Scope & Engagement Proposal — Champions Network

If you read one page

The short version.

1The retainer delivered roughly four times its value. $6,000 billed against work that would cost about $25,500 commissioned from independent designers and developers, or near $45,000 at agency rates.
2It is now fully committed. The sixty hours are spent, and the September work queue is larger than anything this term has held.
3This is a scope gap, not a pace problem. The agreement covered podcast teasers and marketing support — but the marketing half was never scoped. The hours were sized against the podcast work, while the marketing side grew into a curriculum platform, four print editions, an email programme and a chapter publicity system.
4The work has started compounding. The Boulder chapter kit is the clearest example: a request for a flyer became a system where the next chapter costs about an hour instead of a week. That pattern is the argument for continuing.
5September is the hinge. New chapters, a re-recorded curriculum, the subscriber Academy, and Dr. Seltz's transition all land in the same quarter. The engagement needs to be sized for that before it starts, not after.

March – August 2026

What the first term produced.

Every item below is live and inspectable today. Comparable costs are market estimates for equivalent scope commissioned on its own — not competing quotes.

23Pages built

7Print-ready PDFs

4Academy sessions

~27kLines of hand-built HTML / CSS / JS

Billed to the retainer — 60 hrs at $100/hr$6,000

Same scope, commissioned freelance / small shop≈ $25,500

Same scope, agency (blended $150–200/hr + PM + print designer)≈ $45,000

4.2× Value delivered per retainer dollar — 7.4× measured against agency rates

Deliverable	Comparable cost
Marketing siteVideo hero, six-section narrative, leadership modals, scroll animation, full brand system, responsive throughout	$7,500
Four interactive study guidesSessions 001–004 — custom audio player, tabbed readings, accordions, go-deeper modals, ten-question quizzes, embedded video. Closer to small web apps than pages	$4,800
Print brochures — four editionsTwo full art directions of the 8-page, plus the 4-page and the 2-page conference handout; all print-ready	$4,000
2027 March for Life planning guide8-page print PDF and a responsive web edition generated from one source	$2,500
Chapter publicity kit — Boulder, COPoster, two-audience half-sheet handouts, two social formats, QR, RSVP landing page — and the template system behind them	$2,800
Champions Advocate Weekly workstreamAI concept mockup, on-site digest demo with click-through approval flow, and the email-delivery platform analysis	$2,000
Internal toolingGated admin area, build log, correspondence archive, and the live Clockify budget dashboard (serverless)	$2,000
Liberty Action Alert podcast pageFour-part series — players, tabs, accordions, promotional section	$1,200
Brand standards — guide + web referencePalette, type system, logo usage; Markdown source plus a browsable reference page	$1,500
Total comparable value	≈ $25,300

Method: each line is the low-to-middle of the going rate an independent designer or developer would quote for that deliverable commissioned on its own. The estimate excludes discovery workshops, copywriting rounds and dedicated QA that an agency bills separately — so it reads conservative.

What the model looks like in practice

Boulder: a flyer request that became a system.

On August 5 the office asked for publicity for a new chapter at University Lutheran Chapel in Boulder — a poster, some handouts, a social post. Two days later the chapter had all of it, plus something that was not requested.

Aug 5 — Request arrives from the Network office with a photo of the chapel and ten meeting dates. Pastor Rob Jarvis notes he is unsure how to phrase the invitation.
Aug 7 — Delivered: an 8.5×11 poster, two-audience half-sheet handouts, two social formats, a QR code, and a live RSVP page at champions-network.com/boulder.
Also delivered — the template behind it. The next chapter is one data file and a rebuild.

What this changes

Chapter publicity used to be a bespoke design job priced per chapter. It is now a repeatable build. When the Missouri group starts — and Rev. Frith expects it shortly — their full kit costs roughly an hour rather than a week. Every chapter after Boulder is cheaper than the one before it.

The copy also answered the question Pastor Jarvis could not resolve on his own. His chapter is hosted by students who cannot sustain it alone, so the material invites neighbouring congregations to come for the students first and for their own training second — a distinction that decides whether adults show up at all.

Why this works

The cost of expert material has collapsed.

The value here is not that software writes things. It is that the expensive part of producing serious material — design, layout, print preparation, page building, video assembly — has fallen close to zero, while the part that was always scarce stays scarce.

It's not what the AI generates. It's how we reduce the cost of expertise — the stuff that has been expensive and hard to produce. If you've got people who can really talk, that's all they have to be able to do. Gary Ricke · weekly check-in, July 31 2026

That is the whole operating model. Rev. Frith records a lecture; the structured session page, the quiz, the discussion guide and the drip email are derived from it. Dr. Seltz records a podcast; the page, the thumbnail, the summary and the transcript follow automatically. The office sends a chapel photo and ten dates; a full publicity kit comes back.

The Network's scarce resource is theological judgement and the trust of congregations. Everything downstream of that is now production, and production is what this engagement has been converting from a cost into an asset.

Straight accounting

Where the retainer stands.

Figures below are pulled live from the project time log, not estimated.

60Hours delivered under the term

$6,000Total retainer value

12.1Average hours per month

6Workstreams queued for September

To be explicit about cause: the agreement covered two things — posting podcast teasers, and helping the Champions Network with its marketing. The first was clearly defined and has been delivered every month of the term. The second was never scoped. There was no deliverable list, no boundary, and no share of the sixty hours set aside for it. The hours were sized against the podcast work.

What the marketing half became — requested and approved week by week in the check-ins — was a marketing site, a four-session Academy pilot, four print brochures, a planning guide, an email programme, an internal admin system, and a chapter publicity kit. No one over-reached. There was simply no scope line to measure any of it against.

The pace has been consistent throughout — between ten and sixteen hours a month, every month. The mismatch is entirely definitional. The purpose of this proposal is to close that gap: to scope the marketing side explicitly, for the first time, so that both sides know what a month is expected to contain.

September 2026 onward

What the year ahead actually contains.

These are not proposals invented for this document — each one is already on the shared to-do list, requested by Rev. Frith in a check-in.

Workstream 01

Chapter expansion

Publicity kits and RSVP pages for each new chapter, on the Boulder template. Missouri is next; Rev. Frith expects the pattern to repeat through the year as groups form.

Live now · scales cheaply

Workstream 02

Lecture-first Academy

Rev. Frith records a 30–50 minute lecture per lesson; it becomes a structured session page with chapters, discussion guide, quiz and glossary. Year 1 is re-recorded from Lesson 1 starting September.

Largest single block

Workstream 03

Subscriber Academy & payments

Membership shell, admin backend, Stripe subscriptions with coupon codes, gift subscriptions. Currently blocked pending the accountants' decision on which account receives revenue.

Blocked on LCMS finance

Workstream 04

Champions Advocate Weekly

Move from demo to live: the send path on Resend, source permission requests and attribution handling, and surfacing stories on the site rather than only in email.

Plan complete, build pending

Workstream 05

Progress & encouragement layer

Drip onboarding, completion tracking, weekly "here's what's next" emails, and the rewards concept — champion coins, badges, or discounted Year 2 for finishing Year 1.

Designed, not built

Workstream 06

Continuity documentation

Written process documentation so a staff member or intern can run the production workflow end to end. Requested explicitly as a safeguard against single-person dependency.

Risk reduction

One timing note the board should have

Dr. Seltz's transition lands inside this window. If he continues producing the Liberty Action Alert in a reduced capacity, the automation described above is what makes that feasible at a fraction of the current effort — the production cost of each episode falls to editing and posting, both of which are already largely automated.

Three ways forward

Resourcing the year.

Each option below does the thing the original agreement never did: it puts a defined size on the marketing side. All three continue at the current $100/hour rate, which is materially below the market rate for this work and is not proposed to change. The only variable is volume — and therefore how much of the list above actually gets built.

Maintain

$1,500 / month

15 hours per month · 180 hrs/year

Keeps the site, sessions and podcast current
Chapter kits as chapters form
No new platform capability

Honest assessment: this holds ground. The Academy, payments and email programme would not proceed.

Recommended

Build

$3,000 / month

30 hours per month · 360 hrs/year

Everything in Maintain
Lecture-first Academy production, lesson by lesson
Subscriber Academy shell + Stripe once unblocked
Advocate Weekly live send path
Continuity documentation

Matches the workstreams Rev. Frith has already committed to for September. This is the option sized to what has actually been asked for.

Launch

$4,500 / month

45 hours per month · 540 hrs/year

Everything in Build
Full Year 1 and Year 2 rebuilt in the new format
Progress, rewards and drip email layer
Road pitch deck and campaign material
LCRL site migration off Squarespace

Appropriate if the board intends the Academy to carry subscription revenue within the coming year.

Unused hours in any month carry forward within the term. Work outside the agreed scope is quoted separately before it starts, never billed as a surprise. Either party may end the agreement with 30 days' notice.

To move this forward

What happens next.

Rev. Frith reviews this document and tells me anything that misrepresents the work or the priorities before it goes further.
It goes to the board as the basis for the September budget decision, alongside Rev. Frith's own report.
The new term starts September 1 so that chapter formation and the re-recorded curriculum are not interrupted.

A closing note

This has been the most interesting client work I do, and I would like to keep doing it. The Network is at the point where the groundwork stops being groundwork and starts compounding — Boulder is the first clear instance of that, and there will be more. What the year needs is an agreement sized to the work that is actually being requested, so that neither the Network nor I are guessing month to month.