CLAUDE SKILL BUILDER:
a Vivid INstrument
Turn the work you repeat every week into AI skills.
The Skill Shift:
a Vivid INstrument
Turn the work you repeat every week into AI skills.
OPERATIONS WITH A FUNDRAISER’S EYE
The Skill Builder
What is a Skill?
A skill is a written set of instructions your AI follows every time it does a task. You explain the work once: where the information lives, what good looks like, and what it must never do. After that, you say the word and it runs the same way every time.
Some skills you call when you need them, like prepping for a donor meeting or drafting a grant report. Some run on their own on a schedule, like checking every Monday that last week’s gifts were thanked. All of them read from one set of rules about how you sound and what never goes into the machine.
Most of us already ask AI for help one conversation at a time. A skill is what happens when you stop explaining the same task over and over.
HOW IT WORKS
Start by choosing whether you work inside a nonprofit or run a consulting practice. Then list the work you repeat every week, in your own words. Nothing is too small. The report you rebuild every month counts, and so does the thank-you you keep forgetting to check. The builder walks each item through one question first: should this become a skill, or should it stop? Some of what fills a week is there out of habit, and the best skill is the one you never have to build.
Five Questions per Skill
- What starts it: A day and time or a specific trigger from your work
- Where the information lives: Your database, your inbox, a shared drive, your notes
- What the skill produces: A draft, a list, a checklist, a summary
- The rules it follow: How it should sound, what good looks like
- What it must never do: The names, numbers, and actions that stay out.
The whole process takes about twenty minutes.
Nothing you enter is saved or sent anywhere and it clears when you leave the page.
What you leave with.
A skill file for every skill you built, and a one-page checklist to put them to work. Nothing you enter is saved or sent anywhere.
- One ready-to-upload skill file for each skill, written from your answers.
- Your rules file: how you sound, what you never say, and what never goes into the machine. Every other skill reads from it.
- A one-page PDF of your skill set: a checklist to put each skill to work, and tips for skills that last.
- A short README with the same steps, inside the download.
Need Help Getting Started?
We have developed a set of resources to help kick off your skill building journey. Two example skill sets, one for a nonprofit and one for a consulting practice. As well as an access map tool to create a ten minute map of what AI can reach at your organization.
THE Next Step.
Start with one skill. Pick the task you explained most often this month, build it, and run it this Friday. If the skill you want depends on a database nobody trusts or a process nobody wrote down, that is a good time to have someone look at the systems underneath before you build.