The Product that Generosity could be (4/7) — Burning Platform

A Speculative Product Roadmap for Generosity — If not us, then who? If not now, then when?

Phil Pawlett Jackson
20 min readSep 11, 2019

I would hugely enjoy to develop these ideas further. I’d love to be stretched in a Product/UX team, and ultimately I hope to facilitate far-reaching social change through super-charged generosity. Friends in fintech, faith, philanthropy or other, please do be in touch if we could work together.

I am otherwise looking to nurture a group of beta-testers, anyone who’d like to experiment in generosity-games, or for updates generally, leave your details here and I’ll be in touch.

The pitch essay below considers the publicly available figures about Stewardship’s financial position and ambition, and is then structured as questions on three themes:

  1. What sociopolitical futures of giving will displace Stewardship?
  2. What technological futures of giving will disrupt Stewardship?
  3. What happens in a future without Stewardship or equivalent?

Those three questions are a view on existing passive business-as-usual trajectories, I’ve also considered three active disruptions, imaginary but plausible startups, calculated to undermine Stewardship’s business model. Originally in this essay, but for clarity I’ve moved them to stand alone in three separate pieces:

4a. GiftAid API — RegTech for Virtual Charity Formation
4b.
Charitable Challenger Charity Bank
4c. Soft-branded ChurchTech Franchise
[~will link soon]

2018 saw us receive £78.9m from more than 33,500 active Stewardship Giving Accounts (2017: £69.7m from 32,900 active accounts). This includes give.net, our online fundraising platform, which has over 7,800 accounts, for both one-off and regular donations (2017: 6,200). (2018 Annual Report)

Recent growth in numbers on Stewardship appears good.

Our ambition now is to increase the flow of funds to churches and Christian charities from £72 million to £250 million by 2025 and to extend the joy of generosity to new generations. Stewardship JD for Head of Growth ~ Mar 2019

Internal ambitions for growth are ambitious.

Christian charity Stewardship aims to more than triple the amount it pays out in grants to £220m by the end of 2025. Civil Society June 2019

Public ambitions for growth are ambitious.

How have Stewardship arrived at £220,000,000?

Projecting the growth of growth-as-usual gives the curve below (existing figures are from Charity Commission financial submission to 2018, future figures are generated from a differential assumption as shown in table) it is not implausible to consider the possibility of the year-on-year rate of change changing up by the same annual average ~ I have matched their figure by extrapolating from only five data points ~ presumably Stewardship have a more comprehensively justified model.

I would be really interested to understand where the last three years of growth has come from? Which givers are giving what, why and how? Stewardship excellently serves a particular group who are currently giving in a certain pattern, and have been doing so increasingly for four consecutive years. The extrapolated curve assumes the method of growth, the increasing numbers of givers and their respective amounts of giving per person can be sustainably increased over against social trends that might erode church giving in the next seven years.

The charity has already grown by more than 50 per cent in the last 10 years alone, with its income rising from £50m to £82.5m in that time. Civil Society June 2019

Seen in the light of a ten year norm, the same extrapolated curve from above appears as a more significant inflection point. Interpolating backwards the referenced 50% growth from £50m in 2008 looks like this:

The ambition is thus more defiantly a shift from linear growth to something more exponential. This is exciting. A gear shift. Some sort of change in programming to a mode of growth that grows its growing mechanism cumulatively. I’d love to be a part of that.

From numbers © Peter Brierly at BRIN

The growth in Stewardship’s revenue is particularly notable as it has been achieved over against the comprehensively negative trajectory of church numbers. Without more information about givers, the portrait, crudely, is of a sifted minority finding the resource to be increasingly generous, at a rate that outpaces numerical decline.

A devil’s advocacy hypothesis will maintain that these population trends which tend towards zero must ultimately war terminally against growth of Stewardship. My most cynical speculation wonders that growth since 2008 . reflects the influx of equity released to a pensionable and unmortgaged evangelical middle of late Boomers which will taper as they are replaced by Gen X in that life stage ~ but perhaps not before 2025 as those born in 1960 will only retire that year.

This speculation is interested to examine the risks and threats to the currently surprisingly successful business model — risks which are not visited in the Annual Report or website. Is the current Stewardship product resilient to worst-case social trends, and, more interestingly, how could Stewardship 2.0 plausibly assist in reversing wider patterns and trajectories? In this way, the questions below, nakedly, are angled to interrogate a contrasting proposal that if Stewardship diversified and clarified who it served and enlarged or sharpened what it offered them, it could anticipate, navigate, compensate-for and even reverse the trajectory of society’s potential futures.

1. Questions about the Future of Giving

What imminent social/economic new norms will render Stewardship’s business model nonviable? Below are futures that seem likely, and which would bear on the giving which Stewardship relies on, and which Stewardship hopes to influence.

Fewer Christians?

The accelerated marginalisation of Christianity, numerical decline and ageing church population? A future systematic persecution of Christians individually and the church institutionally ~ leading to fewer Christians, and even fewer publicly financially active Christians? (Source Source)

Fewer Christians giving?

Fewer Christians willing to give, fewer Christians able to give. Impoverishment of Christians ~ if Christianity’s previous core was middle England’s middle-aged middle-class — a group that will see it’s economic power and white collar job security diminish and so it’s volume of giving? Fewer of Stewardship’s Christians giving because of a shift in the identity, wealth and posture of Evangelicalism.

Fewer Christians giving as-Christians?

Informalisation of Christianity. Where Christianity is informalised theologically to a moralistic therapeutic deism, then giving is located less productively and less sustainably within a framework of guilt rather than abundance. Where Christianity is informalised ecclesiologically to an ernest but uncoordinated structure-averse low Emergent conversation ~ a flexible but flimsy, and financially unsubstantial vehicle to give to or give through. Where Christianity is informalised civically, the relationship between personal faith and corporate action is obscured, leading to ambivalence about Christianity’s financial relevance, charitable aims or societal role ~ and so a collective, nationally responsible institutional voice is not sponsored. Where Christianity is informalised incarnationally, that is, where ‘social action’ has been appended to a body-optional theology’s idea of ‘Christianity proper’ the resulting low standards of professionalism and efficiency in those charitable forays self-fulfil as lower impact, imprudent causes for a conscientious giver to give to.

Fewer Christians giving as-church-members?

Privatised Christian faith deprecating formal membership in a reaction against the church’s previous self-understanding as a strongly-membership-based organisation, its move towards a late modern opt-in Sunday-goods-and-services organisation, and then to a post-modern reactionary skepticism ~ skeptical both of the risks of coercive-membership, and skeptical of inauthentic low value of Sunday-tokenism and the inauthentic high-cost of Sunday-spectacle. Related widespread ambivalence towards all membership structures and membership organisations leading to fewer Christians locating a personal economic identity/security in the interdependence of church community ~ fewer Christians (even self-interestedly) subsidising church infrastructure, funding church workers and subsidising the central and peripheral costs of holistic community? Ambivalence about Church-as-body then undermining believers’ conviction in the Church-as-unique and Church-as-urgent so much so that those believers aren’t then convicted to financially sacrificially participate in the outward focus of extending/multiplying the Church-as-distinct ~ thus, even those Christians who are able and inclined to give won’t prioritise the peculiar Church-as-Church causes like Church-as-civic-hub or Church-as-missionary-sending-agency etc? When the private expression of individualistic faith is elevated as the preeminent measure of authenticity, it is correspondingly harder to position the church’s corporate costs as a legitimate priority to maximise, rather than an unfortunate overhead to engineer out.

Fewer culturally-traditional, English-language Christian givers?

Proportionally and numerically fewer Christians who are conventionally familiar with existing generosity optimisation infrastructures? If and where there are positive statistics about UK church growth, to what extent is this growth located in marginal, urban, ethnic, transitory, temporary, migratory, expat and cash-poor communities? To what extent is non-traditional British Christianity’s generosity more likely to be expressed from a position of statistical poverty, more likely to be cash-based, more likely to be expressed through eg. Sou-Sou loan clubs, or Western Union, and less likely to be appearing on the radar of traditional fundraisers and less likely to be utilising such as Stewardship’s tax-optimisation, and much less likely to served by such resources as GenerousJourney? I speculate that the 80:20 emphases of fundraising dogma (eg) has historically ignored the poorer majority 80% because of marginal acquisition costs, and so a whole giving industry accordingly underserves an already underbanked and financially excluded group of would-be-givers. What generosity tools are tailored to those communities, languages, currencies and cultural practices of the future emerging British church? Given the ambition for growth, and given the paradigm shift in tech’s possibility, related to marginal costs and the changing makeup of the church demography, there is an opportunity to proactively diversify the shape of product precisely to serve new niche user needs and preferences for alternative giving, saving and transferring structures? To that end, perhaps strategically modifying the demographics represented in the leadership, board and advisors at Stewardship?

Diminished church economic reserves?

Explicit or implicit economic sanctions; rising and unsubsidised maintenance costs for national historic buildings; rising legal costs of defending discrimination claims against Christian positions on eg. end-of-life/marriage/abortion ethics debates, church schools, and the wide cost of administrating a church schism.

People less willing to give to charity?

Skepticism about charity sector, especially big charity? Oxfam moral scandals (Haiti), along with bang-for-buck scepticism about executive pay in charity sector (£150k+ and rising)? And perhaps from a US perspective there is a groundswell of skepticism about big-church finance and salaries?

People giving inconsistently, less usefully and less efficiently?

This because of a move away from giving by formal, repeat-payment regular ways, towards more emotional sporadic modes? A generational shift away from conscious financial planning towards reactive financial surviving and the debt-by-default of new injuriously student-loan-laden graduates.
~ The hypermobility of a commitment-averse, low-attention-span, RSVP-maybe, freelance, digital-nomadic, global generation of givers?
~ The financial precarity of zero-hour, gig-economy, left-behind generation of givers?
For both, despite high levels of empathy in Gen Z: lower ROI on giving campaigns, lower retention of givers, higher cost of acquisition of givers? Is this an opportunity to form a local+global giving portal to serve/educate/empower these modes of being/giving~ a portal that is elastic to retain and to stabilise the hypermobile as well as to buttress and enfranchise the precariat; a portal that dignifies commitment generally; a portal that facilitates possible generosities in sympathy (not in competition) with a student-debt portfolio?

People giving to an infinite network not local circles of need?

The multiplied micro-generosities which ensue from the limitless targetted reach of every possible cause is, in itself, not a bad thing, but it is vulnerable to the long tail problem, the Pareto principle, the winner-takes-all where a disproportionate amount of philanthropy is channeled to high-profile giants who can game the algorithm of redistribution? Diminishing the attractiveness or viability of intermediate and relationally scaled private platforms, like Stewardship?

People giving fewer large amounts?

The diminishing future of legacies from an ageing population? Cumulatively more wealth spent recreationally during the course of longer retirements? More wealth and capital assets liquidated to cover cost of elderly care? Capital assets increasingly prohibitively taxed? More capital assets retained and gymnastically transferred to enable children any chance at the housing ladder?

Institutions giving less, or giving to fewer?

Institutions giving conditionally? Rising expectations of impact investing and the prohibitive burden of metric measuring for smaller organisations?

Government giving less?

Austerity cuts now, uncertainty and volatility of the next few Brexit years, and the overdue post 2008 second recession. Government giving less, especially to religious causes through pro-secularisation and anti-extremism sentiment in all aspects of government?

Government Gift-Aiding less?

Regulation making it prohibitively less easy to Gift-Aid through conditions for qualification especially for religious entities. Is there specifically a liability for Stewardship in centralising the accreditation of individual religious workers as Gift Aid recipients ~ one rogue missionary scandal to jeopardise the validation process of thousands of recipients? Is this an opportunity to de-couple the charitable consultancy function of Stewardship from its giving rails ~ minimally, to componentise these facilities?

Government regulating to introduce higher friction in Fintech.

The collateral of move-fast-break-things Fintech disruption sparking an arms-race to regulate new banks and new effective-banks ~ the KYC/AML restrictions etc. So if/where Stewardship holds funds in ‘wallets’ and performs proto-laundering of provenance for individuals working in complicated countries — poses a risk to all by centralisation. While the government wants to incentivise innovation, following the inevitable and spectacular collapse of one of the challenger banks, public opinion will favour moves to mitigate the risk of rogue bad actors and will skew regulation to favour those large partnerships with the critical mass to automate compliance.

Churches monopolising How Christians give?

Christians increasingly only giving inside private networks on sophisticated bespoke centralised integrated ChurchTech platforms? Churches creating closed ecosystems for congregation funds management ~ positioning themselves as the distributor of all funds for all previously independent Christian functions.

Churches monopolising What Christians give to?

Churches prioritising giving to church-growth-by-planting only. Local-church-is-the-hope-for-the-world weaponised by aggressive church-planting movements subtly under-resourcing non-church-planting functions of the church ~ typically those social, holistic and compassionate financial demands often formerly driven by para-church entities, formerly run on such-as Stewardship’s independent rails.

Churches monopolising Who Christians give to?

Christians giving within sub-denominational cliques in anticipation of Anglican schism? Christians giving less to historical institutional networks as a reflection of a wider culture of distrust? Polarisation of churches theologically leading to the formation of more tribal combative networks with less overlap, empire building with less cooperation, storehouse-giving with less of a need for such as Stewardship to resource mechanisms for alternative generosity.

2. The Future of Giving Platforms

What market developments will render Stewardship’s product redundant or uncompetitive? The competitive landscape of giving platform functionality will determine the appeal of Stewardship to new adopters, and increasingly will present a more attractive platform for existing users.

  • Already. Stewardship already faces competition from the strength of alternative charitable funding platforms (eg JustGiving) better tailored rewards for givers (eg. Kickstarter), better comms facility for beneficiaries (eg Patreon) and more of a functional feedback on impact (eg. Kiva).
  • In development. And, all incumbent giving platforms face competition from easy in-app challenger bank giving-management (eg Revolut ~ see para2.1 in #3/7) offering direct giving methods along with their existing peer-to-peer micropayments services. And from easy in-app giving from social media platforms (eg. FacebookFundraiser and Instagram’s equivalent)
  • Soon. Such disruptors, as Revolut, building giving in-house, face imminent competition from the OpenBanking’s aggregators and the platformification of all banking functions to dashboards of universalisable micro-services ~ including, in it’s most radical form, the totally decentralised value transfers made possible by Web 3.0, cryptocurrency, self-sovereign IDs, and distributed ledgers.

Stewardship’s value proposition is sophisticated, in its combination of financial function and relational trust ~ this will not be disrupted by a giving platform with merely a slicker UI. However, Stewardship will be displaced when (not if) the current rapid innovation of giving platforms produces a service with these four qualities:

2.1 Better rates in their giving facility.

There will emerge giving products with no-to-low commission subsidised by a platform with a CSR ambitions (eg Amazon Smile), or where the running costs are distinguished as a separate optional charitable donation not a commission (eg. Kiva, and MomentumGiving). There will emerge giving/transfer products with inherently low/flat transaction cost (eg. gas on ethereum) or no transaction cost (eg. Monzo-to-Monzo transfer, (see also the scramble by such as TransferWise to develop future proof business models as the commission for international payments that they can justify drops below 1%)) ~ as pure digital money incurs no cost to the provider and so justifies no transaction price to the consumer (who already expects everything for free) ~ sending money will become like sending emails. There should emerge facilities with multiple payment-type functions, quicker payment, tokenised giving and in-kind donations better tailored to the ways people want to be generous — all at no cost.

2.2 Better recipient benefits.

The crowd-supported individual, once the domain of peculiar missionaries, is now widespread as a secular business model and the marketplace has generated very sophisticated self-support tools for CRM and finances etc (eg. Patreon’s patron management, comms, rewards etc, and ditto Kickstarter’s tool kit, templates, tutorials..) As such, there are very high expectations for what super-powers my self-funding tool gives to me as a receiver to help me stay intimately, emotionally, meaningfully, connected with my supporters. Competition to dominate this business provision will only continue to drive cheaper registration, broader total tool package, better integrations with social/admin/analytics for better communications, clearer dashboard for better decision making, better cross platform/app support ~ widgets for always on strategic availability.

2.3 Better trust.

Stronger brand, better credibility, better leverage for giving. Stewardship currently appears to sustain an extremely high level of trust from an, albeit quite narrow, client base.

There’s explicit/ethical trust (eg. One shops with patagonia or Whole Foods Market or Triodos Bank Nederland because of an active belief that they’re transparently doing active good with my money); implicit/functional trust (eg. I may be suspicious of Amazon, but functionally all my data is entrusted to them to do no evil with it); and a peculiar/tribal trust ~ a Christian predilection to give through Christian rails (eg. users of Stewardship self-report that this is a priority).

As a missionary (church, or charity etc), at present, supporters are likely to recognise Stewardship and be inclined to trust Stewardship to do nothing unChristian with the money and as such that they will also perform a service in a transparent and efficient way. But it seems inevitable and right that Christian tribal loyalty will eventually be out-weighed by:

  • trust in a better functional proposition ~ in positive rates of commission;
  • trust in a better ethical proposition ~ in a financial organisation maximising its positive use of funds.

(That is, in all except the most niche sensitive areas of peculiar Christian confidentiality~ funding projects so politically sensitive they risk endangering the lives of those involved, or they risk being de-platformed from their fundraising)

  • At some point the ready implicit functional trust of a universal brand (eg. Facebook for broad trust, or Marcus for deep/elite/niche trust) will be sufficient to persuade a potential missionary to bank there and fundraise there — for legitimacy, network effect and ease. That is, at some point it will be more Christian for a missionary (church, or charity etc) to fundraise through Facebook, because of their reach, economy of scale and subsidies more money will flow more efficiently to Kingdom causes
  • At some point a trusted brand that already trades in ethical good will lend their brand of blessing to a financial powerhouse to create a good good financial product. So partnership of Monzo+Charities Aid Foundation or Stripe+UN Development Programme would be a win-win to certify trust and good-will in peer-to-peer philanthropic transactions. That is, at that point it would be more Christian for a missionary (church, or charity etc) to hold funds with Monzo+CAF, or to run support raise payments through Stripe+UN, because much more direct social good (and transparently less harm) is done for/to the disadvantaged with your money meanwhile.

2.4 Better Christian/Charitable network

Wider global church reach and ease of access to a total social platform, strategic promotion and influence within relevant sympathetic Christian circles, along with facility for cooperation on complex tasks towards shared goals.

The expansion of sprawling mass of misc ChurchTech (egs ChurchSuite, ChurchCommunityBuilder, Subsplash, Pushpay Tech..) expanding in numerical adoption and digitally native congregation familiarity, expanding in depth of integration and extent of the software’s ability to provide for elaborate and very niche coverage to such as payroll for an extended dispersion of sent-individuals, micro-project financing and appropriate comms for that. Such in-house functionality would be attractive to a prospective missionary ~ running finances through a church network’s social platform would give access to direct communication to a congregation’s consumer interface ~ to speak with elevated legitimacy/authority to would-be-donors as a part-of-church in the app experience. A missionary running their giving support in-church would also come with the benefits of: charitable admin prepaid and the economies of scale and efficiency that a mega-church/franchise-network is able to offer, and the no-commission/transaction-fees that a sympathetic church would be able to waive/absorb.

Further, where multiple unrelated churches are using the same white-label product/integration, it would be easy to have a missionary jointly sent (or as is relatively common, to have shared youth worker co-supported; or a joint social venture co-funded etc) from multiple churches/congregations efficiently and accountably.

3. What does the big picture look like if Stewardship or an equivalent generosity app fails?

My initial interaction with Stewardship pitching in February sought to present that they already had all the potential to be the dashboard for a culture-changing network-effect publicly-trackable wealth-redistribution catalyst — relevant to exactly this moment when tech otherwise is exacerbating division and polarising wealth..

Stewardship because they bridge old and new, solve for peer-to-peer, and hold generosity as the basic primitive.

Urgent because the juggernaut of big tech is speeding towards private money but the window for creating viable transparent alternatives is still open.

Disruption as the new normal.

Consider that digital disruption is happening, exponentially, in speed and scope. Tech is making all things Uber — for better or worse, platform capitalism is the new normal. We all gain from the connections tech makes possible, but as such, we are all complicit in the frictionless concentration of wealth and power in the hands of the very very few which it entails.

I Trust Tech.

This shift in our habits towards tech is married to a shift in trust towards tech
~ I trust tech with my detailed identity — my comprehensive self-knowledge.
I trust google to keep my email, ID, passwords.. secure etc.
~ I trust tech for my worldview lens — my comprehensive world-knowledge.
I trust my newsfeed to show news accurately and appropriately.
As such, I engage Google and Amazon with a level of greater familiarity, intimacy, vulnerability, than I ever have the state, and this because of the superpower and convenience these platforms offer me.

My Digital Superpowers.

The superpower offered by Google etc is the power to create a perceived world in my own image, the power to render a buffered self, power to amplify my cause and to look out for my own, power to placate my fears, dilute my responsibilities, distance my vulnerability, affirm my prejudices. Social media subtly segregates the effective domain of my social contract ~ self-selecting an augmented sense of the world’s less diverse otherness and forcibly establishes my filtered feed as the fullness of the world beyond myself. My superpowers game a web of mutually exploited self interest — access to advertise to individuals by exact profile, and advertised to in return ~ a comprehensive transactionalisation of relationships between comprehensively individualised nodes on a private network.

The Digital Singularity.

The cumulative coordinated effect on the world, of this central point of trust is a singularity bigger than the nation state. This single actor is one with whom I have a more significant relationship that I do with the state. This singularity is quite unlike any corporation of prior industrial revolutions.

Cybernetic Me vs British Me.

The cumulative coordinated effect on me, of a thousand tiny shifts in my trust is a deeply enmeshed allegiance to a networked-self. I am the-cybernetic-me-which-Google-empowers, much more than I-am-the-British-me-which-the-NHS-patches-up. I may have more invested, more skin in the game, more at stake, more to lose, in my Google-identity than in my British identity and citizenship. I hold more use-value in the data and IP that I have hosted on Amazon servers than I have in the value I hold in any account in pounds Sterling. A tipping point will come, if it has not already, where I will prefer the world I enjoy courtesy of the digital giants over and against the territory I inhabit and would have responsibility to protect the balanced wellbeing of. And as such, the state is losing its functional legitimacy, and with it, the use-value of the currency it controls, and the future viability of the social welfare it(/we) seek to maintain.

Marginalised State.

The current Brexit debacle illustrates quite how the state will not be overthrown so much as it will be marginalised for it’s lack of transparency, it inability to form consensus, it’s not-fit-for-purpose as guardian of its citizen’s interests. By contrast, the tech giants are deftly able to rapidly innovate self-interested global protocols, they are above regulation, above checks and balances insofar as it seems they are certainly above meaningful financial punishment or incentive by any state actor.

Private Money.

The logical extension of the shift in trust-in-tech is into a privatised domain of value exchange. Bitcoin is an eccentric, extreme, prophetic, harbinger of the possible ~ literally private currency. But other, smaller and more subtle versions of tokenised value transactions can and will be built on the technical trust infrastructures of encryption and on the relational trust structures of social networks, and on the existing trade rails of Amazon. And it seems reasonable that early-adopter silos will formalise modes of pure-digital transacting of privilege exchanges, discounts, benefits, access to more intangible social capital.

Least, last, late-adopters suffer most.

As and when this shift happens, and the state becomes gradually disenfranchised, the most vulnerable in society will suffer first and will suffer most. The least, the last and the late adopters will be locked out. And so, steeply graded gini-coefficients, the polarisation of privilege, a scarcity mindset amongst both the ostensibly rich and the manifestly poor, all foreshadow civil unrest.

Church-as-counter-culture?

And, as in previous industrial revolutions, it is the church who is positioned to champion the subsidiarity of scales where relational generosity can be both personally and politico-systematically effective ~ a generosity strategic in protecting and serving an untragic commons. Certainly in Britain, the comprehensive geographic coverage, the built infrastructure, the latent sympathy which the church is the steward of (all seen is their role in the rise of foodbanks) are the basis of a social resilience which would temper the instability of a society drained by an opaque tech sector siphoning off wealth from the commons.

Church-as-plausibility-structure?

The church is not, and will not again soon, be a significant political actor, but it can demonstrate a plausibility to a nationally scaled form of organised wealth redistribution, and so shame the government but more importantly, empower the government, to rule a country judiciously, to distribute wealth fairly, to regulate bad actors strongly. There has to be a transparent plausibility structure to any campaign to a government to manage the country more generously. The church should be that plausibility, by the fearless wide-opensourcing of its own accounts, displaying publicly it’s corporate and individual testimonies of providence of sufficient supply from the abundance of God. If it is possible to trust God over Google, if it is possible to exist in a global age without leaving global tech agents unregulated, it is more blessed to give than receive, in all things, then the church should be able to bear out that in the data.

ChurchTech-as-CivTech?

It is no pious aphorism, but rather a fundamental true truth that it is actually more blessed to give than receive. This taps into a principle of cosmic abundance of which the church gets to be generous and transparent agent of. The church presently lacks for tech to weaponise this truth of giving, in such a way that would set all people free to do the good they want to do.

Generosity-as-ChurchTech?

The relational capital of a tight network of mature existing givers, the brand awareness in the church at large, the ability to ecumenically and inter-generationally bridge old and new, the core solution for subtle and difficult peer-to-peer giving ~ by contrast with the more widespread and uninteresting church tithe CRM platforms ~ are all key qualities which position Stewardship as the suitable candidate to scale a grass-roots financial transparency and generosity platform for all individuals, for the two-or-three gathered, for small church groups, for wider civic infrastructural governance structure and to the ends of the earth.

So, with some small urgency, before competitors erode Stewardship’s market, and before the movement of financial technologisation pulls up the ladder after it, and before the state is chronically disenfranchised, let’s build an app for this.

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Phil Pawlett Jackson
Phil Pawlett Jackson

Written by Phil Pawlett Jackson

Illustration, Copywriting, & PM for Digital Product and Architecture for Social Good. Keen to learn & collaborate on projects & mischief

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