Quite a few years ago, Gabriel Weinberg from DuckDuckGo launched a "FOSS Tithe" website which encouraged companies to donate some percentage of their profits to the FOSS projects they rely on. I've tried to encourage my former employers to do this when possible, or to pay people to contribute features to FOSS tools we were using. With varying degrees of success.

Now that I'm self-employed again, I can simply donate some of my profits, and am more able to contribute patches.

Sponsoring contributors to build features for your org is probably the best way to go. Your org will get an invoice, you'll get a feature. The project will be happy, and the developer will be happy.