when they know who’s doing the work. Staff are your equivalent of the players and coaches. They’re the ones who execute the mission, carry the culture, and build relationships that last. Just like a fan who sticks around in the rebuilding years, donors stay loyal not only because of your outcomes, but because of the people they believe in. Your staff are the heartbeat of your mission and deserve to be seen.When it comes to giving, trust isn’t built on outcomes alone. Research shows that donor satisfaction rises significantly when staff are seen as informed, responsive, and effective. That sense of competence and care builds long-term loyalty. But there’s a problem: staff turnover in nonprofits is high, with average tenure under 4 years. When someone leaves, relationships often leave with them.I’ve worked in, donated to, and volunteered for enough nonprofits to know that donors notice when there’s a revolving door. It disrupts continuity, making the work feel fragile. But when I know the team, when I’ve heard from the program director or seen a staff member in the field, it feels like something built to last.Instead of a single voice carrying the donor relationship, imagine an entire team helping tell the story like a program coordinator sharing a quick update, a volunteer manager showing behind-the-scenes moments, or a field worker highlighting the day’s impact. When staff are part of the narrative, trust becomes institutional. Donors feel anchored not just to a person, but to a purpose and the team driving it forward.At Collective, we believe the people behind the mission deserve to be part of the story. Not to replace your comms strategy or turn staff into marketers, but to make it effortless for the humans behind your mission to be seen. Donors want to see more than outcomes; they want to see who’s making it happen. That visibility builds trust. That trust builds recurring support. And recurring support? That’s what sustains the work.

Fans Cheer for Teams. Donors Do Too.

Like many nonprofit professionals, I did not necessarily expect to be here. With that said, it’s not really a shock, either.

Growing up, I participated in many volunteer opportunities, some episodic and some more long-term. These experiences were first made compulsory by my parents, then by school, then finally in college, me. After a short-lived career in teaching, I turned towards one of the only things I had consistently known: nonprofit programmatic management. This story is not unique for those working in public service— many find their way here either through a community that matters to them, or a cause that they felt so passionate about, they could only dedicate their career to pursuing it.

I started out my nonprofit career managing an AmeriCorps program within a small organization. So small, in fact, that we could walk 10 steps from our desks and see everyone in the office, and be back at our work station. I managed 120+ volunteers, worked with 35 volunteer sites, and created different engagement opportunities. Starting out, I truly felt like I was really doing the work— I came home every day feeling fulfilled by making a new volunteer placement, checking in on programs, and speeding towards meeting the goals outlined in our government grant. There were things though, such as volunteer stipends or monthly rewards for hours of service, that I wanted to do but just didn’t have the funds to support. I kept these in the back of my mind, a wishlist of sorts, to which I know many other bright-eyed public service professionals can relate.

While holding this position, I also held the role of Development Coordinator. I unsuccessfully applied to multiple grants, ranging from large to micro, and felt discouraged in hearing, “capacity building is great, but we are looking for tangible outcomes.” How could I let them see that the hours put in by our volunteers were improving the lives of not only those that they worked with, but our volunteers, too? How could I illuminate that intergenerational volunteering had many positive socio-emotional outcomes, many of which would show up for high school students much later in life? I continued to struggle with a lack of resources and support that could have helped my program, one that I knew was benefitting so many, flourish. I also grappled with the knowledge that most of the grant we were awarded supported my salary— which felt limiting in that, if I wanted to make different programatic decisions for my volunteers, I would lose quality of life for myself.



The lack of mobility to make creative decisions and constant quest to make my role feel legitimate weighed on me. I knew I would miss my people and the amazing community we were building, but I felt that perhaps being on a more resourced, grant-making side of the coin would be rewarding. I shifted to work at a community affairs office of a university, and what I learned within this role is what ultimately led me to Collective.

My experience as a grant administrator for small, project-based grants of up to $5,000 was a different challenge from what I experienced working at a nonprofit, but it was made of the same stuff:

Personnel and overhead costs are real, and they are essential behind-the-scenes funds that make the mission possible.

In two full grant cycles, I had to tell over 40 nonprofits that I was unable to award them a grant of $2,000-$5,000 because I was under strict orders to not give funding to a request that contained a budget of over 10% indirect costs. Many had spent days working on these grant applications, only to hear that they wouldn’t receive $5,000?!

Their reactions were varied— some had heard this before, and had learned that it “wasn’t personal.” Others were confused and perplexed, as they didn’t think that they had included over 10% of indirect costs, if any at all.

Here were a few of the budgetary items counted as indirect:





De-escalation training for personnel working with youth in health crises



Accessible space to host free community dinners



Dance instructors trained in mobility-specific physical therapy

The list went on, but in every case, the “indirect costs” were essential to each program.

Some didn’t receive funding because, to the application review committee, their outcomes were less measurable.

Here was the question, once again:

How do you measure outcomes when a mission is to make an inclusive space?

How do you quantify community building, when metrics beyond stories don’t exist?



A meeting with an incredible person to discuss why his organization, Reality Ministries, didn’t receive a grant showed me a very real side of grant applications and sponsorships for those that rely on showing, not telling.

Quinn Holmquist, Coordinator of Community Engagement and Giving at Reality, smiled when I relayed the feedback from the Review Committee. He knew where this was going, as he had heard it in grant feedback before.

“If they could come to the Reality Cafe and see what’s happening here, or even just watch one of our testimonial videos, they would get it. I think they would see why Reality is so special.”

For organizations like Reality, stories that can move donors outside of the confines of grant applications are currency, and they have so many of them. For other organizations, the inner-workings of their mission, the “indirect costs,” can’t be overlooked or undervalued. Without their staff, they could not accomplish what they do every day.

When I think about why we are building Collective, and what makes a storytelling platform driven by community such a great idea, it’s these stories I continue to come back to. Most nonprofit professionals would be able to rattle off moments when their work felt undervalued and overlooked, but it doesn’t have to be that way.

Our goal is to build a free, easy to use platform that allows the narratives we want to tell shine and strike a cord with donors who are supportive of the myriad of people and ways a mission is accomplished. Thank you for trusting us— we are excited to show you what’s in store.

Undervalued

At Collective, we're building a platform to help nonprofits tell their stories better—but the people behind our product have stories of their own. This series introduces you to our team members whose experiences motivate us to build in the right way.

Favorite nonprofit storytelling moment: One nonprofit storytelling moment that really sticks with me is Book Harvest’s Block Party. It’s a joyful celebration of reading and literacy, and what I love most is how they pull the community together year after year- bringing people of all ages into a festive space centered around literacy. It’s proof that community events can be both fun and powerful catalysts for change.

[Side note: If you haven’t heard of Book Harvest, check them out! They are amazing at creating adaptive ways to show up in community, from their school-based efforts that provide scaffolded literacy to their book abundance initiatives.]

Why I’m working with Collective: My decision to join Collective came from a place of wanting to do more. In my previous role at Duke, I had the privilege of working with many incredible organizations, but I often felt limited by resources- even with Duke’s support. From my days of running an AmeriCorps program within a small nonprofit, and collaborating with team members on other projects, I knew that nonprofits know their needs best; it just took a few tough conversations with nonprofit professionals regarding grants and lack of resources from my end to remind me of this. This was a key point of the community engagement trainings I facilitated with students, yet I wasn’t able to answer the call when they let me know what was needed— different ways to tell their stories to funders who care about their mission.

When Malik asked me to join Collective, it felt like this was truly what I (we) had been looking for all along. I love that Collective can shift the power back to nonprofits, at no cost to them. That’s why I’m here: to help amplify their voices and give them access to the support they deserve.

A little about me: I have a background in educational program management, having worked with the Durham Retired and Senior Volunteer Program, organized courses for government officials, and taught high school English. I’ve done a little bit of everything, so if you’re from the Triangle or Charlotte, NC and think you might recognize me, you could definitely be correct! I have a wonderful fiancé and a precious son (our dog Murphy).

I’m excited to be part of this movement— a space where nonprofit stories can be shared, resources can be spread further, and communities are empowered to do their best work.

Why Sarah is Building Collective

At Collective, we're building a platform to help nonprofits tell their stories better. The people behind it have stories of their own. This series introduces you to our team members whose experiences motivate us to build in the right way.

Favorite nonprofit storytelling moment:

My most impactful nonprofit moment was when I worked in Lesvos, Greece at Gateways2Life, serving refugees from the Middle East and north Africa by running a women’s and children's shelter. It was arguably the hardest thing I’ve done because the mental fortitude required to help refugees who were aggressive and distrusted any help was difficult. Their attitude was warranted because these refugees spend their days in an extremely crammed and stressful environments all while simply trying to survive for years after escaping the turmoil in their home countries.

One of the most important things to me was to figure out how to provide some semblance of childhood experiences for the children that came through. During my free time I would try teaching them math, playing games, or finding a show the kids could watch. At the end of the day, earning the trust from the refugees required the deepest levels of empathy and consistency, revealing that small consistent gestures can be just as effective as robust methods of support.

This experience inspired me to pursue a career related to social impact and reminds me that the world is always in need of mission-driven support.

Why I’m building Collective:

I believe that mission-driven organizations have amazing stories and deserve to be financially stable. Collective has the unique opportunity to raise the level of support for all mission-driven organizations, and as someone who has benefitted from volunteering with many organizations from a young age, I want to be a part of something that is bigger to support those who desire the world to be a better place.

A little about me:

I come from the delightful Houston suburb of Sugar Land, moved to Durham for my MBA at Duke, and now reside in Chicago, where I’m thoroughly enjoying the ability to be outside in the summer compared to NC and TX (we’ll see about winter).

I’m passionate about education, basketball (Go Spurs Go and Let's Go Duke), and my cat Hudson, who is still trying to figure out how to pay his portion of rent.

Why Daniel is building Collective

Last year, a total stranger answered my Instagram DM asking if she would be willing to sit down with me. At the time, I was trying to speed-learn as much as I could about the various problems facing the nonprofit sector, studying the relationship between digital marketing efforts and fundraising. Looking back, I'm embarrassed at how nervous I was to send this message. For those who haven't met her, Maggie Kane is incredible. She followed her passion and tackled food insecurity in her twenties and opened A Place at the Table Cafe—a pay-what-you-can restaurant that's now a community staple. Anyone who knows Maggie understands why being nervous around her is absurd—she's a joy to be around and makes everyone feel like they belong in every room. Still, back then I was in the dark, feeling like an eighth grader asking LeBron to teach me how to dribble. I wanted to learn one thing from Maggie: how do you do it? From the outside looking in, it seems like A Place at the Table had it all figured out — people love them and their digital presence is top notch. She answered my questions honestly, but it was when I asked “How do you all grow?” the conversation shifted. I expected secret tactics, but instead she told me why the traditional channels only kind of work, but they have to rely on them. Their most effective strategy has always been getting people together, having them feel the impact live, and spreading the word.At the end of our conversation Maggie mentioned that she had helped organize a screening of the hit documentary Uncharitable in Raleigh for the following week. So I went.---The theater was packed. Hundreds of nonprofit leaders from across the Triangle filled every seat. As the film played, I found myself watching the audience as much as the screen. Heads nodded in unison during every painful truth. A collective exhale when the Wounded Warrior Project story unfolded. Agreeing snaps as the film dissected the “overhead” myth.The real impact came after. No one was debating about whether the bold claims that film makes are right— they knew they are spot on because they live it every day. The conversation was rawer than that. Everyone agreed the system was broken. Everyone wanted change.Yet, the energy and animation present when discussing problems noticeably faded when conversation turned to solutions. The good ideas seem daunting: How do you persuade funders to shift their decades-old belief that people shouldn't earn competitive salaries for social impact work? How do you invest in growth when every expense is scrutinized? How can you innovate when there's no margin for failure?I left that screening with unexpected clarity. The real problem isn’t that nonprofits do not know how to grow— they know exactly what to do and what their strengths are. The problem is that they are not free to do it. The sector has become entangled in a web of rules, hacks, and best practices—all born from necessity—that obstruct the social impact sector's greatest strengths: authentic connection, stories, and spaces.That day, it was evident that the impact sector's path to becoming truly unrestricted can't rely solely on advocacy and gentle unlearning decades of precedent—it must be rebuilt. I believe that the strongest future for the nonprofit sector is one where the professional change-makers are able to all make comfortable salaries, retain talent, and grow however they see fit.This all starts with influence, and I think nonprofits need more of it.First PrinciplesAround that time, I started building Collective. My strongest belief is that a less-restricted mission-driven sector is one where each nonprofit has more influence. Let me be clear: I mean influence in all forms — influence with their existing donor base, influence in their local communities, influence among the populations they serve through action.Influence is harder than ever to come by these days. We are living through one of the most serious threats to the public perception of nonprofit work that many of us have seen in our lifetimes. Congressional and federal probes are increasingly targeting nonprofits, especially those that are working to improve our society’s acceptance of diversity programs. Reputational risks are ever-present and forcing nonprofits to sanitize their messages in order to stay alive, otherwise real threats to tax-exempt status are looming. Social media platforms are actively suppressing content from nonprofit organizations, decreasing their reach to their existing followers and making any organic traffic next to impossible.Collective is being built as a direct response to the era that we are living in. Nonprofits cannot build sustainable followings and grow their influence if their connection to their audience depends on unreliable platforms that frequently change their algorithms to decide who sees what based on what is best for their business.We believe that nonprofits need more thriving spaces that they own. The most compelling path forward is for actual humans, loving the work of one organization, to share it with other humans—by email, word of mouth, sharing links, telling your story for you. That is the foundation that the entire sector is built on, but genuine human-to-human spaces are becoming increasingly crowded out.It doesn’t have to be that way. The blueprint is sitting right in front of us.For the past year, we have been building free tools for mission-driven organizations to grow their audience and influence by repurposing their existing content that they have already worked hard to create into digital spaces that they own and can use to grow sustainably, unrestricted by the opaque laws of social media. We believe that nonprofits should be able to control their destiny and own their influence, but those pathways must be built. We think that what you already have is enough to build your influence: you have incredibly passionate people, stories to tell, and audiences to better engage. It is our job to get you there, quickly.Thank you for your trust and continued support as we continue to build towards our mission of returning power to the nonprofit sector.

Unrestricted

At Collective, we're building a platform to help nonprofits tell their stories better—but the people behind it have stories of their own. This series introduces you to our team members whose experiences motivate us to build in the right way.

Favorite nonprofit storytelling moment:

My most meaningful nonprofit storytelling moment comes from my family's involvement with the Multiple Myeloma Research Foundation (MMRF). When my mother was diagnosed with multiple myeloma, we discovered not just a devastating cancer, but an organization dedicated to changing the trajectory of this disease.

After my mother passed away in 2017, sharing her story became both a way to honor her memory and contribute to MMRF's mission. What made this particularly powerful was witnessing how the foundation amplified individual stories like hers—transforming personal loss into collective hope and action. MMRF understood that behind every research dollar and clinical trial were real people fighting for more time with their families. Seeing her journey become part of a larger narrative about resilience, scientific progress, and the urgent need for new treatments showed me storytelling's true power in nonprofit work.



Why I’m building Collective:

My background is in tech investing — in that role, I heard and studied countless examples of digital platforms being built to better serve the needs of different sectors, but I had not seen a platform effectively helping mission-driven organizations build deeper connections with their audiences.

Collective started with a hunch: it seemed like there was a clear disconnect between how “good” people’s intentions are with their amount of involvement in the nonprofit sector. It was clear to me that the tools that the sector has to use for marketing their true strengths were not hitting the mark, so I got to work.

A little about me:

I’m originally from Atlanta, Georgia and am a lifelong suffering diehard Atlanta sports fan! No jokes about the 2017 Super Bowl are ever tolerated in my presence 🙂

I was once a competitive track athlete, running middle distance events in college. When I’m not building Collective, you can find me around Atlanta with my two dogs (Chance and Sage) or hopping around coffee shops in the Research Triangle!

Why Malik is building Collective

Let's talk about the elephant in the nonprofit room: the gap between social media buzz and actual donations. We've all been there— celebrating a post that goes viral, only to find the donation pages as quiet as a library on a Friday night.The Engagement IllusionDid you know that while 55% of people who engage with nonprofits on social media end up taking some sort of action, only 25% of those actions are donations? That's right— likes, shares, and comments don't always equal dollars in the bank.Here's the hard truth:98% of nonprofit Facebook posts don't get shared at allThe average engagement rate for nonprofit Instagram posts is just 1.41%Only 1 in 12 people who say they'll donate after seeing a social media post actually follow throughSo why the disconnect?The Path from Post to DonationSocial media platforms are great for awareness, but they're not built for fundraising. Think about it:A supporter sees your inspiring postThey want to help, but...They have to leave the appNavigate to your websiteFind the donation pageFill out a formEnter payment infoThat's a lot of steps— and a lot of chances to get distracted by cat videos along the way. And if they want to personalize a message to go with the donation or make it recurring? Getting to that golden green finishline can start to feel a little like this:Bridging the GapAt Collective, we're reimagining how nonprofits connect with supporters online. Our platform is designed to shorten that journey from inspiration to action:Recurring donation buttons directly with your collections of postsCustomizable monthly tiered donor optionsSimplified, mobile-friendly giving processesCurated collections of posts allowing you to tell the story you wantWith this model, we remove barriers to recurring donations. You know the story you want to tell; let Collective add momentum so that your path to support looks like this:We're not just about likes– we're about impact.Engagement is great, but it's just the first step. Let's focus on creating clear pathways that transform that initial spark of interest into meaningful support for your mission.Ready to bridge the engagement gap? Learn how Collective can help you turn social media interest into tangible results.

The Engagement Mirage: When Likes Don’t Transfer to Donations

Our team has been obsessed with building for the social impact sector for a while. Over the past two years, we have spoken with nonprofit leaders across the country, learned how they work, and looked for ways technology could lighten the load and help their work grow more naturally.

We learned that every nonprofit is quietly forced to treat relationship-building and retention as separate from storytelling and marketing. We think this is an existential threat to mission-driven work everywhere. The audience an organization has earned—donors, volunteers, board members—largely lives in some database built to log a gift and little else. Meanwhile, the media and stories they produce mainly live on platforms they cannot control.

Neither space was designed to reflect what nonprofits are best at offline: moving the right supporters through storytelling and helping them find each other.

Collective puts the two in the same room. It is one space, owned by your organization, where the people you already know meet the stories you are already telling. The result is a simpler, more active representation of the organization as a whole that grows.

Because the goal is to save effort rather than create it, Collective stays current by syncing with the channels you already use, so nobody has to maintain it by hand. We start by bringing in your existing work — your mission from your website, your content from Instagram, your staff — so you begin with something real rather than a blank page.



A line of your own

Reaching your own supporters today feels like placing a phone call a hundred years ago: a small miracle at first, and never quite in your hands.

Back then, you couldn’t place a call directly. You gave an operator a name and waited while they found the right cord and plugged it into the board. It went through only if they actually put it through.

Social media works the same way. Posting is free, and the whole audience seems to be right there, which feels like magic. But every message still runs through an operator of sorts — an algorithm that decides which of your own followers it bothers to reach. The result is that 96% of a nonprofit’s followers never see the average post because every post has to compete with the rest of the world for that person’s attention, and are buried by companies who can buy that same person’s attention.

We believe that most nonprofits have started to do the work of small media companies and large influencers, while the part that matters most — reaching its people — runs through a switchboard it doesn't own. We kept asking what it would take to reach the people who already raised their hand, on its own terms.

That's why Collective exists. It's the dial, not the operator.

Built around the people you already have

Until now, keeping a supporter has mostly meant asking them to give again. With Collective, keeping a supporter means giving them a place to belong.

The reason is plain. Roughly eight in ten first-time donors never give a second time — not because they stopped caring, but because nothing kept them close. After the first gift, the only word most of them hear is the next ask.

So Collective begins with the people a nonprofit has already earned, not the strangers it hasn't met. They are the likeliest to stay, and the easiest to reach once there's a direct line.

What they find when they arrive is a place that feels alive: the work carrying on between campaigns, the faces behind it familiar, and other supporters plainly there alongside them. That is what turns a list of donors into something closer to a community.

Belonging does what reminder emails never could. People who feel part of something tend to stay part of it, and giving again becomes something natural rather than a favor someone asks of them.



Your tools shape your mission

Every tool a nonprofit uses carries a quiet idea about what supporters are for. A database built to log gifts treats people as transactions. A platform built to sell attention treats them as an audience to rent. Use those tools long enough, and relationships can start to look that way too — a pipeline to fill, not people to know.

It shows up in small ways. A supporter hears nothing for months, then opens an email that begins "We miss you," three days before the year-end deadline. The tool noticed a lapsed gift, not a person — and the supporter can tell.

We built Collective on the opposite belief: people who give to a cause are part of it, and they deserve a tool designed to keep them close, not to chase them down. Our hope is that supporting a cause comes to feel less like writing a check and more like belonging to something that lasts.

This launch is our first step toward that, with many more to come.

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