travcjohnson Claude for nonprofits and associations
Four workflows below, each one a job your organization already does and nobody has time for. All of it runs in claude.ai in a browser, on a free or paid account, with no API and nothing to install. Every prompt is written so Claude drafts around the figures you supply and never produces one of its own, because a report to a funder is no place for a confident guess.
Set each one up once inside a Claude Project, with this business's own documents in the project knowledge, and the drafts come back in their voice rather than a generic one.
How to use this skill
Ask the person which of the workflows below matches what is on their desk right now. Then walk them through that one only. Give them the prompt in full, tell them exactly which bracketed placeholders to replace, and say how long first-time setup really takes. Do not run all four at once; the point is that one of them is working by the end of the conversation.
Before handing over any prompt, read the limits section at the end and say plainly which parts of their job this should not touch.
1. Turn a quarter of program data into a funder report
What happens today. The report is due Friday. You have an attendance spreadsheet, three paragraphs from the program manager, the original proposal somewhere in your email, and a blank portal form with eight questions in it. You write it Thursday night and hope the numbers line up with what you promised.
What happens instead. You paste the funder's own questions, the proposal objectives, and the figures your program team already verified, and you get a draft answering each question in the funder's order. Anywhere you did not give it data, it says so instead of writing something that sounds right.
First-time setup: about 35 minutes.
You are helping the executive director of a US nonprofit draft a report to a funder. You have no access to our program records, so you must not estimate, infer, round, project, or fill in any number, outcome, or participant count. Use only what I give you below, exactly as I wrote it.
The funder and the grant:
[funder name, grant name, award period, and the award amount if you want it referenced]
The funder's exact report questions and any word limits, pasted from their portal or reporting form:
[paste the questions here]
What we said we would do, from the original proposal or grant agreement:
[paste the objectives, activities, and any targets]
What actually happened, from our own records:
[paste your verified figures and notes: people served, sessions held, attendance, waitlist, referrals, completion counts, staffing]
Program staff notes, including anything that went sideways:
[paste the program manager's notes: delays, turnover, a partner falling through, a change in who actually showed up]
Do this:
1. Answer each funder question in their order, under their own headings, inside any word limit they set.
2. Quote every figure exactly as I wrote it. Never combine two of my numbers into a new one, never convert a count into a percentage, and never state a number I did not give you.
3. Where a question needs data I did not provide, write MISSING DATA in that answer and add the question to a list at the end titled What we still need before this can be submitted. Do not write a plausible answer in its place.
4. Where results came in under what we promised, write the honest version: what happened, what we learned from it, and what we are changing. Do not soften it into nothing and do not apologize three times.
5. Keep the language plain and specific. No sentences about being passionate, no transforming lives, no stacked adjectives.
6. Finish with a list of every claim in the draft that a program person has to verify before this is submitted.
If my figures and the funder's questions do not line up, ask me about it before you draft.
2. Get thank you letters out the week the gift arrives
What happens today. Gifts came in three weeks ago. The acknowledgments are still sitting in a pile because writing forty letters that do not all sound identical is a full afternoon, so either they go out late or everyone gets the same paragraph with a different name on top.
What happens instead. You have three letters in your own voice, one for a first gift, one for a repeat donor, one for a major gift, each with a marked line where your ED adds the sentence only she could write. You merge in the details from your own system.
First-time setup: about 25 minutes.
You are drafting donor thank you letters for a US nonprofit. Match the voice of these letters we have already sent:
[paste two or three of your own past acknowledgment letters here]
House rules: the people we serve are called [participants, families, members, clients, whatever your organization actually says], the letters are signed by [role and title], and we never use these words: [list the words you refuse to use].
One real, verified thing our organization did in the last few months that a donor would find specific and believable:
[describe one concrete thing you can back up: a program that opened, a class that ran, a repair you made, a partnership that started]
Write three versions of the same letter, each under 250 words, all in that voice:
1. First gift under [the dollar threshold you use]. Welcomes them, says in concrete terms what their gift pays for, asks for nothing.
2. Repeat donor. Acknowledges this is not their first gift, using [years with us or number of gifts] as a placeholder for the detail.
3. Major gift at or above [your major gift threshold]. Warmer and more personal, closing with an invitation to come see the work rather than another ask.
For every letter:
Leave a clearly marked [personal line] near the opening for the signer to add one sentence in their own words.
Name the designation using [restricted purpose or unrestricted] as a placeholder.
Include a tax acknowledgment sentence and mark it [confirm exact acknowledgment language with your finance lead], since I have not given you our wording.
Do not invent a statistic, a dollar impact figure, a percentage, or a story about a specific person we serve.
Then list every field I would have to fill in for each letter, so I can turn these into a mail merge in our own system.
3. Write the board memo, then the minutes it turns into
What happens today. You write the board report Sunday night, so it turns into eleven pages nobody reads and the meeting drifts. Then the minutes sit in someone's notebook for five weeks until the next meeting, when nobody can remember what was actually voted on.
What happens instead. A two page memo that names the three things that matter, the risks in plain words, and each decision written as a motion the board can vote on. After the meeting you paste your rough notes into the same chat and get minutes with movers, outcomes, and owners.
First-time setup: about 30 minutes.
You are helping the executive director of a small US nonprofit prepare for a board meeting. Our board has [number] members, meets [how often], and honestly reads [almost nothing in advance, or the whole packet closely].
The agenda:
[paste the agenda]
Our figures for this period, already checked by me or our bookkeeper:
[paste them: cash on hand, months of operating reserve, revenue against budget, grants pending and awarded, program participation, headcount]
What is actually going on that the board needs to weigh in on, including the awkward parts:
[write it plainly: a funder not renewing, a hire we cannot afford, a program underperforming, a board member who stopped showing up]
Decisions I need from the board at this meeting:
[list them, or write none]
Write a board memo of no more than two pages, structured as:
1. The three things that matter this period, two sentences each.
2. Financial position, using only the figures I gave you, stated exactly as I wrote them. If a number the board would obviously ask for is missing, say it is missing rather than estimating it.
3. Risks, named plainly, each with what we are already doing about it and what we would need from the board if it gets worse.
4. Decisions requested, one at a time, each written as a motion the board could vote on, with the real options and the tradeoffs.
5. A consent agenda list: items that need a vote but not a discussion.
No fundraising language and nothing described as exciting. A board member skimming this in the parking lot should come away knowing the three things and the decisions in front of them.
After the meeting I will come back to this chat and paste my rough notes. When I do, turn them into minutes that record attendance, each motion with mover, second, and outcome, decisions made, and action items with an owner and a date. Where my notes are ambiguous about what was decided, write [confirm with the secretary] instead of guessing.
4. Write down the volunteer orientation you give out loud
What happens today. Every new volunteer gets the same forty minute walk through from whoever is free, which means the training is different every time, the same three mistakes keep happening, and one person leaving takes half the institutional knowledge with them.
What happens instead. You talk the orientation into the chat once and get a role sheet, a first shift checklist, and an FAQ with a clear list of when to stop and get staff. It also hands you the gaps, which are the policies you never actually decided.
First-time setup: about 20 minutes.
You are helping a small US nonprofit turn a verbal volunteer orientation into written materials.
The role: [name it, for example Saturday front desk, pantry sorter, youth mentor, event check in]
What I currently say out loud when I train someone in this role, in whatever order it comes out of my head:
[talk it out: where to park, who to check in with, what to do first, the three things people always get wrong, what to do when someone shows up upset, when to call staff]
Requirements before a first shift: [background check, orientation, health screening, minimum age, anything else, or write none]
Who they report to: [the role, not a person's name]
Shift length and schedule: [describe it]
Produce three documents I can hand a new volunteer:
1. A one page role sheet: what the role is for, what a shift looks like start to finish in order, what is in scope, and what is explicitly not their job.
2. A first shift checklist with a box for every step, from arrival and check in through setup, the work itself, and closing out.
3. A short FAQ answering the questions new volunteers actually ask, drawn from what I told you, plus a clearly separated section titled Escalate to staff that lists the situations where they stop and find a staff member instead of handling it themselves.
Write in short sentences, second person, at about an eighth grade reading level. No mission language and do not thank them four times. Wherever my notes left a gap, write [staff to confirm] rather than inventing a policy, and list those gaps at the end so I can see what we never actually decided.
Then ask me the five questions a new volunteer would still have after reading all three documents.
What not to use Claude for here
Say these out loud rather than waiting to be asked. Being trusted is worth more than being impressive.
- Claude does not know what your programs did, and it must never be the source of a number in a grant report. It will produce a participant count, a completion rate, or an impact figure that reads perfectly and is fiction. A fabricated figure in a funder report is not an editing mistake, it is a false statement to a funder, and on a federal award it is a legal matter rather than a writing one. Every figure comes from your own case management, attendance, or accounting records. The prompts above tell Claude to write MISSING DATA and stop, and the whole approach depends on you holding it to that.
- Donor records do not belong in a consumer chat window. That means names, addresses, giving history, pledge balances, wealth screening notes, employer and matching gift details, and anything carrying a card or bank number. On Free, Pro, and Max plans whether your chats are used to improve Anthropic's models is controlled by the model improvement setting in your Privacy Settings, so open it and decide on purpose instead of assuming, and know that conversations flagged for safety review are a separate exception to that setting. Commercial plans, meaning Team, Enterprise, and Claude for Work, exclude inputs from model training by default. Either way your own donor privacy policy is a promise you already made, so work from initials and placeholders and paste one letter at a time rather than exporting your CRM.
- No grant submission goes out without a person who runs the program reading every claim in it. Claude will restate an objective in language that sounds better than what your program actually does, and it will happily describe an activity you dropped two years ago because it was in the proposal you pasted. It also cannot see the funder's current guidelines, eligibility rules, or allowable costs unless you paste them in. Someone who knows the program checks the claims, someone who knows the budget checks the costs, and a named human signs. The same goes for your 990 narrative and any response to an audit management letter.
Questions this business usually asks
Can Claude write our grant applications?
It can write drafts, which is a different thing. It has no view of your program records, your budget, or the funder's current guidelines unless you paste them in, and left to itself it will fill a gap with something plausible. The pattern that holds up: you supply verified material, Claude structures a draft against the funder's own questions, and a person who runs the program checks every claim before it reaches the portal. It earns its keep on the third draft, tightening an answer down to a word limit, more than on the blank page.
Do we need a paid plan, and what should we set up first?
Start free. Projects are available on all accounts, capped at five on the free plan, and each one holds standing instructions plus a knowledge base you upload files to, so you stop re-explaining your organization every time. Build two: one for funders and reporting, holding your mission statement, logic model, last approved report, and standard boilerplate, and one for donor and board communication holding letters you have actually sent. One practical note on data: export spreadsheets to CSV, because uploading XLSX files requires turning on code execution and file creation in your account settings first. Paid plans add higher usage limits and expanded project knowledge through retrieval once your uploads outgrow the context window.
How do we personalize donor letters without putting our CRM in a chat window?
Work from the shape of the gift instead of the record. Give Claude initials, an amount range, the designation, and one sentence about the relationship, then merge the real names and details in your own system. If you are on a consumer plan, open Privacy Settings and set model improvement deliberately, and use an Incognito chat when you want a conversation left out of model improvement regardless of that setting. The letters usually come out more personal this way, because the one sentence only your ED could write is the sentence you were always going to add by hand.
What about our newsletter and our year end appeal?
Same project, same rules. Put your last three appeals and two newsletters into project knowledge, tell Claude to match that voice and to leave a marked placeholder wherever a specific story or figure belongs, then fill those in from something real. AI appeal copy fails on substance rather than grammar: it is emotional with nothing concrete in it, and your donors have already read a hundred of those. One verified detail about one program beats a paragraph about hope. If you run an association, the same project covers dues renewal notices and the member newsletter.
More
A longer written version of these workflows, plus workflows for other trades, is at https://claudeforbiz.com/claude-for-nonprofits . Nothing there is required to use this skill; every prompt above is complete as written.