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# About Conservancy
We are set up to help community-driven free software projects thrive. We help our member projects remain vendor-independent and focused on their work, either providing useful and well-maintained free software for their users or creating opportunities to welcome new people into free software.
Under US law, the best way to pursue a non-monetary goal is to incorporate as a charitable non-profit. This structure provides safe-guards against control by for-profit businesses, allows us to work in the public interest and gives us certain tax benefits. In return for that status, we have a responsibility to our donors (and to the IRS) to spend money wisely and only on mission-related work.
As a charity, we must be able to indisputably demonstrate to the IRS that we are upholding our mission and serving the public interest, which affects our policies in many different ways. If you are coming from the business world, the reporting requirements and spending restrictions might seem strange at first. But basically all of our fiscal and legal policies can be traced back to our mission to support community-driven free software and our non-profit structure which requires that we justify all spending as being 1) in support of our mission and 2) responsible and reasonably frugal.
This guide is set up so that you can skip to the part you need right now, often with links to other topics that might be useful around that time. The first few sections discuss your relationship with Conservancy, the middle parts go through all the ways your project can work with Conservancy on specific tasks and then the third section contains information on activities that we know make free software projects more successful and efficient.

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# Communications
#### Your PLC alias
It goes right to us, so there's no need to cc individual staff people on emails. Deb (our Director of Community Operations) looks at all the PLC email and routes it to the correct staff person, accounting for who is in the office and who can best help you. Please don't mix a lot of topics and different requests together, instead make a new ticket or thread so we can easily forward things to the person who can help you.
#### Why is there a number in the subject line of my emails with Conservancy?
We use a ticketing system called RT to handle many of our requests. If we move a conversation to a ticket, it's because it will be more efficient for us (and you) to keep all of the information in that ticket. This is especially important for conversations that result in a financial decision so we can keep a good record. Please don't edit the subject line when you reply to these tickets, it makes it very confusing for others who are following the conversation via the ticket number.
#### Making a ticket
If you already know what you need, you can make a ticket. Please put a good description into the subject line so we can easily process your request.
For conversations about spending project money, use approvals@tix.sfconservancy.org
Seeking reimbursement for an approved expense, use accounts-payable@tix.sfconservancy.org and put your own name and the name of the event or expense into the subject line.
To ask us to generate an invoice for you, please use accounts-receivable@tix.sfconservancy.org
For anything that doesnt fall into one of the above categories, just use your project alias, eg. myproject@sfconservancy.org
### URGENT
We have nearly 50 projects and cannot reasonably handle "emergencies" for more than a few of them on each day. Please don't let procrastination turn your "simple request" into an "URGENT: we need this by tomorrow." If you ever feel like we have not responded quickly enough (were only human), just send a quick "any word on this?" email and we'll usually get you back to you promptly. Oftentimes, we've been working on your request and simply forgot to update you.
You can often find Conservancy staff in #conservancy on freenode.net You can look for staff here if you are having a project emergency and need urgent help or advice. (This is also a great forum to discuss software freedom or get advice from other community members.) Please don't share private information on IRC, especially anything that may concern a legal matter. Finally, if you are having an offsite event and think you might need to have a Conservancy number that you can call during the event, please let us know in advance.

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# Hiring and Paying Contractors
Whenever you want to pay people to do work for your project, you will need to have a contract with the person doing the work. We can help you with the language, but you should have a good understanding of what work you are paying for and the PLC will need to have agreed to spend the amount of money that you'll be paying the contractor. These conversations typically happen in our ticketing system using approvals@tix.sfconservancy.org.
### Roadmap
#### Deciding what work to pay for
Work that you pay people to do for your project must already be on your projects roadmap. You cannot just pay people because they could use the money or fund work because a particular company would really like X feature. The projects direction and priorities for paid work must be defined by the community.
### Contracts
#### Hiring a staff person
If you are planning to hire a salaried person, please get in touch before you write the job description so we can make sure it's a good fit with your mission and our non-profit status. Conservancy will also help you write up a contract for the work, so that everybody is on the same page as far as the work that is being done, plus how much money will be paid out and when.
#### Contractors
A project may choose to pay for (ongoing) work including but not limited to writing code, website design, creating materials, writing documentation or translation as long as it serves your project's mission. Contractors are expected to send us invoices describing the work they've done each month, for the duration of their contract. We use a ticketing systems for our financial business. For contractors, we handle the contract approval and signing via approvals@tix.sfconservancy.org and payments via accounts-payable@tix.sfconservancy.org
#### Net 30
Everyone who does work or incurs an expense at Conservancy is paid on "Net 30" which means we will pay folks within 30 days of receiving a request or invoice. In order to help us keep that promise, we ask payees to be clear and complete when documenting work or expenses. We may also have follow-up questions or require a bit of extra documentation so please keep an eye on your email once you've made a payment request.
#### Outreachy interns
Payment goes out in two installments dependent on continued participation in the program and mentor evaluations.
### Contract Renewals
Most Conservancy contracts for project work have a renewal clause enabling them to be renewed simply by the written agreement of all parties if there are no changes to the terms. When a contract is approaching expiration, you will generally be contacted through the approvals ticket by a Conservancy staff member asking if the PLC wishes to renew it, and for how long. If you agree to renew, the contractor will be asked if they want to renew, and assuming they agree and the project has sufficient funds, Conservancy will confirm its approval. However, if there are changes to the terms of the contract (e.g., a change in pay or hours), this will require either a contract amendment or (depending on the extent of the changes), possibly an entirely new contact. Please notify us as soon as possible if such changes are needed in order to give us enough time to draft a new document and have the contractor review the new terms before the old contract expires.

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# Running Events
#### Events in the Public Interest
The IRS has lot of rules about what kinds of sponsorships non-profit, charitable events can accept and what kinds of benefits can be offered within the context of non-profit, charitable events. Please do not accept money for your event without talking to Conservancy first.
#### Ticket sales
If you choose to sell tickets for your events, you should talk to us. Many events choose to offer a cheap ticket for the cost of the event and a more expensive ticket that is partly a donation and partly the cost of the ticket. We can help you set this up, so please get in touch as soon as you think you may want to do this. We cannot personally send individual invoices to your attendees. Many of our projects use EventBrite and weve also had good success using Symposion for larger events. These systems can be set up to offer an automated receipt for your attendees. (Needs Bretts input)
#### Write a Code of Conduct
We can help you with this, refer you to a consultant or help you find examples to pull from like this one, https://2019.copyleftconf.org/code-of-conduct
### Making a plan
Once you've chosen a venue and date and have a proposed rate on the table, bring us in to talk about liability, insurance and any other accountabilities built in to the contract. Conservancy must be the signer on any contracts you enter into. We can also help you negotiate and make sure all liability concerns are clear. If you have any verbal conversations with the venue that might affect the contract, please let us know as soon as possible. We'll do our best to make sure that your project gets what has been agreed to and does not pay for things that were not provided.
#### Making a Budget
We can help you do this if you've never done it before. Take a look at this sample budget: (put in a budget with a column for estimated and actual columns for both expenses and income) In general it is better to put a number in a market rate number for each expense, even if you might later negotiate a discount.
Estimate your expenses. For instance, you might say "Pizza for 50 people" and put $500 in to the estimated expense column. Then later if only 40 people attend the event and you spend less on pizza, you would put "$400" into actual column. Overestimating by a little bit helps you make sure you don't run out of money for other budgeted expenses.
The same is true for something that gets donated "in kind" which just means when someone donates a thing or service instead of money. For instance, you might say "Taxi from Local Coffee Shop to event" and put $40 into the estimated column. Later on if someone volunteers to pick up coffee in their personal car, you can put "donated" into the actual column. This is also helpful for creating budgets for recurring annual events -- where some years you have a local volunteer with a car and some years you don't.
#### Travel funding
If you intend to cover travel for your events -- for community members, speakers or attendees -- then this should be in your budget. You need to let travelers know about Conservancy's travel policy (before they book anything) and let Conservancy know who is traveling, along with their names and email contacts. (see Travel section above)
#### Fundraising for events
You may be tempted to accept money for list access, advertising or a speaking slot at your events. Non-profit events cannot do these kinds of things. Our projects often accept event sponsorship money in exchange for appearing on a list of sponsors or being thanked from the stage. Please talk to us about any others ideas for sponsorship *before* you offer it to potential sponsors. There's more on this in the fundraising section.

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# The Fiscal Sponsorship Agreement
#### The administrative fee
Conservancy keeps 10% from most of our projects, although we occasionally negotiate a higher administrative fee with event-focused projects. (Events tend to be our most time-consuming type of project to support.) The ten percent generally does not cover all of the work we do on your behalf, but it helps.
#### Notes for non-software projects
We ask that materials provided by our learning or event-based programs are offered under a CC, CC.BY or CC.BY.SA license so that they can be shared.
#### Events
There are a lot of opportunities to sell influence, stage time or audience attention that is not consonant with a "non-profit event." If you only ever worked on a for-profit event, these stipulations can be tricky to navigate. If you're applying to join Conservancy and your main activity is an event, please take a minute to read more about the kinds of events that are within our mission scope. Here's a link to our event section.

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# Project Growth
#### Community Building
These are some general recommendations for getting your project organized and growing.
* Mailing lists and IRC
Most of our projects use a mailing list for asynchronous communication and IRC (Internet Relay Chat) for real time chat. Be clear about kinds of decisions will be made in which place to avoid confusion. We recommend having a Code of Conduct that covers these communications, like this one https://www.python.org/psf/codeofconduct/ Some other tips for running a welcoming channel are here, https://libreplanet.org/wiki/Group:Women%27s_Caucus/Resources/IRC
* Bringing in new users and contributors
We highly recommend making a plan for recruiting and retaining new people. Outreachy and GSoC are great ways to do this. More resources here: https://opensourcediversity.org/
https://www.firsttimersonly.com/
* Attending events to speak about your project
This can be a powerful way to reach new people who might be interested in your project. How to do public speaking: https://github.com/vmbrasseur/Public_Speaking
* Hosting a meeting co-located with a larger event
Many of our projects do this. Say a big event in your space is on Friday and Saturday, why not hold a small event to talk about project work and goals on the Friday or Monday? We can help you do this.
#### Road-mapping
* Technical decision making
We highly recommend doing this in a way that is shared transparently with your whole community. Regular intervals generally improve attendance for these kinds of meetings.
* Getting input from your larger community
* Record keeping and transparency
Consider keeping your regular minutes in a wiki or shared repository so that folks who couldn't attend or who join your project later can easily see what they've missed.
* Holding an election
Conservancy can help you hold an election for leadership roles or a referendum on a particular topic. Weve got easy, secure, online voting software and can set everything up for you.
#### More Ways We Can Help Each Other
* Interested in hosting an intern? We can help!
* Finding a free software solution for your technical need. Write to your PLC alias and well work with you on this.
* We can help you brainstorm some fundraising or promotion ideas, just write your PLC alias and well set up a short meeting.
* Can someone sit in on our annual or semi-annual planning meeting or long-term strategic planning meeting? Yes! Please give us lots of notice and keep in mind that Conservancy staff are all in US time zones.
* Templates for various things; eg photo release forms, sponsor prospectuses, fundraising communications, codes of conduct, kernel enforcement template forms which can be tailored for your specific project's purposes
* Advice when there is community friction? We will do our best to help in these situations. The earlier you let us know whats happening, the better.
#### Talking Conservancy Up
- Please do this early and often! We really appreciate it!
- Once a year, we will ask for your help with our year-end fundraiser
We hope youll help us by posting our fundraising “button” and consider blogging and/or micro-blogging about how Conservancy helps your project thrive.
- Here's a logo (https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2013/feb/28/new-logo/) you can put on your website or blog to show that your project is a Conservancy member!

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# Legal
#### When in doubt, write to us
For legal purposes, your project is now part of Conservancy. Anytime you encounter a large block of legal sounding text from a company, event or organization, please send it to us. If you are about to fill out a grant application or sign something as part of an application for funding or in-kind support, please write to us first. If you have licensing questions, want help with your trademark or anything comes up where the idea of suing starts being discussed, please get in touch with us before deciding anything.
#### Trademarks & Licensing
Conservancy can help you register and then defend your trademark. It costs a little bit of money depending on how many marks and jurisdictions you want to register, but our lawyer can help you make a good choice. We can also work with you on changing or applying a software license to your work and will read and help you sort though any contract that comes up. Write to us though your PLC alias and well get you to the correct person.
#### Contracts, EULA's, Terms of Service
As your fiscal home, Conservancy needs to be able to sort though these agreements for you since we are legally responsible for your project. This includes User Agreements, Grant Applications, anything that asks for your taxpayer ID number or has lots of legal verbiage that they want your consent to before giving you access to a service. These conversations typically happen in our ticketing system using legal@tix.sfconservancy.org, but you should write to your PLC alias first to make sure we get your matter assigned to the right person.
#### Avoiding Conflicts of Interest
Our non-profit status requires that all paid project work is done in the public interest and not for the benefit of a single corporate entity. This means that we must watch out for conflicts of interest, or places where money might get spent in a way that does not serve the project's public interest goals. Conservancy is ultimately responsible for maintaining our non-profit status for the benefit of all our projects so we often ask questions to make each project avoids the kinds of activities that could jeopardize that status. A few examples:
#### Funding Discussions
Discussions around grants that up up being "How can we pay Shelly?" instead of "What is the most important work on our roadmap and who is the best person to do that work?"
#### Contract Work
Contract work that is being funded by a company that does not want the work added to the mainstream codebase or wants it under a proprietary license
#### PLC Composition Changes
Too many people on your PLC becoming financially dependent on a single company, either as employees or contractors
If you think you are approaching any one of these situations, please let us know so we can help you figure out how to proceed.

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# Onboarding
#### The Conflict of Interest Policy
Members of your Project Leadership Committee will be asked to sign a Conflict of Interest statement where they promise to surface any potential conflicts and abstain form voting on things when necessary.
#### Money
When your project joins Conservancy, you'll transfer any existing project funds to Conservancy and then you'll get a donate link to help you bring in more funds.
#### Send us web-ready and print-ready logos
The ideal logo file is an SVG file that includes both your project logo and name together in the way youd like them presented. We'll also need a 2-3 sentence description of your project for our website where we list you along with our other member projects.
#### Let us know about any pending financial commitments
Please disclose any outstanding project bills, or open grants when you join Conservancy so we can help you follow through with these obligations.

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# Your Project Leadership Committee
#### How should you choose leadership?
You want people who are invested in your project and have time to participate in periodic decision-making conversations. If your project serves multiple constituencies, you probably want to pick folks from multiple constituencies for your leadership too. There's a lot of academic evidence that diverse groups tend to make better decisions and are less likely to be surprised by their work's interactions with other systems.
#### Composition
You want your Project Leadership Committee (aka PLC) to be enough people that you have more than one perspective on your project but no so big that you never can get everyone on a call. We will also ask that you do not choose too many people from one company or who represent the same financial interest. This might be expressed in your Fiscal Sponsorship Agreement as a either a number or a percentage.
#### When people resign
For record-keeping purposes, we'd like the person leaving to write to us to say, "I am resigning." If there was an election and some folks left and some folks joined, just forward us the results of the election along with any supporting material.
#### Adding new folks
You might do a vote amongst your current PLC, decide by consensus or have your wider community vote on your leadership. Whatever method you choose, please let us know when you are adding or subtracting new PLC members. We appreciate you sending along any kind of supporting information, like a blog post about the new board members or the discussion that lead up to the change on your PLC.
#### Your PLC alias
Each Conservancy project has project leadership committee alias, project@sfconservancy.org that includes your current PLC members and at least two Conservancy staff members. If you have an employee or contractor, we can set up another alias for communications that you want to share with Conservancy and those folks.
#### Meetings
We recommend that your PLC meet on a regular schedule. This could be weekly, monthly, bi-monthly or quarterly. If you like, you can invite a Conservancy staff member to these meetings. We might not be able to attend a meeting every week, but if you let us know when you would like our input then we'll certainly try to attend those meetings.

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# RAISING MONEY
#### Individual Donations
The easiest way to take money in is via Paypal. You will get a Paypal button to use on your site to accept donations to your project. Please do not negotiate further earmarked funds unless you discuss those plans with us first and make other arrangements (we can give you a new PayPal button for those campaigns). For example, donors should not send money in with notes like, "This donation is only for Neal to do work on my bug" or "Please use this money only to pay for supporting my favorite library." Money should be donated to the project generally or to your project's event(s) if you choose to have events. (see more on that in the events section)
#### Corporate Sponsorships
These are great, but they must be charitable donations. You can display sponsors' logos on your website and in event materials. Charities cannot sell influence over their activities or offer product endorsements or access to their community to a for-profit company. That means you cannot sell a guest blog post or advertisement on your website, a sponsored story in your newsletter, a talk slot at your event or a seat or vote with any project committee. If you are new to the ways charities do things and have any questions about sponsorships, please get in touch with us were happy to help.
Most corporate sponsors need an invoice or want a receipt for their donations. If a new prospective sponsor contacts us first, we will forward the request to you so that you can be in charge of your sponsor relationships and decide if you want to have a relationship with that sponsor. We will not issue any invoices to new sponsors without your approval.
If a new corporate sponsor contacts you first and you choose to accept their sponsorship, please email accounts-receivable@tix.sfconservancy.org with all the background information needed to generate an invoice: company name and address, contact name and email address, sponsorship level and any other details they will want included or mentioned on their invoice or receipt (companies in Europe often want their VAT ID included). Include copies of any emails or other documents indicating the donors agreement to be invoiced.
Note that some corporations require a purchase order and/or setting Conservancy up in their supplier system before we can invoice them. Purchase orders and instructions for registering in a sponsors system should also be sent to accounts-receivable@tix.sfconservancy.org.
There are a few ways to streamline sponsor relationships. Publicly posting what your sponsor benefits are and choosing a set number of sponsorship types that you offer is a great start. We also strongly advise that you only offer benefits that are very easy for you to fulfill and charge enough for your sponsors levels such that you don't mind doing that work. Conservancy only handles the financial transaction; it is your responsibility to fulfill any sponsor benefits once payment has been received.
Some good examples or corporate sponsorship pages: https://www.seleniumhq.org/sponsor/, https://www.outreachy.org/ (scroll down), https://twistedmatrix.com/trac/wiki/TwistedSponsors and https://www.phpmyadmin.net/sponsors/
#### Grants
Grants are great way to bring in money. Often a grant will come with a contract or other document describing both parties' understanding of how grant money will be spent and what obligations the recipient of the grant owes to the grant giver. These documents need to be looked over by a Conservancy lawyer to make sure that the work is on the project roadmap, that the obligations are fulfillable, and that we understand how to pay out the money you receive so that the grant is not forfeited for a technicality. Please email any grant documents to legal@tix.sfconservancy.org for review.
### Other Fundraising Topics
#### Swag sales
If you sell swag to raise money for your project, then you need to know how much the item costs and how much of the price of the swag is a donation. For example, if you buy a bunch of hats for $5 and then sell them for $30 to raise money for your project, then $25 is a donation and $5 is a purchase. Buyers are entitled to receive a note acknowledging their donations.
#### Corporate matching programs
Many companies will match their employees' charitable contributions. The employer typically needs affirmation that the employee donated, along with proof that it was a charitable gift. The thank you email the donor receives from us, along with their PayPal receipt or cancelled check, are usually sufficient for this purpose.
#### How do I find out if money has come in?
Sponsors donating through your PayPal link are sent a donation receipt by email when the payment is imported into our books. A copy of this email is sent to the PLC.
If the donation or grant was invoiced through our ticketing system, the project representative should have been ccd on the ticket, and they will receive a copy of the email sent to the donor acknowledging receipt of the funds.
### [ADD SOMETHING ABOUT LEDGER-REPORT]

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# Spending Money
Project Leadership Committees (PLC's) make all financial decisions for their project. These decisions must be in line with the project mission (eg. no limos and fancy champagne.)
#### Decision Making
Who should be involved in which decisions?
People should recuse themselves from conversations where the topic is paying them, reimbursing them or buying equipment for them. A recipient of project funds can make a request, but then the other PLC members should discuss whether or not to grant the request without the potential recipient. If the recipient is a PLC member, then a new email thread needs to be started with everyone else on the PLC plus at least one representative of Conservancy. The Conservancy representative could be either the Director of Community Operations or a Conservancy lawyer who is helping with the contract.
#### Who lets Conservancy know a decision has been made?
One person on your Project Leadership Committee (PLC) should be designated as the Conservancy liaison. Make sure you pick someone for this role who has the time to be responsive to email.
### Reimbursements
All reimbursements require PLC approval. For a single reimbursement, the approval can be sent directly to accounts-payable@tix.sfconservancy.org along with the request for reimbursement and receipts. For multiple reimbursements, please create an approvals ticket noting who is to be reimbursed and for how much. (For regular expenses, such as monthly meetups, you may wish to budget an annual total that can be drawn on by the approved spenders throughout the year rather than trying to itemize expenses up front.)
#### Shirts, stickers or other swag -
There are two ways to handle swag; 1) buy swag and give it away to whoever you think will help promote the project, 2) buy swag and then sell it at reasonable mark-up to raise money for your project.
Method one is easy, let us know you're planning to buy swag and either let us pay for it or you can pay for it and submit your receipt for reimbursement, via the accounts-payable queue.
For method two, we recommend you use a drop shipper (Spreadshirt) that will automatically produce a report of your sales including how much the shirt and shipping cost and how much of the sale was a donation for your work. This helps us track the swag income and the cost of the swag separately which is something the IRS would very dearly like us to do.
If you need a type of swag that isn't offered on Spreadshirt or wish to do in person sales of some type, please get in touch with us via your PLC alias so we can help you set up the record-keeping requirements.
#### Booth materials
Similar to the swag section above, you can have us buy stickers, leaflets, giveaways, booth signage or other items or you can tell us what you're thinking about and then buy and submit your receipt for reimbursement, via the accounts-payable queue.
#### Group meals
They should be fairly reasonable. Be sure to record the names of attendees. A picture is nice too (we love pictures of our projects celebrating their hard work!) but is not required.
#### Hardware and other equipment for doing project work
First, youll want to discuss whether or not you all agree on spending money for this without the person or people who will be receiving the equipment. You might want to approve an amount “plus or minus 10%”, since sometimes prices can change quickly.
Second, you need to decide whether to fund the purchase as a reimbursement or a grant. The ownership and tax implications are different. If the payment is a reimbursement, Conservancy will own the equipment, and the money will not be taxable income for the recipient. The opposite is true if the payment is made as a grant: the recipient will own the equipment, but the payment will be taxable income to them, and they will have to provide us with completed tax forms (W-9 or W-8BEN).
Once a decision has been reached, forward the approval to approvals@tix.sfconservancy.org.
Receipts for approved equipment purchases should be sent to accounts-payable@tix.sfconservancy.org. If the purchase is a reimbursement, the recipient of the equipment must agree to the following terms:
(a) Clearly label the equipment that it is property of Software Freedom Conservancy, and put the email address hw@sfconservancy.org on it if you can.
(b) When the equipment arrives, send us the serial number.
(c) Some reasonable personal or academic use of the equipment of course is acceptable, but we need to be sure the equipment will be used *primarily* for contributions to the project. Once you have the serial number in hand, send us a statement like the one below, filling in the variables:
"I, YOUR_NAME, will be the primary user of the DESCRIBE_EQUIPMENT, SERIAL_NUMBER_IF_IT_HAS_ONE. I attest that the equipment will be primarily used to facilitate my volunteer contributions to the INSERT_PROJECT_NAME project."
(d) If the equipment ever becomes non-functional and/or you have plans to get rid of it in any way or give it to someone else (even if it's someone within your project), please get in touch with us before you do.
If the purchase is a grant, grantee must provide tax information and agree to terms similar to the following (this is a basic example; projects may have additional requirements):
1. Grantee will perform at least 35 hours of work on PROJECT with the equipment Grantee purchases with the grant funds.
2. After three months, or the performance of 35 hours of work on PROJECT, Grantee shall provide a brief grant report in reply to this email, including a list of work undertaken, and work completed during the month. When the work includes materials placed in a revision control repository, the grant report should include a list of all commits related to the work made to a publicly accessible revision control repository.
3. Grantee will not use the grant funds to intervene in any election, or support or oppose any political party or candidate for public office, or engage in any lobbying not permitted by IRC section 501(c)(3).
4. Grantee will not adopt, use or apply to register any trademarks that incorporate, are a play on, or are similar to PROJECT without the prior written consent of Conservancy.
5. Grantee represents that the equipment they are purchasing with the grant funds is not being paid for by any other person or entity.
6. Grantee acknowledges that no goods or services were provided to Conservancy in return for this grant.
7. Grantee agrees that it will maintain records pertaining to its use of the grant funds for at least two (2) years after they are spent. Grantee will provide Conservancy with reasonable access to review relevant records for the purpose of evaluating the expenditure of grant funds and ensuring compliance with the terms of the grant
#### Vendors who do some kind of work for you
Please let us know about any sort of situation where youre going to be paying someone, e.g., design, recording, meeting facilitation, catering, event organizing, etc. In most cases we should have a signed contract with the provider describing the work to be done and the billing process before they begin. Send the relevant information to approvals@tix.sfconservancy.org as soon as possible.
To receive payment, vendors will need to send an invoice to accounts-payable@tix.sfconservancy.org that describes the work, lists expenses and clearly lists the hours worked with the rate they are charging or describes an agreement to do a set amount of work in exchange for a lump sum. The invoice should also include their contact and payment information.
For ongoing contractor work, please also see (contractors section.)
### Travel
All travel reimbursements must adhere to Conservancy policy, published at https://sfconservancy.org/projects/policies/conservancy-travel-policy.html. It is the responsibility of each traveler to familiarize themselves with and adhere to this policy.
Your project's leadership committee (PLC) must sign off on travel spending, and may place additional restrictions on what they will reimburse. Travelers who intend to seek travel reimbursement should contact the PLC as early as possible for their approval. Do not include the traveler in the email thread or on the ticket discussing whether or not to fund their travel: it's a conflict of interest. (link to COI section).
Once decided, the PLC should let Conservancy know that they've authorized travel by sending the name(s) and amount(s) authorized to approvals@tix.sfconservancy.org. It is preferable to send authorizations for all the people going to the same event in one approvals ticket; however, to avoid creating unnecessary administrative work, please only list the people who have confirmed they intend to travel to the event and request reimbursement.
#### Visas
Conservancy can write a letter of invitation or a sponsor letter for community members that are traveling to the US. The traveler must be coming to the US primarily for a project meeting or a conference relevant to project work. We will need the traveler's address, their relation to the project, travel dates and an approximate itinerary. For sponsor letters, we also need to know who their project host will be during their trip. (Note from Rosanne: this doesnt seem to belong in the Reimbursements sections, but Im not sure where to move it to.)
### Expenses Conservancy Can Handle Directly
#### Ongoing server or domain expenses
You let us know what kind of service you need; server space, domain name registration, email hosting, etc. Providers Conservancy has accounts with include Gandi, Rackspace, AWS, and Google Cloud. If you prefer a different provider, we will have our lawyer review any agreement or terms of service. If the rates for the same level of service are going to change significantly, we will let you know and if we can, we'll recommend a more frugal alternative. In order to have Conservancy handle these payments automatically rather than having you pay them and request reimbursement, we will need access to the billing invoices, either by setting the account to send them automatically to accounts-payable@tix.sfconservancy.org (preferred), or by giving Conservancy accounting staff login access to the account to retrieve the invoices manually.
#### Large travel expenses that the traveler cannot afford to wait to be reimbursed for
The PLC must agree to prepay the travel expenses and note that explicitly in the approvals ticket. The approvals ticket should include the travelers name and email address, dates and purpose of travel, and what/how much is approved for funding. The earlier you do this, the better. Travel is full of local oddities and early travel plans help overcome those oddities when they are still likely to be cheap or avoidable. If there is a hackday or a meeting planned before or after a large event, please let us know that too. We'll have the traveler send us their info (see the travel policy) along with the dates for the event or meeting, and book the flight and hotel for them. Travelers whose expenses are prepaid must still adhere to Conservancys travel policy, including submitting a report after travel is completed.
#### Computers or other significant equipment for people working on your project
See “Hardware and other equipment for doing project work” section above for the differences between Conservancy-owned equipment and equipment grants. Whether it is a Conservancy-owned purchase or a grant, the recipient must still agree to the relevant terms, but Conservancy can purchase the equipment directly and have it shipped to the recipient rather than having them purchase it and submit receipts for reimbursement.
#### Expenses associated with a venue contract. See the section on EVENTS for more detail.
#### Code-signing certs
Projects pick their official name and generate a CSR to send to Conservancy. You will also need to vote to confirm you are willing to spend the money that obtaining a code cert costs, somewhere between $150 and $450 (at the time of this writing.)
#### Preferred Infrastructure
These are the tools we prefer to use. Unless there is a significant unmet need, we really prefer to work with one of each type of vendor across all our projects. This helps us stay on top of changes in APIs, services and pricing. (BRETT)
* Ticket sales
* Gandi for domain registration
* Server space?