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Empower Your Nonprofits With AI
As a community foundation, you have the opportunity to lead your nonprofits into the future by facilitating effective AI integration. Every day, at every one of your nonprofits, someone is already using AI – even if they don’t realize it. From Google search summaries to automatically generated emails, nonprofits are already dealing with the impact of AI-generated content. In the classes that we’ve taught, only 16% of attendees report no experience with AI; the other 84% are using it already, but without the training they need.
Why You Should Care
By supporting AI training, you help your nonprofits leverage the incredible power of AI to achieve their mission, while avoiding the mistakes that can hurt their cause. From grant applications to donor outreach to web site improvements, knowing how best to use AI gives your nonprofits to ability to do more with less.
“Our local nonprofits are stretched thin with limited staffing, budget constraints and increasing demand for services. Ken’s training on AI helps these organizations become more efficient with administrative tasks such as board meeting minutes, financial statements, grant proposals and more. We appreciate the opportunity for the nonprofit sector to learn best practices in AI to build and support their capacity.”
Veronica Blake, CEO, Placer Community Foundation
The Current Landscape
There are so many ways that AI can help nonprofits – for example:
GRANT WRITING
Given a description of the funding opportunity, the nonprofit’s mission statement, and a grant application, AI can provide feedback to the writer about whether the app is in alignment with the organization’s values, meets the requirements of the grantor, and makes a strong case for funding.
FUND RAISING
Given a list of donors with information about their donation history, AI can group donors into similar personas (e.g. once-a-year heavy hitters, small monthly, irregular) and provide ideas for the kinds of appeals that might work best for each persona.
BOARD MEETINGS
AI can help develop the agenda for a meeting, create a facilitator guide to help with timing, transcribe the meeting into notes with action items, summarize the meeting, and review the transcript & agenda to point out areas for improvement.
These and many other use cases highlight how AI can help. But it’s possible for AI to hurt an organization. For example, it can create a grant application that commits an organization to providing support and services that aren’t feasible. Outreach emails written by AI without the human touch have a cookie-cutter feel that lacks real warmth. And the use of AI brings up tricky issues around plagiarism, attribution, and implicit bias in AI-generated results.
This combination of the good and the bad, the promise and the pitfalls, makes AI use by nonprofits both compelling and frightening. Which is why we think it’s essential to provide training to help nonprofits navigate this complex and rapidly changing environment.
Accelerating Impact Through Strategic Partner Investment
Community foundations typically work with a core group of larger, established nonprofits that serve as key partners in addressing community challenges. These strategic organizations—whether they’re major human services providers, educational institutions, or advocacy groups—have the greatest potential to benefit from AI’s impact. When multiple staff members from these anchor nonprofits attend training together, they achieve the critical mass needed for organization-wide AI adoption, moving beyond individual experimentation to systematic integration that transforms how they operate.
This concentrated approach delivers exponential returns on your training investment. Instead of having one trained individual struggle to convince colleagues or implement changes in isolation, you create internal champions who can support each other, share best practices, and drive adoption across departments. A nonprofit with three trained staff members can implement AI solutions for grant writing, volunteer coordination, and donor outreach simultaneously, creating momentum that spreads throughout the organization. We recommend identifying 3-to-5 of your most impactful nonprofit partners and sponsoring 4-to-8 staff members from each organization to ensure they have the internal capacity to fully realize AI’s transformative potential.
Benefits for Your Foundation Staff
While supporting your nonprofit partners is a primary motivation, your own foundation staff will also gain tremendous value from AI training. Community foundation professionals juggle multiple responsibilities—from grant management and donor relations to program evaluation and community outreach—all areas where AI can significantly reduce administrative overhead and enhance effectiveness. Our training equips your team with the skills to streamline routine tasks like application reviews, donor communications, and report generation, freeing up time for higher-value strategic work and deeper community engagement.
One particularly powerful opportunity is creating customized AI assistants for your nonprofit partners. With proper AI training, your staff can develop specialized tools that help grantees with common challenges—such as an AI assistant trained on your foundation’s grant guidelines and application requirements, or one that helps nonprofits craft stronger program descriptions based on your funding priorities. These custom solutions position your foundation as an innovative resource while reducing the repetitive questions and support requests that typically consume significant staff time, creating a win-win scenario for both your team and the organizations you serve.
What We Do
Our goal is to ensure that 100% of our students leave with the skills needed to not only use AI efficiently, but also responsibly. We do this via two different four hour courses that cover key challenges faced by nonprofits.
AI Essentials
• What exactly does “AI” mean?
• How do I effectively interact with AI?
• What analysis can AI do for me?
• What are the critical issues with using AI?
AI In Depth
• How can I customize AI?
• How can I effectively use Deep Research and Extended Thinking?
• What are “agents”?
• How can I provide guidance for responsible AI usage?
The AI Essentials Course
There are four separate modules, each one hour long. Each module consists of 30 minutes of presenting the material, following by 30 minutes of hands-on exercises. At a high level, the four modules are…
This is our gentle introduction to AI. I’ll explain how to think about your relationship with AI and what it’s best used for, like generating ideas and providing feedback. We’ll briefly compare different AI tools and then dive into hands-on exercises. I’ll finish by explaining how AI models work to generate responses.
We’ll have fun with prompting, which is how we talk to AI. I’ll show you how to structure your prompts, including specifying the AI’s persona and what you want it to do. We’ll discuss how AI responses can vary, the importance of context, and what happens if you give AI nonsensical prompts.
Here, I’ll show you how to use AI for analyzing data, from reviewing course descriptions to comparing website donation processes. I’ll explain how AI can be a neutral tool for critique and why providing context to AI is key. We’ll also discuss crafting effective analysis prompts, and how to get AI to give you more direct feedback.
We’ll cover the potential problems you might encounter when using AI. We discuss “hallucinations,” where AI makes things up, and the issue of bias in AI systems. Privacy concerns around data being uploaded to the cloud will be addressed. We’ll also explore attribution and plagiarism, the power imbalance AI can create, and the problem of false positives. Finally, we’ll touch on the guardrails that AI systems have in place.
Ken Krugler is a professional software developer, startup founder, open source enthusiast, and (most importantly) a trainer with over 15 years of experience teaching technical classes. His special talent is making challenging topics fun and understandable, honed by years of volunteer teaching middle school students.
How We Partner
We are focused on partnering with community foundations, because you know your nonprofits – what they need, how to reach them, and the best ways to support them. This means we can effectively and efficiently provide training to the right people from the right nonprofits.
We offer two ways to bring AI skills training to your nonprofits.
In-Person Training
You host the event – securing a venue, promoting it to your nonprofits, and handling registration and payment. We deliver the training. This works well when you want to offer AI skills as part of a broader capacity-building initiative or event. Pricing is negotiated based on group size and scope.
Online Training
We handle everything – scheduling, registration, payment, and instruction. Your role is connecting us with your nonprofits by promoting the training through your network. This is a lightweight way to bring valuable AI skills to your community with minimal staff time.
Partner With Us
If you’re interested, we encourage you to reach out!