A volunteer movement incorporated, and set itself up so a board could inherit it.

Death Collaborative grew out of Houston’s Death Cafes, open gatherings held since 2012 where people talk plainly about death and dying. They brought us in before they incorporated.

Overview

A Preliminary Audit, a donation platform feasibility study, Google Workspace infrastructure with hands-on enablement, an identity and a site. Their board holds administrative ownership. They created every account themselves, with us in the room. They have run it successfully without us since.

The read

Access sat in personal accounts, scattered across whoever set each thing up, with no second holder and no inventory. A board with rotating seats has to be able to account for what it controls.

Mail was going to junk. The team assumed the word death was tripping filters, which is a reasonable guess and the wrong one. Their sending domain had never been authenticated, so no provider could confirm the mail was really from them. That worked for years, until the major providers tightened their requirements in 2024 and 2025. Nothing tells you when you’ve tripped it.

The plan

Administrative seats came first, for brand operations and technical infrastructure.

We screened 36 donation platforms and tools, scored a shortlist of five on cost at scale, data portability and what happens to a donor list when a vendor changes terms, then recommended one. The free ones cost the most: a percentage of every gift, and a donor list you cannot take with you.

The study recommends separating the pieces: the site, the payment processor and the donor records, each held on its own terms and replaceable without touching the others. The move is theirs to make, on their timeline.

What the site needed to say was mapped before anything was drawn: what each page was for, who it was for and what a visitor had to be able to do.

The implementation

A Workspace environment configured for board turnover: folder architecture, organizational structure, group-based access, email authentication, multi-factor and a password manager the board administers.

An identity drawn from symbolism older than the modern funeral industry. The mark is hand drawn on a three-by-three grid, and its trunks spell death. Its color runs from canopy green down to root blue. Every word is set in typefaces by Vernon Adams.

Wireframes reviewed section by section, so the content was settled before the design carried it. A custom WebGL landing page.

Hands-on workshops with the full board: a walkthrough of their new Workspace, a scavenger hunt to find their way around it and password manager setup, all done together in the room. Then a session on the identity and where it can flex.

What they hold

The identity system and its guidelines, with source files. The feasibility study, theirs to re-run when the donation market shifts. Credentials created by their own people, in a password manager the board controls. Documentation the board can operate on its own. A blueprint for a headless CMS backend, with single sign-on provisioned early, so the next phase does not require a rebuild.

Their work asks people to sit with the hardest conversation there is. A template would have been an insult.