Affiliate Programme Terms

The EMPOBase Affiliate Programme rewards people who refer paying organisations to EMPOBase.

The programme covers EMPOBase subscriptions only — Starter, Team, and Pro. It does not cover the Enterprise plan, which is custom-quoted and handled case-by-case outside this programme, and it does not cover EMPO Academy courses, EMPO trainings, or consultancy services.

Eligible: independent M&E, humanitarian, and development consultants and trainers; NGO, CSO, and INGO staff, who can register for the credit track we're building for organisations whose conflict-of-interest rules prohibit personal cash payments; content creators, community leaders, and capacity-building organisations serving the humanitarian and development sector; and agencies and referral networks. Larger organisations may instead be onboarded as Strategic Partners under a separate MOU.

Not eligible: EMPOBase and EMPO employees and contractors, and their immediate family members; anyone under 18 or unable to enter a binding agreement; applicants in jurisdictions where we will not be able to legally send payouts, once payout rails launch; and anyone previously removed from the programme for a policy violation.

Applications are reviewed manually. EMPOBase may approve, reject, or remove any affiliate at its discretion, without being obliged to give a reason. One account is permitted per person or entity.

Each affiliate receives a unique referral code (for example, EMPO-AYE20). A referred organisation is credited to an affiliate when a valid, active, non-self-referral code is entered at checkout. Link-based attribution with cookie tracking is planned but not live yet — for now, attribution requires the code itself at checkout.

Entering a valid code grants the referred organisation a 10% discount on their first year of annual billing (monthly-cycle signups do not receive the discount), plus a 30-day free trial instead of EMPOBase's standard 14-day trial. Only one code can be applied per organisation, and it cannot be combined with other promotions.

A referral becomes commissionable when the organisation makes a payment while the code remains valid, active and non-self. There is currently no separate approval or fraud-review window — commission is recognised as soon as a confirmed payment is made, and reconciled in our records that month. Affiliates do not have self-serve access to these figures yet.

Offline referrals — where no code is used — are not currently tracked or credited.

If two affiliates' codes could both plausibly apply, the code actually entered at checkout takes priority. There is no cookie-based fallback yet.

Affiliates earn a flat 10% commission on the annual payments an organisation they referred actually makes, for 24 months from the date the referral is credited, while that organisation's referral code stays valid, active and non-self. Because commission is earned on annual billing only, that window covers two payments: the signup and the first renewal. Because the referral discount applies to the first year only, year one is 10% of the discounted payment and year two is 10% of the full annual price. There is one rate for everyone — no tiers, no bounties, no milestone bonuses.

Commission is calculated and shown to the EMPOBase operator team in a monthly report. Automated payouts to affiliates are not live yet — payout rails (via Stripe, Wise, or another provider), a payout schedule, and a minimum-balance threshold are all planned for a later release.

Credit-track rewards — EMPOBase account credit, or extra modules, storage, or donor seats — are also planned and not yet redeemable.

Commission only accrues on payments EMPOBase has actually collected. There are currently no automated refund/chargeback clawbacks, tiering, or grace periods, because there is no tiering.

Affiliates are expected to represent EMPOBase honestly and to work within their own organisation's rules. Specifically, affiliates should:

• Disclose the affiliate relationship whenever recommending EMPOBase.
• Use EMPOBase's official brand kit, screenshots, and one-pager.
• Represent EMPOBase's features, pricing, and plan limits accurately, as published on empobase.com.
• Follow their own organisation's conflict-of-interest and procurement rules — register interest in the credit track (in development) where cash referral fees aren't permitted.
• Share their code in workshops, courses, communities, or content where they have a genuine audience.

The following are prohibited under the programme:

• Self-referrals — your own tenant, your organisation's tenant, or any account you control.
• Bidding on "EMPOBase", "EMPO", or misspellings as paid search keywords, or running ads that point directly at empobase.com.
• Posting codes on coupon or deal-aggregator sites, or presenting a code as an "official EMPOBase discount" detached from your own recommendation.
• Impersonating EMPOBase staff or official channels, or implying a partnership beyond what your agreement grants.
• Spam, scraped contact lists, or unsolicited bulk outreach.
• Misrepresenting features, prices, guarantees, or compliance claims.
• Promoting EMPO Academy, EMPO trainings, or consultancy services under this programme — they are out of scope and carry no commission.

Affiliates do not currently have access to a dashboard or conversion data — reporting is internal to EMPOBase for now. An affiliate-facing summary of aggregate conversion data (clicks, trials, conversions, earnings) is planned.

Affiliates never receive a referred customer's personal, organisational, or beneficiary data, and must not attempt to identify or contact users of a referred organisation's EMPOBase account through programme data.

EMPOBase reviews referral activity manually for signs of fraud, including fake organisations, incentivised signups made without genuine intent to use EMPOBase, and code abuse. Automated fraud monitoring is planned. Suspected fraud results in commission being excluded from the operator report pending review; confirmed fraud results in code revocation and removal from the programme.

Either party may terminate the affiliate relationship at any time; revoking a code immediately stops new discounts and commission accrual on it. EMPOBase may modify this policy or the commission rate with 30 days' notice to active affiliates. The programme may be paused or discontinued at EMPOBase's discretion. Since payouts are not yet live, no payout obligations exist under this draft; once payout rails launch, this clause will be updated to describe them.

This policy forms an agreement between the affiliate and EMPOBase LLC (formation pending — to be replaced with EMPOBase's final registered entity name once incorporated).

Affiliates are independent parties. Nothing in this policy creates an employment, agency, or exclusive-partnership relationship.

Governing law: the jurisdiction of EMPOBase LLC's registration [to be completed after incorporation].

EMPOBase liability under this programme is limited to commissions earned and approved but not yet paid.