In August, we stewarded a process where 130+ Association Representatives (AREPs) or co-owners of the Impact Hub Network decided how to spend real money of the Association -- they received €100 each and over the next 7 days they had the chance to allocate it towards member-led initiatives they believe would make our network stronger. No committee vote. No Board sign-off. Just the people who co-own the Impact Hub Network, deciding together 🤝
We ran this as a live experiment with Cobudget - a tool I first discovered and nerded out on as a member of the Enspiral Network (a huge source of collaborative tools and radical experiments). It's simple: community members allocate funding toward what they care about most, transparently and in a more participatory way — therefore sharing decision-making power that would normally sit with a Board (like ours). We’ve also given all Hubs the chance to match their funding allocation, growing the pool even further.
The funding was allocated across 9 proposals that have been developed in a longer co-design process over the last several months that we hosted online and at the Global Gathering. These proposals are member-led initiatives that could improve our culture, collaboration and collective thriving, and some examples include: an emergency response & solidarity mechanism to help Hubs in crisis, an improved onboarding process for new Hub founders, or “nodes” that support thematic business development and knowledge creation across our network.
Why do this at all? Wouldn't a committee vote be simpler? Isn't this the Board's job anyway?
Here's the thing we realised: the outcome matters less than the muscle we build getting there.
By doing this experiment we hoped to:
- Increase engagement and shared ownership - get our global community and AREPs genuinely invested in the initiatives we fund.
- Walk the talk. We talk a lot about transparency, co-ownership and distributed decision making. This is where we actually practice it.
- Make governance fun (or try to)! Too often these processes feel flat, top-down and disconnected from the people they affect.
There's also just something powerful about Impact Hubs deciding, on their own terms, how to improve the network they co-own together. Tools like Cobudget enable us to put this into practice.
So, what did we learn?
1. New processes take time to integrate 🌀
Cobudget itself is fantastic, but fitting it into our existing comms and processes took some retrofitting. To validate voter registration (one rep per Hub) and track Hubs who elected to "match" the funding, we built a Google Sheet on the side and sent reminders via email/Slack. Digital literacy also varies across humans - understanding the tool, trusting the process, actually logging in to vote all took longer than we expected. Budget time for people to get comfortable with it, not just time to run it.
2. Not everyone will or can participate - design for that 🤸♂️
Full participation of 135 wasn't the goal, and it's not realistic. Capacity, time zones, bandwidth, interest - they all vary across a network this size. The better question isn't "how do we get everyone to vote," it's "how do we design a process that still feels legitimate, even when not everyone votes." We had 100 out of 135 Hubs register to vote (almost 75%) which we were thrilled with for a first experiment. However with 35 Hubs not voting, we're left with funds to redistribute.
3. Seeing the funding decisions was powerful. Understanding the reasoning would've been even more powerful 🧐
Watching where the money went told us a lot about what the network values. But we didn't capture the why - the thinking behind each choice. Next time, we want to capture the reasoning alongside the vote, not just the outcome. Cobudget has a comment function per project that wasn't fully used. We did track unique funders per project though, which was an interesting indicator in itself.
4. Global seasons and timing matter more than we accounted for 🌎
We ran this over a period that overlapped with summer holidays for a large part of our network (Europe), and that made participation harder for both the teams running pilots and the people voting. We knew going in it wasn't ideal timing, but went ahead anyway, and it cost us some engagement. There's no perfect time for every region, but there are trade-offs to acknowledge and ways to soften them - like proxy voting which we ended up adding as an option.
Now our focus turns to supporting the projects in the pilot implementation phase over the next 3 months.
We're so grateful the Network embraced this experiment, and we're taking these lessons into future rounds. I think the power and potential in networks lies in the ability to harness it's collective intelligence like. As a Board, it's also our responsibility to look for ways to decentralise power and decision making.
I'd love to hear from others who have experimented with collective decision making or collaborative budgeting. What did you try? What did you learn? And what else can we try to bring more participatory approaches to governance and decision making as a network? 🌈
