We think of AI as an overeager intern. Give it a clear job with clear limits and it gives your team hours back. Give it neither and it just makes new messes faster. The Pattern. On most teams, staff are already using AI on their own personal accounts. Nobody has said what is safe to…
If the work lives in five places, it does not really live anywhere. Putting it on one board, with dates people believe, changes what your whole team can see. The Pattern. Most teams we meet started moving their tasks into a new tool and never finished, so the work is split across three places. Priorities…
Databases are about two things. They hold a true record of every gift and they give you reports you can trust. When either one breaks, fundraising feels it first. The Pattern. The move to the new system was supposed to be done months ago. The old one is still running every day, because the new…
Heading into Q4 I was in a really good place, but my work felt scattered and everything Claude handed me was way too wordy. So we took a big step back, rebuilt my business plan into two pages, and cut fifteen skills down to five so the plan actually runs my week.
A simple year-end mailing list took me far longer than it should have, and I know where the buttons are. October is not scary because of the letter. It is scary because of everything underneath the letter, and that is where AI can actually help.
A few months into using AI every day, the tools you built start answering with things you retired months ago. Here is how I audited my own AI setup like any other system, and why the cleanup was mostly taking things out.
Every donor engagement model I have been handed looks the same. A circle. Identify, cultivate, solicit, steward, back to the top. I think it looks more like a ski mountain.
Before you plug AI into anything, you need to know which connections are yours to make. The Personal Access Map shows you where you stand in about ten minutes, and the workbook helps you build from there.
The gap between that world and this one keeps shrinking. The first time I heard about generative AI, I hated it. It scared me. Most of the fundraisers I talk to feel the same thing, and nobody has given them permission to say it out loud. Everything is moving so fast it feels like we cannot possibly keep up.
