Who we are

Gift Collective is a joint venture of The Gift Trust and Open Collective NZ.

The Gift Trust is a registered charitable trust and donor advised fund, with a decade of experience in the charity sector in Aotearoa, and a track record of managing millions in philanthropic funding. It is the fundholder for all Gift Collective funds.

Open Collective NZ is a non-profit company founded by a kiwi to bring the internationally successful Open Collective software platform, and the service it enables, to local projects. OCNZ also offers a parallel non-charitable fundholding services.

Open Collective Inc is an international company that makes a software platform many entities around the world use to provide crowdfunding and fundholding services. Open Collective NZ (OCNZ) is an independent kiwi-owned company created to bring this service to Aotearoa. OCNZ has formed a partnership with a registered charitable trust in order to offer charity fundholding services, called The Gift Collective. The relationship between the kiwi ventures and Open Collective Inc is like that of any software vendor and customer (not a parent company or owner). If you join, your project, initiative, or community will become a Collective, with its own page on the platform to fundraise and manage your budget.

1. Transparent—everyone can see where the money comes from and where it goes.

2. Collective & Ongoing—designed for collaborative communities to be funded over time, not one-off campaigns or tied to a single individual.

3. Fundholding (a.k.a. fiscal sponsorship or auspicing)—instead of simply transferring you the funds, we hold them in our bank account and pay them out as you go, taking care of painful stuff like taxes, accounting, liability, and payment processing, so you don't have to. We offer charity fundholding as well, to help you meet philanthropic grant requirements and provide donation tax credits.

Are you a not-for-profit?

The Gift Collective is under the umbrella of a registered charitable trust and is completely not-for-profit. OCNZ is a social enterprise incorporated as a limited company, but its legal terms specify that Collective funds can never become company profit and must be donated to charity if not used by the Collective who raised them. Any potential profit derives only from OCNZ's 5% fee for services. Everything about our budget is transparent, too!

View The Gift Collectives Transparent Budget

View Open Collective New Zealand's Transparent Budget