For international readers, a whip round is “an informal British phrase for collecting money from a group of people, often to buy a joint gift, make a donation, or cover a shared cost.” 

At LocalGov Drupal, our running costs have been covered by a whip round since January 2023 and we’re going from strength to strength. This post explains how we got here.

Why we needed to raise money

LocalGov Drupal’s development was supported by the UK Government’s Local Digital Fund from October 2019 to December 2022. During our final year of funding, we explored different ways to cover ongoing costs – product development, onboarding, community building, events and comms.

The first question we asked ourselves was: could this work be covered by volunteers alone?  If you’re thinking about sustainability now, this question is a good place to start. You might find that volunteer effort is enough to keep going.

Canvassing the most active members of our community at the time, we found that most wanted to be involved in some way, but no one had sufficient time alongside their day jobs to run things. Also the community had more interest and expertise in product development, testing and content design, and less in other areas like coding, comms, community building and managing the finances. So we needed to raise money to make sure everything essential was covered.

We modelled budgets for a minimum and desirable core team, then set about exploring how this could be funded long term.

Finding the right model

After a while searching, the team identified a model used by the Cooperative Councils Innovation Network. It charges council members an annual fee on a sliding scale, calculated from their budget and population. This sheet shows a few example calculations.

Council subscription fees (Google Sheets)

Fees are made up of three parts:

• A low base fee of £500 paid by everyone
• 0.65% of the council’s population, capped at £1500
• 0.002% of the council’s budget, capped at £7500

We tweaked the values above to produce annual fees of between £1500 and £10000. The above achieved good value for councils, while covering all costs – provided sufficient councils paid their fees. 

Importantly, we felt that subscription fees of this amount would be relatively straightforward for the council’s IT budget holder to pay. We understand that many senior digital leaders in councils have authority to make payments up to £25k without excessive paperwork.

Finally we decided that council fees should be voluntary, as some councils may not be able to afford the fees, or initially struggle to make the case for them. 

Once all of these decisions were made, our team started knocking on council doors to see who would pledge financial support. It turned out we got these numbers right the first time – enough of our council colleagues decided they could support us, and the rest is history.

Suppliers pay fees too

There are two ways for councils to get LocalGov Drupal. It’s open source so with the right skills in house, councils can just get started on their own.

The other common way is to hire a Drupal supplier. They can do a wide range of things from setting up hosting and creating design templates to deploying security patches and feature upgrades.

Because LocalGov Drupal has many suppliers, we were able to develop a subscriber scheme for them. It uses the same idea as the council one, with turnover in place of budget, and number of full time staff including contractors in place of population.

Unlike councils where fees are voluntary, suppliers must pay to be fully included in our community. There’s nothing to stop any Drupal supplier contributing code or working with councils though.

Project specific whip rounds

Over the last year, we’ve introduced the Community Fund where councils and suppliers can pledge time and money to specific projects outside of our main roadmap. 

The scheme works a bit like Kickstarter: we create a list of projects and call for pledges from our community. Once we have sufficient pledges for a project, it can start and the resulting code is open source and free for anyone to use.

Our biggest success to date is the award winning Publications Importer, funded by Southwark Council and built by Chicken. It uses AI to munge PDFs into HTML which can then be checked and published by a human editor, saving hours per document.

We’ve also run multiple rounds of funding for our Elections module, funded by Cumberland and Walsall councils and built by Rohallion. There’s an open funding call to cover proportional voting for the upcoming English mayoral election, plus ongoing votes in Scotland and Ireland.

There’s lots more to say about the Community Fund, so I’ll blog again about this soon.

Lessons learned

Whip round funding has been very successful for LocalGov Drupal, and it’s definitely worth considering for your project. Here’s a few things we’ve learned:

• a sliding scale of subscription fees was better than having the same fee for everyone. Councils come in all sizes, and we wanted the bigger ones to pay a higher (and still reasonable amount) than the smaller ones. This was welcomed by everyone, small and large councils alike
  
  
• there’s a limit to the amount a senior IT officer can pay, and this varies from one council to another. Payments higher than the ones we ask for would probably need alternative governance arrangements. This is where I think the flatpack collaborative model from my previous post comes in
  
  
• being able to explain precisely how the membership fees are worked out was really important to our councils. We can point to a calculation and publicly available population and budget figures, and this helps everyone.
  
  At one point we were slightly put off by the odd numbers councils pay (e.g. why does Carlisle pay £1,457 and not £1500?), so we explored payment bands with round numbers. We found that councils were more reassured by ‘precise’ figures, and modelling showed that similar councils could have ended up paying significantly different amounts, which was unfair
  
  
• like other open source communities, ours has a small but significant free rider problem where some councils aren’t paying their subscription fees. They take the code that our community created, and access community resources and events without acknowledging how they’re paid for or contributing to the cost. This is a shame, but we still think voluntary fees are the right approach. If you’re a council that’s not currently paying, please get in touch for a chat 🙂

Thanks

LocalGov Drupal refined this model and achieved financial sustainability thanks to careful work by the LocalGov Drupal core team – Aaron, Finn, Tim, me, Maria at Agile Collective and many more. We’re always open to comments and suggestions from community members, and will no doubt evolve our funding still further.