Skip to content

Cookiewolf Co-operative handbook (Work in progress - RW TEST)

About Cookiewolf

Cookiewolf was formalised as a co-operative in February 2025 to realise a shared goal between us.

We’re a collective of developers, designers, researchers and other folk who understand digital tools, small organisation goals, sustainability and creative thinking. Our solutions focus on accessibility and inclusivity as well as delivering on a limited budget.

Our values

Cookiewolf's aim is to collaborate with like-minded people working with organisations that create positive change in the world while reflecting these values ourself.

What we do

We work with organisations and people to discover, design and build the digital tools they need.

Working together

Roles

We operate as flat a hierarchy. We are project managers, creatives, programmers, artists and designers.

Directors

Our directors are responsible for the legalities of running the buiness. They are re-elected from members once a year. They have the same power and shareholding as members who are not directors.

Members

Our members set the strategic direction and culture of Cookiewolf. They bring in business together and share equally in the profits. They attend regular check-ins but have no minimum commitment of work hours. They take care of internal admin and client work.

Collaborators

Our collaborators have no power over our strategic decisions nor our culture, but we do invite their input. They work with us on specific projects for set periods of time.

Making decisions

We use consent rather than consensus for making decisions.

Directors

Directors provide a purely administrative function. No decisions which impact the membership are taken by directors without consultation of the members.

Members

Members are responsible for making the decisions that shape the co-operative. These are things like: long term strategic changes, big investments, inviting new collaborators, financial planning, brand control and profit distributions.

Collaborators

Collaborators invited to participate in key meetings and contribute to the decision making conversations.

Rates, pay & profit sharing

Rates

We bill our clients between £450 and £650 for each 6 hour day that we work. The rate depends on their means and our level of involvment in managing the project & infrastructure.

Pay

We have 3 rates of pay: members, collaborators and trainees.

Our pay is intended as fair compensation for professional services. We treat everyone as equal regardless of they type of contribution they make. We set our base rate to balance the sustainability of our business while prioritising the welfare of our workers.

Members are paid a base rate that aims to provide a minimum take home of £180 per day.

Collaborators are paid a flat rate of £200 per day if they are helping with Cookiewolf admin and £250 per day if they are working on a billable project.

Trainees are paid a minimum of £16 per hour.

Profit sharing & benefits

All member and trainee employees get 6 weeks of prorata holiday pay.

All member and trainee employees are entitled to equipment, training and travel bursaries according to need.

Member pay is topped up quarterly on a prorata basis. Surplus is distributed equally for everyone working in that quarter, regardless of which projects or tasks they have worked on. The amount we share out is 80% of profit for that quarter. The remaing 20% is put towards admin, hardship & contingency funds.

Trainees who are participating as probationary members, also receive some profit share.

Working with others

Cookiewolf works with a variety of clients mainly from the charity, grassroots and arts sectors.

We want to collaborate with our clients to create meaningful impact. As a co-op we will decide the criteria that is important to us when selecting projects and clients.

Collaboration and training is at the core of what we deliver. We work with you to feel confident about maintaining the tools we build together.

Project structure

We work together iteratively, constantly assessing the project's priorities with clients involvement throughout. We manage projects in a way that allows us to accommodate the unexpected, in phases of discovery, definition, design, build, test.

  • Long-term consultancy or development of a platform
  • One-off project work
  • On-going support and maintenance

Tools we use

Where possible, we choose to support open source & ethical web services. Our long term aim is to eliminate all others from our stack. Below are some of tools we currenly use.

To build

  • CMS: Wordpress, Drupal, DeCap
  • API: No code (e.g. Zapier), Python FastAPI, Laravel
  • Web applications: Elm, React
  • Web portfolios: Carrd, Squarespace
  • E-commerce: shopify, WooCommerce
  • Database: Airtable
  • Documentation: MkDocs

To host

  • Domain management: Gandi, Cloudflare
  • Servers: Kinsta, Krystal, Cloudron, Siteground
  • Static hosts: GitHub pages, Netlify

To manage

  • GitHub projects
  • Trello
  • Proton
  • Whereby