Our financial philosophy is built upon the principles of sacred economics, which derive from religious, spiritual, and indigenous traditions.

We study and intentionally apply these principles in all that we do. Our core guiding principles are as follows.

  • Full Transparency

    Every financial decision we make is open and accessible to all, cultivating accountability, trust, and community ownership. We actively seek community input to guide decisions.

  • Interconnection

    Economic exchange is part of a web of relationships between people, communities, and the earth. We measure wealth in connection, belonging, and advancement of shared purpose, seeking always to apply funds towards the well-being and benefit of all.

  • Ecological Sustainability

    We use funds in ways that support regenerative and sustainable practices, honoring the sacredness of all life.

  • Diversity of Contribution

    We value service, time, creativity, care, and knowledge as equal to financial gifts, and we prioritize creating opportunities and expressing gratitude for diverse contributions.

  • Generosity

    We honor the generosity of those who give, and we strive to multiply the value of all we receive in generous service to our community. We ensure our services are made generously available to all, regardless of financial capacity.

  • Reciprocity

    We emphasize that every economic exchange provide benefit to all involved. We value circulation rather than accumulation of funds.

  • Stewardship

    We view all that we receive as gifts entrusted to us to serve our community and future generations. We align financial decisions with what is most simple and essential, avoiding waste, excess, and distraction from our core mission. We make careful, intentional decisions and practice responsible reserve-building to ensure our work is sustainable for many generations to come.

To view our complete financial roadmap, please see our outline below.

The Sacred Sound Circle Financial Model

Oversight and Accountability

We are committed to upholding the highest standards of non-profit operational models:

  • We maintain thorough and professional bookkeeping and accounting, utilizing consistent support from volunteers and contractors to remain comprehensive.
  • We comply with nonprofit best practices, including compliance with nonprofit regulations, IRS filings, annual reports, and donor transparency.
  • Our board provides oversight over all financial decisions.
  • Board members meet regularly, and a financial report is presented at each meeting. An audit and review committee will be formed.

We are recruiting board members. If you are interested, please consider joining our board!

Current Status

Sacred Sound Circle has not yet received initial funding. We have been hard at work creating models to ensure many years of growth, impact, and sustainability. We are now launching our vast outreach campaign to engage supporters, collaborators, and donors like you.

Projected Budgets

Year 1 Projected Budget

Within our first year, we are prioritizing simplicity, conservatism, and necessity in budgeting.

Our major funding priority is designing and launching our MVO (minimum viable offering): an online social platform equipped with the most basic tools necessary to kickstart community building, such as creating a profile, building and sharing posts, and basic interaction functions. Our concurrent funding priorities are: registering as a non-profit, grassroots fundraising, branding and design, and financial bookkeeping.

Expenses

Total: $21,750, dependent on revenue and volunteer support.

MVO online social platform development: $14,600

Building a platform base: $2,000

Interaction plug-in tools: $2,000

Ecommerce and event RSVP plug-in tools: $2,000

Annual platform hosting fees: $600

Development contractors: volunteers $0, contractors $5,000

Maintenance contractors: volunteers $0, contractors $3,000

Non-profit fees: $3,450

Articles of incorporation fee: $75

501(c)(3) tax exemption application: $275

Charitable solicitation registration: $100

Consulting services: volunteers $0, hired consultant $3,000

Grassroots fundraising: $1,300

Promotional products and donor thank you gifts (stickers, t-shirts, and tote bags): $500

Stationary, postage, and shipping: $500

Online processing fees: $300

Logo, product art, and website art: volunteer $0, contractor $400

Financial administration and accounting services: volunteer $0, contractor $2,000

Reserve Building: Dependent on revenue

Revenue Target

Total: $40,000 (variable)

Grassroots donations: $15,000

Fundraising events: $10,000

Sponsorships: $7,500

Online shop purchases: $7,500

Year 2 Projected Budget

As our funding grows, we plan to scale responsibly and sustainably. Within our second (and third) year, our emphasis will be on expanding and improving our online social platform, hiring team members, increasing outreach and fundraising capacity, and building reserve funds. As in our first year, every effort will be made to ensure financial decisions are cost-effective, efficient, conservative, and sustainable.

Expenses

Total: $138,000, dependent on revenue and volunteer support.

On-going social platform maintenance and scaling: $20,000

As our user-base grows, we anticipate spending to increase capacity, improve functionality, maintain the platform, and respond to inevitable technical errors. This work will require on-going relationships with contractors and higher payment tiers for hosting and plug-in tools.

Two full-time team members: $50,000 each, $100,000 total

We aim to hire two full-time team members within year two, a decision that has been carefully considered and deemed necessary to handle the anticipated volume of outreach, customer service, fundraising, community building, volunteer coordination, and administration needs.

Developing a mobile app: $10,000

We plan to launch a mobile app by year 2 or 3, a significant step towards increasing user engagement.

Outreach and fundraising: $5,000

We aim to accumulate excess funds that can be reinvested in outreach and fundraising campaigns, which will in turn increase revenue and engagement. These campaigns will likely include expanding our online fundraising shop, running advertisements, hosting web events, creating high quality social media content, and more.

Financial administration: $3,000

We will maintain professional and thorough reporting, accountability measures, and regulation compliance, paying all required fees and depending on volunteers or contractors for accounting and filing.

Reserve Building: dependent on revenue

Long-term sustainability is of utmost importance to us. Once we are stable, we will build a reserve fund to plan for the unexpected, ensuring our organization remains impactful for many generations to come.

Revenue Target

Total: $170,000 (variable)

Donations: $50,000

Memberships: $30,000

Grants: $20,000

Sponsorships: $20,000

Online shop purchases: $20,000

Fundraising events: $15,000

Advertisements: $10,000

Tabling: $5,000

Funding Strategy

Our guiding strategy is diversified revenue streams.

We are committed to creating an array of funding sources, prioritizing creative, flexible, and imaginative solutions, and avoiding overreliance on one source. This strategy promotes feasibility and long-term sustainability. We operate by the principle of “start small, fail fast."

We invest small amounts into potential funding projects within limited periods of time, and are committed to testing, analyzing data, and pivoting swiftly to new creative ideas if we do not receive the results we expect.

Grassroots Support

  • Grassroots Donations: We are launching a vast, thorough outreach campaign to generate interest, support, collaboration, in-kind donations (contributions of services, talents, and other resources), and monetary donations. This campaign foregrounds direct asks to sacred sound practitioners, facilitators, community groups, and other stakeholders via social media, email, and calls. With every ask, we emphasize taking the extra step of sharing our work with others, leveraging the widespread pre-existing networks of connections in the sacred sound community to build momentum for our grassroots outreach campaign.

  • Memberships: Members will be those who set up a reoccurring donation. They will receive special incentives to join: member newsletters highlighting the impacts of their donations, and member webinars where they will hear updates on our organization and have opportunities to connect with others and provide input on our work. We also plan to publish a regular digital or print magazine for members, which will curate the best posts, articles, and resources shared on our platform alongside beautiful artwork.

  • Online Fundraising Shop: We are launching an online shop to sell a variety of spirituality and wellness products, collaborating with talented and passionate artists, authors, and wellness product producers who are contributing their high-quality, meaningful products to be sold with a significant portion of revenue being invested directly into Sacred Sound Circle. We believe this shop will serve multiple aims. The products sold are curated specifically to appeal to our community base: people who may be interested in sacred sound practices. By leveraging social media to promote our shop, we believe our products will attract people who are interested in our mission, while also raising revenue. We will use our shop to generate funds and to build interest, email lists, and social media followings.

  • Fundraising Events: We will engage prominent sacred sound leaders and organizations to host special fundraising events for our organization, such as webinars and workshops. These events will be offered to our community on a sliding scale donation, providing meaningful enrichment and community building experiences while also raising revenue.

  • Engaging Our Base: we are launching a consistent social media presence, taking advantage of powerful social media algorithms to reach new people, and sharing content that cultivates education, trust, recognition, dialogue, online shop purchases, and donations. Our team of volunteers will produce engaging multimedia content about sacred sound practices, music, events, and philosophy across a variety of platforms, including Instagram, Facebook, Tik Tok, and Youtube. Additionally, we will engage our base via our email lists - sharing articles, resources, graphics, videos, playlists, and more. These efforts are intended to build will for greater engagement and donations. We will also expand outreach by encouraging our community to comment, share posts, and submit their own contributions.

  • Cultivating Donor Relationships: Every effort will be made to cultivate genuine, reciprocal relationships with our supporters, with the aim of scaling donations over time. We strive to ensure that every supporter receives handwritten thank you letters and/or phone calls from our team. Supporters will also have access to special events where they can hear about our progress, next steps, and volunteer opportunities, and where they will have the chance to ask questions, provide input, and share ideas. These measures will generate community ownership, trust, and transparency, and will build willingness to increase donations and commit to long term support. Each supporter will be strategically cultivated overtime to increase their donation and to set up a reoccurring donation.

Partner Support

  • Grants: initial research has shown there are many existing grants that align closely with our mission in various ways, including those that uplift interfaith work, community building work, social well-being, accessibility of the arts and spiritual practices, and service, justice, and peace building efforts. We plan to leverage grant opportunities at every turn.

  • Sponsorships: We know that building a robust online community network will offer salient benefit to organizations and facilitators seeking to expand their reach. We plan to offer opportunities for sponsored posts on our platform and in our outreach materials. These posts will be clearly labeled, honoring our commitment to transparency. In line with our principle of reciprocity, sponsorships will be exchanges that provide benefit to sponsors via broadened outreach, as well as to our community by providing meaningful benefit to them and reinvestment of revenue. Within our first year, sponsors will be ensured future promotional slots once our MVO is operational, in exchange for providing start up funding. Sponsors will be carefully selected to ensure they align with our values and will provide meaningful benefit to our community.

  • Influencer Partnerships: There are many sacred sound leaders and facilitators with well-established followings. We plan to engage in meaningful relationship building with those who have such followings, and to create reciprocal partnerships in which we each promote each other to our followings. We will recruit these leaders to host fundraising campaigns on social media and fundraising events for our organization.

  • Advertisements: when posting our high quality social media content to platforms such as Youtube, we will leverage advertisements to generate sustaining revenue, while always honoring our commitment to transparency with our community about the need for such advertisements. We will also explore options for advertisements on our web platform and in any materials we produce in the future, such as a magazine. These advertisements will be carefully screened and selected to ensure they align with our organizational values, and to honor our commitment to reciprocity - advertisements will only be selected if we believe they will provide meaningful benefit to our community.

Future Revenue Streams

  • Donation prompts: Guided by our principles of generosity and interconnection, we call on those who benefit from our services to be generous in giving so that many others may continue to benefit as well. Each time a user of our platform interacts with select key features on our platform (i.e. creating a profile, creating a post, RSVPing to an event, making a purchase), they will receive a pop-up prompting them to make a donation to cover the processing fees of their action. This pop-up will be as simple, sleek, easy to navigate, and data-supported as possible, with every effort made to avoid user irritation. All donation prompts will be presented on a sliding scale with options from low to high, options to set up a reoccurring donation, and a link to options for non-monetary contributions. Once a user makes a donation, their card information will be saved in our system, streamlining future donations. This method is tried and true: on popular fundraising platforms such as Fundraise Up, roughly 90% of donors opt to cover transactional fees when prompted.

  • Tabling: we plan to host tables at events and conferences that are specific to sacred sound communities or adjacent. Tabling will serve multiple purposes: expanding outreach, recognition, and trust building, cultivating relationships with new donors, and selling products and merchandise to raise direct revenue.

Are you all in?

Join our family & help bring Sacred Sound Circle to life.

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