You've used ChatGPT or Claude. You typed a question, got an answer, moved on. But what if AI could remember your brand guidelines and apply them to every document your team creates — without anyone asking it to? What if it could turn a quarterly report into a four-page executive summary in five minutes? What if it could draft your next appeal letter using everything it learned from the last three years of appeals?
That's not science fiction. We've built these things for our own organizations — and in this workshop, we'll show you exactly how.
This session is not a product pitch. We're not selling a platform. We're two nonprofit practitioners who figured out how to make AI do real, repeatable work, and we'll walk you through the same process — live, on screen, start to finish.
We'll start with a framework most people are missing: the difference between asking AI a question and giving AI a job. There's a natural progression — from smart prompts to persistent skills to automated agents to custom-built tools — and most organizations are still at step one. We'll show you what each stage looks like with real nonprofit examples, and then we'll build things in front of you.
You'll watch us create a brand skill from scratch — the single most useful thing we've found for any organization — that makes every document, presentation, and letter come back styled to your standards automatically. You'll see a report distiller turn a PDF into a formatted executive summary. And we'll take real challenges from the room and start building solutions on the spot, so you can see the method, not just the result.
We'll also tackle the hard questions: donor privacy, quality control, whether AI-generated content is "cheating," and how to bring along colleagues who think this is all hype. We've had those conversations inside our own teams, and we'll share what actually worked.
Leave with ready-to-use templates for five common nonprofit use cases, a decision framework for identifying what to automate first, and the confidence to build your first AI skill within days — not months. No coding required. No technical degree. Just clear thinking and a willingness to try.
Learning Objectives:
A practical framework for deciding what AI should do for you. Learn to distinguish between tasks that need a one-time prompt, tasks that need a persistent skill, and tasks that need full automation — plus a decision tree for prioritizing which to build first based on time savings and ease of implementation.
A practical framework for deciding what AI should do for you. Learn to distinguish between tasks that need a one-time prompt, tasks that need a persistent skill, and tasks that need full automation — plus a decision tree for prioritizing which to build first based on time savings and ease of implementation.
Understand where this is going. See the natural progression from simple skills to sophisticated automated tools, so you know what's possible as your comfort grows — and you can make informed decisions about what to build internally versus what to pay someone else to do.
