Share sensitive documents with the people you choose, and stay in control of them.

What Selo is

Selo takes its name from the Portuguese word for a wax seal: the mark on a letter that shows it reached the right hands and was not opened on the way. It is a tool for sharing sensitive documents with people outside your organisation.

When an NGO applies for a large grant or goes through a donor's checks, it hands over audited accounts, board papers, staff details and sometimes information about the communities it works with. The tools built for that job were made for banks and law firms selling companies, and they are priced that way. The free alternatives, shared drives and file links, put those documents on someone else's servers in a country you did not choose, behind a link that anyone can forward. Impact organisations have been left to pick between the two.

What it does

Each person you share with gets their own access code. Documents sit in three tiers: open, gated, and agreement-gated for the most sensitive material, which is released only once the recipient has accepted your terms. Every page a recipient opens carries a watermark with their identity, so if a copy turns up where it should not, you know whose it was. You can see who opened which document and when. If a code is passed on or a relationship ends, you cancel it and the access stops at once. There are no public links: nothing in Selo can be opened by someone who simply has a web address.

Who it's for

NGOs, social enterprises, impact businesses and the consultancies that work with them. Selo is for the moments when a known group of people outside your organisation needs to see documents you would never put on a shared drive: a donor doing its checks before a large grant, a lender or investor looking at a major project, a government or large agency working through a partnership agreement, or a funder you are approaching for the first time.

How it's held

You can run Selo on your own servers, in the country you choose, so the documents stay under your organisation's control and under laws you already answer to. Kora and Suara are built the same way. OpenImpact Studio built Selo and makes it available to other organisations doing impact work.

Get in touch

If you have a grant application, a donor's review or a partnership agreement coming up and want to see whether Selo fits, write to hello@openimpact.studio.