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

As we kick off the fiscal year this month, we are reflecting on our last blog post six months ago, and the progress we’ve made on CS&S’s commitment to serve fiscally sponsored projects. As a part of that initiative, we began tracking both internal metrics and project satisfaction across multiple dimensions. We want to highlight some of what we’ve improved upon 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 wins! Under the leadership of CFO, Ron Brooks, our finance team now provides financial reporting to fiscally sponsored projects 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. Getting our monthly close to 15 days, and maintaining it there, has been a significant goal for us over the past year and we are happy to report that we have been averaging 15 days since December 2024. We 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 support the 15 day close. 

Over the past six months we also undertook a systems migration to move our accounting system 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 to the projects through personalized dashboards. The new system will roll out in August with the July reports to fiscally sponsored projects, and we can’t wait to dive in and teach project teams how to customize their financial dashboards.  

As we communicated in January, our priority is servicing fiscally sponsored projects. Led by COO, Dr. Kena Mayberry, our awesome fiscal sponsorship operations team is at the heart of what we do every day. This team is aligned on providing best in class service to fiscally sponsored projects. Whether it’s getting payments out quickly, turning around a contract, or fielding a question from a project, our team cares about service, and getting things done effectively. To more efficiently track requests, our team moved to an Asana-based task management workflow this year. 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. 

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 was lower. (Net promoter score 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. 

Finally, 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. We are experienced in issues around open source software licensing, terms of service, and other issues common to open source software and open knowledge projects. We have gained valuable experience in the administration of US federal grant funds over the last three years. Our projects also use membership models and fee-for-service models to augment philanthropic funding and build towards sustainability. We support projects to work with both US-based and international employees and independent contractors. CS&S has significant experience in the management of projects with grantmaking programs. Adding to this experience, we bundle full HR support, fundraising support, and strategic advising to give our projects the best possible home to launch or sustain their work. 

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

Photo by USGS on Unsplash