A clear-eyed look at the original 50-country study surfaced three walls that no amount of tweaking could move. As Matthew put it, we were adjusting the haircut budget when the rent was the problem.

• The under-18 wall. Our research director cannot put his name on centrally-collected data for minors across many countries without enormous, multi-country ethics-board infrastructure. About 70% of Collab organisations work with under-18s — so an "18-and-over" headline doesn't serve the coalition.
• The money wall. A robust 50-country longitudinal study cannot be done on our ~$1M budget. For scale: the Global Flourishing Study covers 22 countries and required ~$43M. One million dollars buys roughly one country for seven years — not fifty.
• The quality wall. Forcing a global study onto a small budget means snowball sampling and ad-hoc collection — data we can't compare year to year or region to region. Serious research partners like OneHope were rightly hesitant to sign off on that.

The crowdsourced model removes all three at once: organisations gather their own data under their own consent models, so the cost, the legal load, and the Western-sampling bias all move off our central plate.

This isn't a new idea — it's a return to one of our own founding ideas. Stanford's Collective Impact framework names five conditions a coalition needs to move the needle together. We already have four. The one we kept reaching past is shared measurement.

The Index simply builds the missing leg. A shared measure never required the world's largest research programme — it required agreement on what we all measure, and a place for the crowdsourced data to come home to.

For this to be a proven pattern, it has to be a pattern. It is. Across business, academia and the faith sector, the same play recurs: define one shared measure, validate it, give it away, and let everyone benchmark against it.

And beyond these, the whole idea is everyday practice — the Net Promoter Score is a single number millions of organisations report and benchmark against. We learn the model, not the questions: where Q12 measures organisational growth, the Index measures gospel momentum across four tiers — have I encountered, responded, am I being shaped, does it spread?

An organisation signs up and gets the Index white-labelled as their own — their logo, their survey, their results to keep. Their data flows back to the Index. When a country reaches a critical mass of crowdsourced responses, benchmarking switches on for that country.

• The integrity line. We never claim to speak for a whole nation. We only ever say: "of those who have completed the Index, here are the results — and here's how you compare." That single discipline is what makes crowdsourced data responsible.
• Tiered access. The measures are free and open to anyone. A standard report is free. An advanced report is paid — but free for Collab members. Coaching and consulting sit on top as a paid layer.
• Risk moves to the edge. Because organisations run it themselves with their own consent models, central liability for under-18 data largely disappears.

Still being finalised — presented here as the proposed shape, not a settled contract.

• The Collab owns the project — and crucially, owns the relationships and the people. NXT Move continues as the appointed three-year backbone of the Collab.
• Eido Research provides the engine — the survey infrastructure and the intelligence platform. This sits squarely in their wheelhouse; they're already building shared-measure platforms of exactly this kind, so we add one new standardised measure onto infrastructure others are already funding.
• Co-owned IP — the Index would be jointly held, governed by a contract between NXT Move (for the Collab) and Eido Research. Anyone can publish results as long as both are credited.
• Partner organisations participate — they run it, keep their own data, and get diagnostics back. The ask shifts from "give time to our research" to "use this and benefit."

The budget doesn't change — the same ~$1M through 2033 that we've already taken to foundations. What changes is what it buys. The old plan would have spent the entire envelope on field research in a handful of countries and still come up short. The pivot fits comfortably inside $1M and funds the whole platform — the shared metric, the dashboard, distribution, and consulting — with room to scale as adoption grows.

These are realistic starting points, not a ceiling. Early years are lean because the crowdsourced model pushes data-gathering cost out to the partners; later years carry the dashboard build-out, translation, and the human layer.

• Increasingly self-funding. The tiered model (free measures & standard report; paid advanced reports & consulting) offsets later-year costs, so the curve bends toward sustainability rather than perpetual fundraising.
• More fundable, not less. Same number, stronger story. Foundations hesitate at "another seven-year research project"; they lean in at a dashboard, a data model, and impact consulting — concrete, fundable assets. When we showed a dashboard, the room lit up.

• 2026 · Build & baseline. Index finalised and validated; dashboard v1 built; pilot waves run in Dallas–Fort Worth and Buenos Aires to establish the baseline.
• 2027 · Prove the model. Activate a handful of key countries and NextGen Collab–engaged organisations to initiate real momentum and demonstrate that the crowdsourced model works at scale.
• 2028–2029 · Scale. Many countries live; first flagship State of the Next Generation; certified facilitators trained.
• 2030–2031 · Trend lines. Multiple waves of comparable data; first responsible cross-region insights; multilingual dashboard.
• 2032–2033 · Standard, not survey. The Index is referenced as the shared metric for next-gen discipleship; self-sustaining model; the 2033 vision in view.

We keep both frameworks. The simplest way they relate: the 3 questions are what we measure; the 4 tiers are how deep it has gone. That makes them two axes of one grid — every question can be read at every tier.

The survey stays grouped by the three questions; each item is tagged with the tier it probes; and the dashboards report both lenses. See it live on the Survey and Org Dashboard tabs.