‘Changing the world’ is probably not the first phrase people associate with support and maintenance contracts.
Usually, it’s more along the lines of, the cookie banner has stopped working, the homepage looks weird in Safari, or can somebody explain why the server fell over last night?
Support work is not usually seen as the glamorous side of digital. Nobody’s posting dramatic launch videos about accessibility fixes or successful dependency updates. Nobody has ever fist-pumped after a plugin update went smoothly (well, apart from maybe Dan).
But here’s the thing. A lot of the work that helps organisations change the world and become more resilient, accessible and sustainable happens after launch, not before it.
And during Co-op Fortnight, that feels worth talking about.
Because while this blog starts with support retainers, it’s really about something bigger: what it means to run a digital agency as a worker co-op, and why we think that leads to better outcomes for the organisations we work with and how we’re changing the world one server migration at a time.
At Agile Collective, we work with councils, charities, NGOs and membership organisations to build and improve digital services. Sometimes that means a large website rebuild. Sometimes it means helping a content team untangle years of publishing chaos. Sometimes it means accessibility audits, discovery workshops, performance reviews or user research.
Co-operation changes how we work
Being a worker co-op changes the way you approach digital projects.
There are no external shareholders at Agile Collective. The people doing the work are the people making decisions about the business. That shifts the focus away from short-term growth and towards long-term relationships, sustainability and useful work.
It means we can be honest when a client doesn’t need a rebuild.
It means we can prioritise maintainability instead of creating unnecessary dependencies.
And it means we spend a lot of time thinking about what happens after launch, because for most organisations, that’s when the real work begins.
That mindset shapes all kinds of projects.
Our work with War on Want focused on making the organisation’s website more effective as a campaigning and communications tool. That involved discovery work, design thinking, content structure and careful technical improvements. We didn't try to sell a rebuild, saving them a few thousand pounds that they can spend on changing the world.
Many of the organisations we work with are dealing with shrinking budgets, growing demand and increasingly complicated digital challenges. Councils are under pressure. Charities are stretched. Internal teams are expected to do more with less.
Against that backdrop, cooperative ways of working start to feel less like a nice idea and more like practical infrastructure.
Open source and the co-op ecosystem
A big part of our work is built around Drupal. Partly because it works well for complex public sector and nonprofit organisations, and partly because we believe organisations should have more control over the systems they rely on in a world where tech sovereignty is increasingly important.
Open source creates a different relationship between agencies and clients. Organisations own their platforms. Improvements can be shared. Knowledge spreads instead of being locked away behind contracts and proprietary systems.
We see it clearly in projects like LocalGov Drupal, where councils collaborate on shared infrastructure, patterns, and improvements rather than repeatedly solving the same problems in isolation.
We’re also part of CoTech, a network of worker-owned tech co-ops that collaborate, share knowledge and support each other. Through CoTech, we regularly work with organisations that believe technology should be more open, ethical and accountable.
Which is refreshingly different from the traditional agency approach of treating everybody else like direct competition at all times.
We’re also members of workers.coop, which supports and advocates for worker co-ops across the UK and contributes to Solid Fund, which provides financial help to worker co-ops.
That wider movement matters because it proves businesses can operate differently. You can build companies where workers have ownership, decisions are shared and success is measured by more than growth graphs in investor slide decks. You can also spend part of your afternoon discussing accessibility audits before joining a meeting about economic democracy.
The Good Causes fund
Co-op Fortnight is also a good time to talk about what happens to the value created by our work.
At Agile Collective, part of that goes into our Good Causes Fund. Each year we set aside a percentage of any profits to support social, environmental and community projects. Sometimes that support is financial. Sometimes it’s technical expertise or strategic help. The important thing is that the value generated by our work doesn’t disappear upwards to shareholders. It gets recycled back into communities and organisations trying to make things better.
That feels particularly important right now.
A recent recipient was Yalla, a tech co-operative based in Gaza and the UK.
The military campaign and humanitarian crisis in Gaza left half the Yalla co-op team unable to work, while the cost of living surged and basic supplies became unaffordable. Yalla’s Joe Friel said: “The Good Causes donation came at one of the hardest points for our co-operative. The funding went directly toward the monthly financial support we continued to pay our members in Gaza throughout this period.
“It meant we could keep standing by our colleagues when they needed it most, rather than letting circumstances beyond their control cut them off. That continuity of support mattered enormously, and we’re genuinely grateful for this contribution that helped us hold the team together.”
Slow, practical change is still change
The tech sector loves dramatic language.
Everything is disruptive, transformative or revolutionary. Usually, before the demo environment has even been tested properly. But most meaningful change is slower and more collaborative than that.
It’s councils sharing improvements through LocalGov Drupal.
It’s charities becoming less dependent on expensive proprietary tools.
It’s organisations building digital services that people can actually use and maintain long-term.
It’s co-ops supporting other co-ops through networks like CoTech and workers.coop.
And yes, occasionally it’s somebody quietly fixing the cookie banner before it becomes a legal incident.
Which, in its own small way, might also help change the world.
