Open Fifth’s 2025 charitable giving and social value round-up
Last updated on: 17th December 2025| 17th December 2025 | Open Fifth
Charitable donations
Here at Open Fifth we have a strong commitment to giving back, embodying our core values, and delivering social good. One of the ways we do this is through our pledge to donate a minimum of 5% of company profits each year to charitable causes.
This year’s recipients for direct donations were selected based on recommendations from the Open Fifth team. We donated £4,500 to five charities working across the UK on critical social and environmental concerns:
- Bookmark Reading Charity (£1,000): Dedicated to helping children improve their literacy skills through reading support and book provision.
- Equal Arts (£1,000): Focusing on supporting people living with dementia through creativity and the arts, including creating dementia-friendly books.
- Pollinating London Together (£500): Engaging communities and applying scientific methods to create pollinator habitats and corridors.
- Re-engage (£1,000): Working to reduce loneliness and isolation among individuals aged 75 and over.
- Settle (£1,000): Providing coaching and crucial support to young people transitioning out of the care system.
By making these donations during the Big Give’s Christmas Challenge week, the donations are doubled through matched funding.
Staff giving and match funding
This year we also introduced a new initiative for UK-based staff to efficiently and easily donate to their chosen charities through Payroll Giving. Through this voluntary scheme, the team can support the organisations they care about each month with essential, reliable funding. To extend the impact of these donations and further support the causes the team cares about, Open Fifth matches each monthly donation up to £10 per person. We are proud to see the uptake from the team for this initiative:
Staff donations, combined with our company match, reached £1,486.
Open Fifth contributed £448 through our match funding commitment.
These donations have supported a great variety of causes, from dementia support and research charity Alzheimer’s Society, which provides support and research for dementia, to The Bunnyjackpot Foundation, a rabbit rescue.
Giving time and delivering social value
Beyond direct donations, Open Fifth has also undertaken pro bono work for charitable organisations, sponsored software development such as the Homosaurus plugin for Koha, and undertaken a digital inclusion workshop on behalf of a library customer.
We commit time at no cost within the open source communities behind Koha LMS and Aspen Discovery for development, quality assurance, maintenance, documentation, mentoring, governance, and conference planning. By taking leading roles within these communities, we strengthen the software and not only do our own library customers benefit, but so do all libraries using the open source software globally.
Public procurement policies are increasingly requiring social value commitments and delivery as part of their contractual requirements. This ensures that public spending maximises the additional social, environmental and economic benefits to people and communities beyond just the goods or services procured. At Open Fifth, we are proud to have a history of charitable giving and delivering social value since before the introduction of these policies and in excess of their requirements.
Looking ahead to 2026, we will continue to find ways we can give more back, further our positive social impact, and support the causes important to our team.
— The Open Fifth team
