A Commitment to Service: A Look Back, and a Step Forward

As we kick off the fiscal year this month, we are reflecting on the progress we’ve made on CS&S’s commitment to serve fiscally sponsored projects since our last blog post from January 2, 2025. Today we are thrilled to highlight some of the key improvements that we’ve made over the last six months, and share that for the first time in years, we are open to new project applications this fiscal year.

First, let’s celebrate some of the incredible wins realized in the past six months!

• Faster fiscal reporting. Under the leadership of our CFO, Ron Brooks, our finance team now provides financial reporting in an average of 15 days after the end of each month. For example, May financials were provided to projects by June 15th. This improvement has equipped our projects with necessary data that impacts their day-to-day financial decisions. Achieving this quick turnaround time, and maintaining it there, has been a significant goal for us over the past year; we are happy to report that we have been averaging 15 days since December 2024. We also want to acknowledge the contributions of our whole finance team–Erin, Taron, Josmil, Noël, and Ron–as well as our project teams, who have diligently uploaded receipts and coded transactions earlier each month to enable a 15 day close.
  

• Accounting system upgrade. We successfully completed a systems upgrade to Sage Intacct, which went live on July 1. This tool will continue to improve financial management for fiscally sponsored projects, making self-service, real-time financial data available through personalized dashboards. The new system will roll out in August, with the July reports to each project.We can’t wait to dive in and teach project teams how to customize their financial dashboards to best serve their needs.

• Task management with Asana. As we communicated in January, our priority is service to fiscally sponsored projects. Led by COO, Dr. Kena Mayberry, our awesome operations team recently transitioned CS&S to an Asana-based task management system that has increased transparency, alignment, and efficiency. Each project team shares an Asana board with our operations and finance teams so that projects can see who is managing a task, and how far along in the process the task is to completion. We are proud of our fiscal sponsorship operations team–Hope, Rachel, Linda, and Kena–for designing and implementing this system to keep the whole organization on track.

Whether it’s getting payments out quickly, turning around a contract, or fielding a question from a project, our team cares about service, and works hard to ensure needs are comprehensively and promptly met. We are proud of our accomplishments in the past six months and look forward to continuing to incorporate stakeholder feedback to drive our future work.

Incorporating feedback - our new quarterly satisfaction survey! To fully center service at the heart of our organization, we need to measure how we are doing from the project’s perspective. To better understand the experience of our fiscally sponsored projects, we now conduct a quarterly satisfaction survey.

We first collected satisfaction data during our organizational assessment in July 2024. This was a difficult time for our organization, as conflict over CS&S’s role as a fiscal sponsor in larger geopolitical issues played out in our organization. During this time, we took our first assessment of project satisfaction, and learned that our satisfaction score was low, and net promoter score (NPS) was lower. NPS is a measure of how likely current projects are to recommend CS&S to a colleague.

As of this June, our project satisfaction is up significantly from baseline scores in every category (operations, finance, and human resources). Our organizational net promoter scores have also risen significantly from last year (from 27% in June of 2024 to 66.67% in 2025). Our goal is to raise our promoter score to 100%, and we’re constantly seeking to improve our services to get there.

We are accepting new project applications! We are thrilled to announce that we are open to new project applications for the first time in nearly two years. Founded in 2016, we have significant experience as a science and technology fiscal sponsor, with both Model A (comprehensive) and Model C (pass-through) fiscal sponsorship. We have managed the operations of nearly 20 projects over the past 8 years, and we remain committed to delivering best-in-class fiscal sponsorship services for science and technology projects. We look forward to sharing our valuable expertise and considerable experience, including our knowledge around managing issues around open source software licensing, terms of service, and other considerations common to open source software and open knowledge projects. We have also gained valuable experience supporting projects utilizing membership and fee-for-service models to augment philanthropic funding as they build sustainability.

While US-based, we support global projects that work with both US-based and international employees and independent contractors. CS&S has significant experience in the management of projects with grantmaking programs, and have built our expertise in the past three years in the administration of US federal grant funds.

Leveraging our extensive expertise and experience, we are also proud to offer a bundle of full HR support, fundraising support, and strategic advising to the high-quality fiscal support that we provide, giving our projects the best possible home to launch or sustain their work. 

If you’re interested in discussing fiscal sponsorship with CS&S, please fill out a new inquiry form and our team will be in touch with you!

Photo by USGS on Unsplash