Just in case you missed our email from earlier today, we are posting this here, as well…
If you've been member of the FS Conversations/FS Hub community for more than a little bit, you're probably familiar the ideas that 1) fiscal sponsors aren't charging their projects a "fee," and 2) fiscal sponsors aren't providing "services," and 3) we all should do our best to remove those words from our vernacular.
We hosted a session of the Fiscal Sponsor Conversations on this topic back in April 2023 to discuss the article titled "Is Fiscal Sponsorship a Service Provided for a Fee? Why it isn't and why it matters" written by Erin Bradrick of NEO Law Group and Josh Sattley of Social Impact Commons.
While this may seem kind of nit-picky, there are real, important reasons why fiscal sponsors shouldn't refer to project admin costs as fees and to the support they provide to projects as services. (Please read Erin and Josh's article if you haven't already.) Note: This applies to Model A sponsorship, Model C and the other models as well.
Along those lines, the Schulman Consulting team recently reviewed the websites for each and every organization that is represented in our community and found that, of the organizations that mention a specific admin cost, a whopping 74% of them use some version of the word "fee."
So, we are taking this opportunity to request that you and your team make a plan to review your internal documents, along with all project- and public-facing materials, and make the necessary changes. Some items to review include:
Your public-facing website
Online, or other electronic, forms (i.e. applications)
Your fiscal sponsorship agreement(s)
Any intranet or project portals
Operations/Policy/Employment manuals and handbooks
Project and employee onboarding materials
If you're looking for some ideas for alternative terms to use in place of the word "fee," here are some we've collected from the community:
administrative charge
administrative cost
collective infrastructure support
cost share
fiscal sponsorship cost
shared cost
shared administrative contribution
shared administrative cost
And the most common replacements for the word "services" seems to be "support" or "supports."
Thank you for help in moving our sector forward!