Through the BIG Growth Innovation Programme, BGN partnered with London South Bank University (LSBU) from September 2024 to March 2025 on a structured, 61-hour academic collaboration exploring how congregations perceive and engage with digital services, including AI, VR and digital payments, and how these services affect spiritual experience and community life. The research directly informed BGN's ChurchGOers Digital Transformation Initiative.

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Reducing the risk of assumption-led development

BGN wanted to build ChurchGOers but had no rigorous, evidence-based understanding of how congregations feel about digital adoption. Without this insight, the business risked designing features based on assumption rather than genuine user needs. The collaboration gave BGN the academic capability to test that assumption before committing to product development.

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Turning community insight into product research

LSBU's academic team, led by Dr Opeyemi Olusegun Atanda alongside Dr Georgina Bartlett, with support from Dr Kerry Wood and Professor Dan Frings, led project scoping and the literature review, designed the research and ethics approach, oversaw recruitment and delivery of focus groups and interviews, and led the analysis, reporting and final handover to BGN.

The team took a mixed-methods approach: semi-structured interviews, focus groups, and case studies, combined with thematic analysis of qualitative data and statistical analysis of survey responses. Around 15–20 participants were purposively sampled across different churches, age groups and socioeconomic backgrounds to ensure a representative range of views, with findings triangulated across methods for reliability.

The project was structured into seven work packages, each with a defined objective, named owners, allocated hours, and clear start and end dates: project design, the collaboration agreement, the literature review, ethics preparation, recruitment and focus groups, analysis and reporting, and final outputs. This baseline plan, managed throughout by Alex Hokin as UKSPF BIG Growth Project Manager, was handed over to BGN in full, so the schedule and scope were transparent from day one.

Anna Kulhan, Project Compliance Officer and Coordinator, managed the collaboration agreement between LSBU and BGN and coordinated between the LSBU research team and Paul Johnson at BGN throughout, from getting recruitment materials, sign-up links and QR codes out into BGN's church networks, through to scheduling focus groups and interviews against the agreed timeline. Ethical approval and compliance sat with the LSBU research team throughout, with informed consent obtained from every participant and confidentiality strictly enforced, in line with LSBU's ethical research guidelines. Given the personal nature of the topic, participants' views on faith, technology and community life, particular care was taken over consent and confidentiality at every stage of recruitment and data collection.

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What the research revealed

• Spiritual authenticity comes first: church members are open to digital tools, but technology needs to enhance rather than replace meaningful worship

• Trust is the real gatekeeper for adoption, built through leadership endorsement, data security and alignment with core beliefs

• Attitudes were shaped more by individual faith perspective than by age alone

• Community connection, not just convenience, was consistently what people valued most

• Privacy concerns ran higher among church members than in typical consumer contexts

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From research findings to a product roadmap

BGN adopted several new-to-firm processes because of the collaboration, including structured mixed-methods research, a data-driven decision framework, and a systematic participant recruitment approach.

The research now underpins the new-to-market ChurchGOers AI-Driven Engagement Platform, covering AI-powered feedback and ratings, VR worship experiences, AI-driven digital giving, and predictive church growth analytics, with a market launch planned for December 2025.

By frontloading research before building, BGN also reported significant productivity gains: roughly 60% faster data collection and 35% shorter anticipated development cycles.

The project closed with a full presentation of outputs to BGN and comprehensive documentation handed over to Paul Johnson, covering the research findings, the case study framework, and the specifications feeding into the ChurchGOers platform, giving BGN a clear, evidence-based roadmap to take into their own product development.

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Reflections from the project team

“Working with Black Gifted Network was a reminder that good product research has to start with what a community values, not with the technology itself. By listening carefully to church members first, we helped BGN build a platform that has a genuine chance of earning trust, rather than just adoption.”
Dr Opeyemi Olusegun Atanda, Academic Lead, LSBU

“This project showed what a tightly scoped work plan can do for a multi-partner collaboration. Everyone, LSBU's academics, our compliance team, and BGN, knew exactly what was being delivered and when, which meant we could focus our energy on the quality of the research rather than chasing the schedule.”
Alex Hokin, UKSPF BIG Growth Project Manager, LSBU

“Having a clearly scoped collaboration agreement with named leads, hours and deliverables against each work package made this project straightforward to govern and report on, and gave both LSBU and BGN confidence that the funded support was being delivered and evidenced properly throughout.”
Anna Kulhan, Project Compliance Officer and Coordinator, LSBU

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Building knowledge for future collaborations

For LSBU's academic team, this was a novel application area: faith-based digital transformation is an under-researched space, and the project has generated material the team intends to develop for academic publication. It has also strengthened the team's sector expertise in a way that will help support future faith-based organisations through the BIG Growth Programme, and it stands as a strong exemplar case study for the programme itself.

The biggest challenge was methodological rather than technical: designing research that could ask honestly about AI, VR and digital payments without presuming church members would see these purely as neutral tools. The team built sensitivity to spiritual and denominational values into every stage, from question design through to how findings were fed back, so that the recommendations respected what churches value rather than pushing a generic technology adoption narrative onto them.

It also reinforced, for the coordination team, the importance of building extra time into recruitment and consent processes when working with community and faith organisations, since trust has to be earned with participants before data collection can begin — a useful reference point for structuring compliance and coordination on similar community-sector collaborations going forward.

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The value of structured academic support

As Dr Atanda put it, the programme let the team apply rigorous academic method to a real commercial problem, on a timescale and budget a business could actually use, giving BGN evidence to de-risk a product decision that would otherwise have relied on years of trial and error. Alex Hokin added that the programme gives a business like BGN structured access to academic expertise it wouldn't otherwise be able to resource, delivered against a clear plan and timeline — with the BGN collaboration standing as a strong example of that support translating directly into a concrete product roadmap.

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Could collaboration help you move forward? Speak to our team about your next step.

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About the programme

The BIG Growth Innovation Programme connects South London businesses with academic expertise from London South Bank University and partner universities, delivering tailored collaborative support to help businesses innovate and grow. The programme is funded through the UK Shared Prosperity Fund (UKSPF) by the Greater London Authority. The aim of the UKSPF was to improve pride in place and increase life chances across the UK investing in communities and place, supporting local business, and people and skills.