‘QALBCONNECT’ PROJECT BUSINESS MODEL: BUILDING A UNIFIED AND TRUSTED DIGITAL PLATFORM FOR PROGRAM ALERTS AND WELL-CONNECTED MUSLIM COMMUNITY

Abstract

This paper presents a conceptual QalbConnect project business model (BM) for a digital platform/app designed to unify and consolidate Islamic programs on a single, integrated, and trusted platform. This is to help addressing the challenges, extreme pains, essential gains, and important job-to do of various customer segments (CS) by program organizers and participants. The platform addresses the challenges faced by program participants in discovering, attending & engaging with these programs as well as an easy side income for programs organizers. Currently, programs promotion is in silo and fragmented, relying on local mosque announcements, words of mouth, and from various social media platform creating “island of automation”. These uncoordinated and silo approaches are no longer sufficient to meet the needs of the society in the digital era, making it difficult for Muslims to easily find and follow relevant programs on a single, integrated, and trusted platform. The platform resolves this silo and uncoordinated issue by consolidating all programs information in a single platform, streamlining the promotion process and making programs more accessible to a wider audience among the community. Employing the Design Thinking (DT) methodology, this paper explores the insights faced by programs organizers and participants through literature reviews, benchmarking, interviews and surveys to understand and define the key challenges, extreme pains, essential gains & important job-to-do of all of the customer segments. Followed by ideation and designing an initial BM with a digital platform/app prototype, using business modelling tools i.e. the Environmental Map (EM), Business Model Canvas (BMC), and Value Proposition Canvas (VPC). The initial BM was tested and validated with the CS. After testing, the validated project business model was established. A strategy canvas was created to compare the validated project business model against other platforms. Finally, this paper offers a validated conceptual business model for QalbConnect as a solution, pain reliever, and gain creator in addressing the important job-to-do, extreme pain, and essential gain of CS. Future works include the development of a detailed Project Management Plan (PMP) for QalbConnect digital platform/app.