23. Could Asalatu Groups Earn Collaboratively? The Case for Sharing the Pulpit and the Proceeds - Asalatu Empowerment - Empowering Members
23. Could Asalatu Groups Earn Collaboratively? The Case for Sharing the Pulpit and the Proceeds
There are thousands of small religious gatherings that are doing genuinely good work with almost no money. A group meets weekly, a lecturer teaches, someone recites, people give what they can, and the whole thing runs on goodwill and one overworked secretary. Meanwhile, forty minutes of that teaching disappears the moment the room empties.
That gap that is between content that is worth hearing and content that is never captured is the starting point of an idea Jack Lookman sets out in the Jack’s Curated Business Idea series.
His proposal is not complicated; Have Asalatu groups and content creators pool their material, publish it together, and divide whatever it earns by an agreed formula.
What makes it worth examining is not the monetisation aspect, which is ordinary. It is the governance. Almost every partnership of this kind collapses not because the content was weak but because nobody agreed, in writing, what would happen when the money arrived. Jack spends most of the episode on exactly that, and it is the most useful part.
The proposal in one paragraph
Collect relevant content from Asalatu groups such as lectures, dhikr, preaching, Qur'an recitations, Qur'an competitions, da'wah; then publish it collaboratively on agreed platforms, and split the profits according to an agreed, proportional formula.
The Asalatu gets a share. The main participants get a share. A lecturer whose lesson is recorded may want individual compensation on top of what the group receives. A portion goes to charity. The content creator who assembles and publishes the work takes a share. And tax gets paid.
That last item is the one people forget in the enthusiasm of a first agreement, and forgetting it is how a small collaborative project becomes a personal liability.
Why collaboration beats going it alone
Jack gives a reason that is more strategic than it first sounds. Asalatu content is a niche. Yoruba-language content is a niche. A single group that is publishing alone is a small audience of people who already know about it.
Collaboration changes the arithmetic without changing the workload much. Ten groups that are publishing separately reach ten small audiences. Ten groups publishing through one channel reach the sum of those audiences, and each group's material benefits from the traffic the others bring.
In content, distribution is the scarce resource, not production. A group that already has a lecture ready does not need a bigger microphone, what it needs is a channel.
This is why the model is more than a fundraising tactic. It treats the niche as an asset rather than a limitation; it is also the same logic that makes specialist publications viable while general ones struggle.
The money has to move in three days
Here is the detail that separates this proposal from most well-meaning partnership schemes. Jack recommends that payments to all parties be made within three days of receiving the money.
That is a specific, operational commitment, and it is doing real work. Most disputes in collaborative ventures do not begin with theft. They begin with delay.
The money arrives, sits in one person's account, and the others start wondering. Wondering becomes resentment. Resentment becomes an accusation, and the accusation is usually about character rather than process. A short, published payment window removes the wonder entirely.
He pairs it with two other disciplines which are accounting done with the utmost care, and transparency, which he describes as the thing that builds trust.
The formula itself can run on a spreadsheet or an app. None of that is sophisticated. All of it is the difference between a partnership that survives its first payment and one that ends there.
This is worth pausing on, because it is the least glamorous and most transferable idea in the episode. If you take nothing else from the model, take the three-day rule.
Any joint venture you are part of, be it a family business, a cooperative, a shared stall, it would benefit from a written commitment about how fast money moves after it arrives.
The legal scaffolding nobody wants to discuss
Jack lists four things to settle in advance, and each one maps to a failure mode you can probably name from experience.
A written agreement or contract. Not because anyone expects a fight, but because a written document is the only version of the plan that survives everyone remembering it differently eighteen months later.
Intellectual property. This is the hardest question in religious content, and it deserves more attention than a passing mention. Who owns a recorded lecture, is it the lecturer who delivered it, the group that hosted it, or the creator who edited and published it?
Without an answer, every future use is a negotiation, and the safest default is to agree in writing that the group holds the rights and licenses them to the channel, with the lecturer's consent recorded separately.
An exit strategy. Jack returns to this repeatedly, which tells you how often it is skipped. What happens if one group wants out? What happens if the creator moves on? What happens if the Asalatu splits or becomes insolvent?
He recommends planning for all three, including the possibility of insolvency, like an uncomfortable clause that, if written while everyone is friendly, is worth more than any amount of goodwill later.
Dispute management. Who decides when two groups disagree about which clip goes out, or when a lecturer objects to the edit? Naming a decision-maker in advance is not pessimism. It is the cheapest dispute resolution that is available.
Two further terms he specifies are quietly important. Agree a minimum and maximum length for each clip, so the channel has a consistent format and nobody is negotiating runtime every week. And route the Asalatu's revenue to the Asalatu's account, not to an individual's, a single sentence that prevents an entire category of problem, from accidental commingling to outright accusation.
How it actually runs
The operational model is refreshingly concrete. Choose the content topics. The Asalatu sends high-quality clips to the content creator. The creator builds a YouTube channel, edits and publishes. Once the channel is monetised, profits are divided by the agreed formula, with a charity percentage taken out, and proportional division based on views per video.
That last mechanism deserves a note. Dividing by views is fair in one sense and divisive in another. It rewards the content that travels, which is what generates the revenue, but it can leave a small group whose material consistently draws modest numbers feeling like a passenger.
Two protections help; they are a floor payment so no contributing group receives nothing, and a periodic review of the formula itself, that is agreed in advance. Fairness in a partnership is not a formula. It is a formula plus a conversation.
On platforms, Jack suggests YouTube, Facebook and other social media, plus blogs and membership sites. On naming, he suggests a short, memorable name that is relevant to the content that is still to be agreed upon, which is honest for a proposal at this stage.
On registration, a sole trader arrangement or an existing business umbrella.
On research, the usual market, product and competitor work.
On skills: interpersonal, communication, basic IT and project management.
Nothing here requires capital, rather it requires coordination, which is harder.
The cost argument, examined
Jack's cost case is that the model is close to free. The creator takes a profit share rather than an upfront fee, so their compensation is not a cost. Recording and logistics are minimal. Volunteers can do much of the work. Excluding human resources, the net cost impact is close to zero.
That is true in cash terms and misleading in real terms, and it is worth saying so plainly. The model is cheap in money and expensive in time, coordination and trust.
Someone has to chase clips, chase consent, edit, publish, answer comments and run the accounting, and that someone is usually doing it alongside everything else. "Close to zero cost" is accurate for a spreadsheet and optimistic for a person.
The honest version is this; the model requires almost no capital and a great deal of unpaid labour in its early phase. That is a reasonable trade for a group with more commitment than cash; but the person doing the work should know what they are signing up for, and the formula should reflect it.
A creator's share that assumes they are contributing a few spare evenings will eventually produce a creator who stops.
What the group gets beyond money
It would be easy to read this proposal as a fundraising mechanism, and it is partly that. But the non-financial return may matter more to a small group than the cheque.
An archive, first. Most Asalatu groups have decades of teaching that exists only in the memory of the people who attended. Once recorded, that becomes a body of material a new member can work through, a family can revisit, and a researcher could one day consult. A group without an archive restarts with every generation.
Reach among people who cannot attend, second. Members who are ill, travelling, caring for someone or living abroad are effectively excluded from a weekly gathering.
A published channel is not a substitute for presence, but it is a meaningful extension of it, and for diaspora communities, often the only access they have.
Credibility, third. A group with a well-run channel carries a different weight in its community and with potential donors than one that cannot be found online. It also makes collaboration between groups easier, because there is something concrete to collaborate around.
The threats, named
Jack names three which are: greed, conflict and distrust. All three are governance failures rather than character failures, which means all three are preventable with the clauses above.
The fourth threat goes unmentioned and deserves naming and it is inconsistency. A channel that publishes three lectures in the first month and then goes quiet for a season will not monetise, and the groups will conclude the idea failed when the real problem was cadence.
The economics of content reward regularity more than brilliance. Any collaboration of this kind needs a publishing schedule somebody owns.
What it is really for
The problem the model solves is stated in order, and the order is telling. First, spreading the message. Second, raising donations for the Asalatu. Third, promoting collaboration between groups. Fourth, raising awareness. Fifth, creating income for all parties.
Income is last. That is either a piece of modesty or a piece of realism, and probably both. A collaborative religious channel that leads with earning will attract the wrong collaborators and repel the audience. One that leads with service, and happens to be financially sustainable, is doing something different in kind.
It also explains the charity provision. A model built on religious content that keeps everything would undermine its own premise. Allocating a share to charity is not a tax optimization. It is the thing that makes the rest coherent.
Replicability: the real opportunity
Jack closes by noting that the model can be replicated by starting with lectures, then extending to other topics such as dhikr.
That is the most commercially interesting sentence in the episode, and it is underplayed. What he has actually described is a template: a community with valuable, under-recorded expertise, a creator who can package it, a governance framework that keeps everyone honest, and a platform that pays.
Swap the community and the expertise and it works again through a trade association, a professional body, a diaspora network, a sports club, or a cooperative of artisans.
The niche is not the constraint. It is the starting condition.
If you wanted to test it this month
Four steps, no capital required at all. Pick one group and one topic, then record three sessions properly and get written consent from the speaker and the group before publishing anything.
Publish on one channel for eight weeks on a fixed schedule. And write the one-page agreement before the first upload, not after the first payment, by covering the profit split, the payment window, intellectual property, the clip length, the account the money sits in, and the exit.
Then watch one number: whether the audience returns. Everything else is negotiation.
The thing worth taking away
Most collaborations fail on arithmetic that nobody wrote down. This proposal is unusual because it treats the arithmetic as the main event like a payment window that is measured in days, a formula on a spreadsheet, an account that belongs to the group, or an exit clause written while everyone still likes each other.
The content is the easy part. The governance is what decides whether the pulpit gets shared, or whether it gets fought over.
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