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

Murphy Cline-Snider

About

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

Product Updates

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

Why we are building Collective, in many posts.

Perspectives

Meet the people bringing Collective to life

Team

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

Launching on Collective

Collective

Collections

Account

Product Updates

More collections