Steward Technology PlatformPBC

Taking the difficulty out of doing good

Kansas City · In development

Nonprofit technology · Public benefit corporation

Your nonprofit is mission driven. Your technology should be too.

We are building the platform a nonprofit runs on — donors, gifts, events, programs and finance in one connected system. And we are building it on a premise the sector does not have yet: that a supporter's consent should be portable, and that when software starts acting on someone's behalf, what it was permitted to do has to be provable.

The problem

Nonprofit software takes more than it gives.

Technology is supposed to create capacity. In this sector it usually consumes it — systems that are hard to learn, hard to leave, and assembled from parts that were never designed to speak to one another. The organizations least able to absorb that cost are the ones paying it most.

Donor records
The same person, three times over. One from the gala, one from the online form, one typed in by a board member.
Permission
Nobody is sure who agreed to what. Preferences live in one system and the mailing list is sent from another.
Events
The night ends with a stack of name badges. The person who bought the table is in your records. Their seven guests are not.
Finance and reporting
Reconciliation as monthly archaeology. Three systems, three numbers, and a week spent making them agree.

The part no single vendor can fix

Permission is the thing that does not travel

Every symptom above has a product answer. One of them does not.

A supporter's relationship with a cause is not confined to one organization or one vendor, but the record of what they agreed to always is. Their preferences get copied into each system that touches them, each copy drifts, and there is no single place to see what is outstanding or to withdraw it. That is not a gap in anyone's feature list. It is a gap in the sector's plumbing, and a platform cannot close it alone — a promise one company makes about a supporter's data is only as durable as that company.

HOW IT WORKS NOW One supporter agrees to something Website COPY CRM COPY Email tool COPY Event app COPY Four copies, quietly drifting apart. No single view of what is outstanding. Nowhere to withdraw it once. WHAT IT SHOULD BE One record, held by the supporter what was agreed, with whom, for what, and until when Organization READS IT Organization READS IT Organization READS IT WITHDRAWN IN ONE PLACE — EVERYWHERE AT ONCE No copies to chase. Nothing to take anyone's word for.
The shape of itThe difference is not a better preference center. It is where the record lives. Once the supporter holds it and each organization reads it, withdrawal stops being a request and becomes a fact.

A platform can implement this. Only a shared standard can make it true across the sector — which is why we intend the trust rules to be governed outside any one company, including ours.

We are building that groundwork alongside the product rather than after it, in the open, and with people who do not work for us. There is more to say about it than we are ready to say publicly; if that is the part you care about, it is worth a conversation.

And it is about to matter more

Software is starting to act on people's behalf

Which turns a policy question into an engineering one.

Every platform in this sector now says it uses AI responsibly. The claim worth making is narrower and checkable: once software chooses recipients, schedules gifts or moves money for someone, what exactly it was permitted to do stops being a matter of good intentions. Authority has to be bounded in advance, tied to a purpose, recorded as it is used, and revocable in the middle — not asserted on a values page.

BOUNDED AUTHORITY The grant Scope — what it may touch Purpose — what for Limit — how much, how often Expiry — until when The agent acts only inside the grant cannot widen its own authority CHECKED AT EVERY STEP The record every action, with the authority it was taken under SHOWABLE TO A FINANCE TEAM WITHDRAWN AT ANY POINT — THE AGENT STOPS, THE RECORD REMAINS
Why it is infrastructureAn agent's authority is only meaningful if someone outside the agent can check it afterwards. That is a property of the plumbing, not of the model — and it is the reason this work cannot wait for the products to mature.

Our commitments

What we are committing to, in writing.

Consent and control

Organizations and the people who support them decide what is shared. Your data leaves in a usable format whenever you want it, which means we have to earn the next year rather than rely on the cost of leaving.

Discovery is never for sale

Placement in search, recommendations and discovery cannot be bought, at any price, by anyone. A two-person rescue and a national foundation are seen on the same terms.

Agent authority

Agents act only within permissions that were granted explicitly, keep a complete record of what they did, and have no way to widen their own access.

How we are paid

We do not sell data and we do not sell ads. The organizations using the platform are the only ones who pay us, and nothing about a supporter is for sale in any form.

How we intend to run

Two choices we would rather be held to than described by.

Customers are members

Not a tone of voice. The organizations paying for the platform set roadmap priorities, see decisions discussed in the open, and can contribute work that other members use. That is ordinary in open infrastructure and close to unknown in nonprofit software, where the largest platforms are privately held and the relationship is a support queue.

Employees are the core

The people building this are not a cost line to be optimized between funding rounds. We would rather grow slowly with people who intend to stay than staff up for a milestone and cut back after it — because the commitments above are kept by individuals making small decisions correctly for years, and that is not work you can outsource or rush.

Why a public benefit corporation

A mission you can hold us to.

Incorporating as a PBC puts these commitments in the charter, where the board is accountable to the stated purpose alongside financial return. We think it is also the better business: organizations that trust their technology stay, and they tell others. But the reason to write it down is that good intentions are not a governance mechanism, and the people who made a promise are not always the people who will be asked to keep it.

Contact

We are building this with nonprofits, not for them.

If you work at a nonprofit
We want to hear what your current systems cost you — in hours, not licence fees.
If you build things
Engineering, design, nonprofit finance, identity and consent standards. Especially the last one.
If you are adjacent
Funders, processors, sector organizations and investors who have seen this problem from another side.
Contact us

members@stewardtp.com