Support Us

HELP ACCELERATE OUR EFFORTS!

Our team is committed to building this app to help make the world a better place, but we are not independently wealthy! We have day jobs and are devoting a significant portion of our time to the Phrases for Life development effort. We have been on this journey for over 2 years and now have a good working capability to support the basic capabilities for applying voice recognition to help people learn Bible Phrases.

At this point, we would love to be able to build out a dedicated team to do more faster. Software development, testing, support and maintenance are not cheap and there is a lot more we want to do to improve Phrases for Life! If you feel that using positive, uplifting technology to bring the word of God into peoples’ lives is important, please support our cause!

We are collecting donations through our crowd-funding campaign through Fundly. All donations are fully tax deductible and made to the Gateway Leadership Initiative and will be applied to the following:

Donate Your Time

Your time is the best way to help! Assist us with quality assurance, content administration, usability & enhancement ideas ... or introduce the app to your friends & family.

Donate Time

Donate Old Devices

Donate old devices you don't use, like iPads, iPhones, Android phones and Android Tablets. It is critical for us to test on a variety of platforms to ensure a consistent user experience.

Donate a Device

Donate Financially

Launching Soon -- Fundly.com campaign to support operations & engineering. Donations will be managed by Gateway Leadership Initiative, a 501c3 organization.

Donate

Our Ongoing Costs

Infrastructure
Operating the solution, including cloud fees for compute, storage, cognitive voice recognition, security, etc.

User support

Resources are required to respond to user inquiries and help address bugs and other issues that may be found

Content Acquisition
We currently have access to Bible translations that are in the Public Domain such as the World English Bible, King James Version and American Standard Version, but we need to get licensing to ensure we support the most popular translations that people want to use, including New International Version (NIV), New Living Translation (NLT) and other popular translations. Pursuing these agreements and ensuring our content meets their copyright requirements takes time and effort.

Feature Development
Ongoing work related to building new capabilities and usability improvements. Some of the features on our roadmap are detailed below.

Awareness Campaigns
Just because we build it doesn’t mean they come! It takes effort and money to get information to the people who may most benefit from this kind of App, including advertising through Google Ad Words, setting up a social media presence, and establishing regular Newsletters to inform our audience.

Quality Assurance
Feature testing and regression testing as we add new capabilities is critical to the stability of the app and a good user experience across various devices and browsers.

Equipment
While we have been using simulators to test across various devices, these simulators are not 100% effective. Purchasing the most popular devices employed by our user community is critical to ensuring the app works consistently across environments.

Feature Enhancements for Practice Mode

While we started with “Competition Mode” so that people can immediately start to have fun. We have received very strong feedback that our community wants a Practice Mode that is more suitable to self-study. So, the next phase of our journey is to build this! To manage costs and ensure we get features out to our community as quickly as possible, we have broken up our roadmap for Practice Mode into several incremental releases.

A dedicated practice mode with a different flow from Competition

Visual feedback and accuracy assessment on what you got right and what you missed

Final results scoring and recommendations for next steps

Practice Mode – Release 2.0
  • Estimated costs: $20K
  • Target Timeframe: Q2, 2022
  • Release Overview:

Support for a self-study optimized experience, with infinite retry attempts for each phrase, accuracy scoring and visual analysis of the user’s response. You can see some of the designs for Release 1.0 above.

Practice Mode – Release 2.1
  • Estimated costs: $15K
  • Target Timeframe: Q3, 2022
  • Release Overview:

Support for User logins using Facebook and Google IDs. Ability to save your favorite phrases to your user profile; Accuracy scoring history and progress tracking for favorite phrases. Designs coming soon.

Practice Mode – Release 2.2
  • Estimated costs: $20K
  • Target Timeframe: Q3, 2022
  • Release Overview:

Support for “Thematic Study Plans” (see Supported Phrases) with key phrases for topics such as courage, forgiveness, love, persistence, etc. Build your own study plans or select from a pre-defined library. Share your favorite study plans with friends and family. Designs coming soon.

Practice Mode – Release 2.3
  • Estimated costs – $30K
  • Target Timeframe: Q4, 2022
  • Release Overview:

A powerful practice schedule designed and demonstrated to work by John Burke (based on the Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve) to help people master dozens or even hundreds of bible phrases in no more than 5 minutes per day. Receive practice reminders for your Study Plan, timed to ensure maximum retention with minimal effort. Includes progress tracking for each Study Plan. Miss a practice? The system will automatically adjust your schedule to ensure maximum retention while accommodating your busy day. Designs coming later this year.

 

Community Engagement Roadmap (2023 focus):

Once we have a solid Practice Mode to support self-study, we would like to develop capabilities related to fostering community and encouraging greater participation, such as leaderboards, chat rooms, etc.

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