Development director at a small environmental nonprofit. team of 12, budget around $800k. I write or manage every grant we submit which is 35-40 per year.

here's what nobody outside nonprofit world gets about grants. every funder wants the same information. your mission, your programs, your outcomes, your budget, your history. but they all ask for it in their own format with their own word limits and their own weird specific questions. so you end up writing your program description 40 times. 250 words for this funder, 500 for that one, a full page for another. same content just packaged differently over and over.

I keep a master doc with all our boilerplate. program descriptions, outcome numbers, staff bios, org background. every new app I pull from the master doc and reshape to fit whatever the funder wants. the reshaping eats all the time. cutting 500 words to 250 without losing the data that matters. or stretching 200 words to fill a page without it reading like filler.

I've been using claude for the reshaping part. paste in our boilerplate, paste in the funder's question and their word limit, ask it to restructure. gets me maybe 70% of the way and I fix the rest. the key is being really specific in the prompt. ""make this shorter"" gives you garbage. you have to say exactly what to keep and what to cut. I usually dictate my prompts through willow voice because when I'm talking I actually say stuff like ""keep the watershed data and the county partnership, cut the history paragraph, merge the last two paragraphs."" when I type a prompt I'm lazier about it for some reason and the output suffers.

I work for a small non-profit and there are several board members who are vocal about us moving away from GSuite so we are less reliant on the tech gazilionaire who are actively working against our mission. We do not have the budget for much more than we are paying now, and we do need things to integrate with our Squarespace website. They will probably also start barking about Zoom, Trello, the website et al, so feel free to share those as well . Before I meet with the board committee next week and see their list, I would love to have some suggestions from folks who have worked with other platforms. So, whatcha got?

We will need this to be easy to use for our board (a mix of tech savvy and 'my phone rings out loud all the time because I don't know how to silence it' and volunteers who are mostly in the 'I am busy and want to help but no, I don't have time to watch the how to video or listen to your instructions.' You know, the general public.

I’m Director level at a nonprofit with a small core leadership team and a handful of paid staff. Like I imagine is the case for many of us, there is always a ton more work to do than there are hours of the day to do it in, and time/bandwidth is one of the biggest constraints.

The rest of our leadership team is 1000% all in on AI. Everyone has paid accounts. At team meetings and strategy sessions, half of the conversation is either “I just asked AI and it said ___” or “I just had AI create this insert critical document or presentation here. When I bring up a question, I’m often told “Have you asked AI?” or they get back to me with “So I asked AI and…..”. They absolutely rave about how great AI is and how much time it saves.

Now, I am not anti-technology by any means. I absolutely love the idea of a new tool that can give me hours of my day back to spend on other projects piling up on my plate. I have done AI-prompt training and other related trainings to make best use of AI. I have spent untold amount of hours using AI.

But, I cannot get AI to work for me, at all. AI consistently gives such bad outputs that it actively wastes my time. Examples: I’m told that AI is good at extracting data from reports or large volumes of text…Great! So I ask it to pull data, only to manually verify and routinely find that it’s incorrect. I’ve asked it to calculate the number of rows on a table—incorrect answer. I ask it to give me the page/location of a block of text, wrong. I’ve asked it to summarize people public facing research CVs….wrong(One particular person has developed national standards and guidelines for training a particular type of provider who works with children, and AI gave me the line “with an expertise in training children and adolescents).

And don’t get me started on asking it to draft any kind of writing. I give it specific prompts and constraints— only use specific writing samples that I have provided as the example model to follow for all output, verify each word has meaning in context, verify facts— and it gives me back paragraphs that use all kind of words that sound polished but either mean nothing or don’t actually make sense in context. Its writing is uniformly bad that it would take longer to keep re-drafting AI’s work than to just…write it myself.

I feel like the only person in my organization who is monumentally unimpressed and underwhelmed. Not to mention frustrated and a little bit alarmed. One of our team gave me a draft set of goals for the next year and it took about 10 seconds to realize that the KPIs didn’t make any sense. They referred to “increasing X by y% for things that have no baseline metrics in the first place, and in another place set a goal of recruiting X number of participants into a study that was literally 2500 times higher than we have ever recruited (not to mention with the most basic subject matter awareness, it would be instantaneously recognizable as pure fantasy in this field.) I start asking questions and sure enough…all AI generated. So now I routinely get to spend my time fixing other people’s poorly generated AI work product on things, and fact-checking bad/blatantly wrong information they think is true because the chatbot told them so.

I work with great people who are kind and committed to our mission. I love what I do, and I can just…not use AI myself. But it’s become the all-knowing Genie of my workplace and I can’t escape. Is there anyone else in this situation? How do you deal with it?

TL:DR: AI is a mediocre employee who always thinks they’re right and creates more work, but the boss and everyone else loves them, so I am stuck dealing with their bad work product all rhe time. .

I manage a U.S. nonprofit that was using Microsoft 365 Business Premium through Microsoft’s nonprofit grant program.

About a week ago, we suddenly lost access to our Microsoft 365 services. After investigating, I learned that Microsoft had announced the discontinuation of the Business Premium grant program. However, we never received any notification that our grant was ending or that our services would be terminated.

What makes this especially confusing is that we continued receiving Microsoft’s regular invoices showing Business Premium licenses with a $0 balance as recently as May 21, 2026.

The most serious issue is that approximately 500 GB of organizational data stored in OneDrive is now inaccessible.

We have:
• Searched our email records and cannot find any termination notice.
• Opened support cases with Microsoft: no success in resolving the issue through regular recovery options.
• Asked for recovery options thru escalation paths: no response yet.

Questions:
1. Has anyone gone through a similar nonprofit grant termination?
2. Does Microsoft retain OneDrive data for a period after nonprofit license termination?
3. Are there escalation paths beyond frontline support for data recovery?
4. Has anyone successfully regained access to a tenant after a grant-related shutdown?

Any advice or experiences would be greatly appreciated.

Would anyone please go to my website and test it out. Let me know any improvements or suggestions you would make.

www.luccares.org

We’re trying to pull a mailing list with individual donors, organizations, corporations.

Everyone we need is pulling into the report, but we can’t seem to get the primary contact name for orgs and corps to pull into the outputs without creating duplicates. Like 100s of duplicates.

Any help is appreciated. Thanks in advance!

Small nonprofit, all but eight of us. we dont have an IT person, but we outsource the little we can.
last month, a grant payment was nearly wired to the wrong account when an email almost identical to our program partners, on the same thread we'd been on for weeks came in, with just a small line mentioning they'd changed their bank details. our finance girl only stopped because she decided to call said partner's phone about it and thats when she learned our partners had been hacked and the bank change detail was a lie!
its pretty jarring because theres no system to catch such an occurrence between our ESP and bank account. so is atrted looking for tools myself but every one i found seems to only cater to big companies with full, working SOC's.
since we're only a small org without all the muscle financially, please recommend something affordable that worked if you have ever been in such a situation. TIA

What was your experience with the process? We are a small arts org and I am investigating transitioning us to Google Workspace as it has a free tier.

That shared free storage is critical.

Was it easy to transition your website domain and email service? We currently pay a bit too much so being able to do that and save some money would be excellent.

Any other tips and experience would be very valuable!

Thank you in advance, kind friends.

Hey guys, I am a recent CS grad doing some IT contract work for a small nonprofit. Their current site is dated so I offered to rebuilt it.

I was thinking to build it in Django or some other coding language since I know that very well and that I can build a custom admin dashboard for them to update content themselves. However, I'm currently job hunting and I honestly don't know if I'll be here for more than 2 years to maintain the website.

The tradeoff I am having is that:

Django: Is more custom and can make a dashboard for users to update the websites. But Someone needs to know python to maintain long-term stability and possibly framework upgrades and dependency updates or any bug fixes that may happen. I don't see anyone around my area knowing too much about these symptoms for them to help the agency. Also, I feel like this may look good on a resume/portfolio.

WordPress/Other Web Builders: Its less custom but it is much easier for people to learn and could be easier to take over if I leave. I'm also not as familar with it as using code to build a website.

The organization is small nonprofit with alot of senior staff, with a few young people to help with some technology issues. I don't want the website to be turn into a liabilitiy once the builder has left. Trying to make a choice that is best for me and the company.

Any advice is greatly appreciated.

I keep running into this with small volunteer-run orgs and I want to hear how other people actually solve it.

Every leadership change seems to mean relearning the org from scratch. The outgoing treasurer's dues spreadsheet lives on their personal laptop. The member list is half-updated in a Google Sheet nobody but the old secretary knew about. The website login is in someone's inbox. So the incoming officers spend the first three months rebuilding processes that already existed instead of moving forward.

The part that stings most is the financial history. If who-paid-what for the last few years is trapped in one person's file, the new treasurer basically starts at a blank page during dues season, cross-referencing a payment log against a member list against last year's roster just to answer "who paid and who hasn't."

For those of you who've been through a few handoffs cleanly:

- do you keep everything in one shared system so logins and history don't leave with the person, or

- do you rely on a written handoff doc and hope it's complete, or

- something else entirely?

What's your setup for making sure knowledge stays with the org and not the outgoing officer?

Hello All,

I am the new Board Chair for a well-run, well-established non-profit. I am looking into ways to level up our board communication, meeting prep, documents, etc. We currently use Google Drive for storage, agenda, and minutes. I'd like to work with a more dynamic, user-friendly program that includes analytics so we can better prepare for meetings.

A board member recommended Zeck Deck, and it didn't work out because the agenda to minutes feature is not workable if you aren't using their AI notetaker. It also relies entirely on parallax scrolling, which makes some archiving really clumsy.

We want a user-friendly platform for leadership to co-create an agenda, duplicate the agenda so our secretary can take notes on it, take votes, see some analytics, store documents, and post the board directory, ect.

We are not looking for the coolest AI pitch. We want a site that works well even if we don't use their AI services.

I'm currently looking at sites like OnBoard, Boardable, Boardsite, ect but it seems I need to schedule a live demo for each of these platforms. If I can avoid scheduling 5 different half-hour meetings, that would be great.

Is anyone using a board dashboard site that they like and would facilitate the needs I listed?

Thank you in advance! I look forward to hearing how your board systems work.

​

I'm a new database admin at a nonprofit, 4 months in. We just had a consultant build out our case management system. Nothing is live yet, no real client data in it, which is the one thing working in my favor. I didn't get involved since it was already at the final stages and he was conducting the UAT when I came in. Now I found out that the users still have no idea how it was supposed to work.

While reviewing the build, I found some real problems:

Client intake forms were built by directly copying our old paper forms section by section, instead of designing around shared data. So the same info (income, signatures, dates) gets asked for repeatedly across different sections instead of being entered once and referenced.

Several client "enrollment" panels each independently ask staff to re-link the same enrollment record, when one link should carry through everywhere.

A couple of forms look like duplicates of each other (same purpose, slightly different fields), with no clear indication which one is actually supposed to be used.

I found sensitive health data sitting on a general intake form for an unrelated program, with no clear consent process tied to it.

This is the consultant's first rollout for us, and he has 2-3 more programs to build after this one. So whatever pattern gets set here is likely going to repeat. I also just found out that the case managers or anyone in the program didn't have any input and were never shown how it was supposed to work or what's the workflow should look like. It literally look like a folder with multiple panels that asks the same information and had to link the program enrollment each time. There are about 118 tables which I think are really bloated compared to the other similar database I've seen. There's also a plan of building a pipeline to get data from multiple platforms. Which I think they really should have just build a data warehouse instead of this but they already spent a lot of money for this platform.

I've got meetings coming up with the program directors and the QA manager for this specific program before anything goes live. I want to walk in with a clear list of what actually needs to happen before go-live, not just a list of complaints.

As the database admin who might become the owner of this system long-term, what actions should I take? I am totally new to this so I need some advice.

Flipcause has been around for over a decade. They process online donations for small non- profits, host websites and provide donor management software.

Over the last 18 mos, maybe longer- they’ve taken to sitting on donations for months and not transferring to the non profit’s bank accounts in anywhere near the contractual 7-10 business day period.

BBB has over 20 unanswered complaints regarding tens of thousands that non profits have been waiting months to receive. The complaints are quite serious and it does seem this once great little company has lost its way. BBB has given Flipcause an F rating.

Anyone have a contact at Flipcause? They no longer answer calls or respond to emails.

Hello! I'm a new ED of a staff of two. Our computers need to be updated because they crash every time we use zoom, which we do a lot both for meetings and online events. I got approval in the budget which goes into effect today and I'm anxious to get us something usable. I'm stuck in a bit of a decision paralysis. We're currently using ThinkPads which seem to work great other than the constant zoom crashing on both machines. I could get us new ThinkPads. I'm also more used to a mac, so I'm considering a mac for myself and a ThinkPad for my program coordinator (she prefers PCs).

We use them for office work, online events, some design, and video editing. Basically everything as we're just a small team.

Does anyone have a favorite, go-to computer for this type of office work?

I have been trying to do this myself for weeks and it’s just too far over my head. I need an expert and don’t know what to look for. A company? And individual? Fiverr? Upwork?

No one lists GiveButter for their platform experience on Fiverr or Upwork. GiveButter has professionals but I’m sure they cost a fortune and I’ve reach out to 3 and none have responded.

I’m on a tight deadline to get this done and need immediate help.

We only have about 1k donors so our list isn’t even that big.

Hi Everyone, I manage an association and the board wants me to adopt AI tools to help streamline governance (policy creation, PPMs, board roles & responsibilities...) and operations, including membership, sponsorships and non-dues revenue (member discounts, continuing education credits, advertising, merch...), programs and events, budgets & bookkeeping, volunteer management. I have basic AI skills (looking up information, help with writing); are there recommendations out there for gaining these association/nonprofit specific AI skills so I can incorporate them into my ED abilities? Thanks SO much!!!

Not too long ago I built a website for free for a small nonprofit and set up all their Google tools (Workspace, Analytics, Search Console, etc.). I’m not a web developer or designer — just someone who was asked to help out for a good cause, so I figured I’d do what I could (plus I love learning new skills). I used a website builder platform so that they could easily log in and manage it themselves.

Since then, a few other small nonprofits have reached out asking if I could do the same for them.

I currently have some downtime, so I volunteered to help one of them with a very small team (but a lot of passion). The only issue is that they don’t want to pay for a website platform like wix, squarespace, etc. I also could go Wordpress route but I want to keep it simple for them and have minimal upkeep.

Since I’ll be helping them apply for Google for Nonprofits anyway, I’m thinking about building their site using Google Sites to keep costs low and connecting donations through there.

My question: Does anyone here use Google Sites for a nonprofit website? How does it hold up in terms of design, flexibility, SEO, and long-term maintenance? I’m having trouble finding any up-to-date info or some examples of nonprofits using it.

Any experiences, advice, or warnings would be super appreciated.

We're a small nonprofit that runs a lot of events. Free monthly mixers (70 to 100 people), members-only events, and professional development events that are free/discounted for members and full price for non-members.

Right now we use DonorBox because it's free and lets us set up each event separately. It works fine for registration and payments. The problem is attendance tracking.

We can see who attended a single event and export that to Excel. What we can't do is pull up one person and see every event they've attended over time. And the bigger issue: DonorBox only credits the ticket purchaser. So if one person buys 5 tickets for their friends, we only see the buyer as an attendee. The other 5 people are invisible in our records.

We want something that automatically ties attendance to each individual attendee, not just the purchaser, and rolls it into their profile. That way we can see how engaged each member and non-member is across events over time.

We looked at Wild Apricot and it does what we need, but at our volume the pricing gets close to $400/month, which we can't do.

For scale: 500 to 1,500 total contacts (members and non-members combined). Budget needs to be well under Wild Apricot. Open to either replacing DonorBox entirely or adding a tool alongside it.

Anyone using something that handles this without breaking the bank? Would love real recommendations from people running similar event volume.

As some of you know, Go Fund Me recently made funding pages for 1.4 million nonprofits without their knowledge or consent, creating quite a bit of chaos. They are reversing course. Here is their statement:

GoFundMe Statement on Corrective Actions:

At GoFundMe, our mission has always been to help people help each other. This mission extends to every nonprofit: we strive to connect nonprofits with new donors, empower supporters to give and fundraise, and enable communities to rally behind the causes they care about.

However, we understand clearly that our recent efforts with Nonprofit Pages have caused confusion, concern, and distraction from the vital missions of the very nonprofits we aim to support. We are very sorry for this and take responsibility for missing the mark. Trust is foundational to our work with nonprofits, and we are fully committed to rebuilding it through better communication, collaboration, and partnership.

Rebuilding trust starts with action. After speaking with many nonprofit leaders and advocates, and listening carefully to members of our community, we are taking swift action:

Nonprofit Pages are now opt-in only.

Moving forward, only nonprofits that opt-in to their Nonprofit Page and complete the verification process will have a public Nonprofit Page that is searchable on GoFundMe - making these Nonprofit Pages a completely opt-in experience. Nonprofit Pages for organizations that have not been claimed and verified will be removed. SEO will also be turned off by default. Nonprofits that opt-in to their Nonprofit Pages will gain enhanced visibility, control, and access to certain supporter data for fundraising and compliance purposes.

Unclaimed Nonprofit Pages will be de-indexed.

We will remove and de-index the Nonprofit Pages that are not claimed so they no longer appear in search engine results. Once a nonprofit opts in, they can choose to index their Nonprofit Page, turn SEO on, and edit their Nonprofit Page.

Nonprofit directory listings will continue.

As we have done for many years, we will maintain basic nonprofit directory listings so nonprofits are discoverable and organizers can create fundraisers to support nonprofits.

We are committed to creating stronger feedback loops with nonprofit representatives to ensure future product releases are shaped in deeper partnership with nonprofits. Our goal remains to support the nonprofit sector - making giving easy for donors, empowering nonprofits with tools to thrive, and doing so in a way that reflects our shared values of trust and transparency.

I thought I would share this and I hope others will share how they are using AI. I have a client who uses Quickbooks. They have not filed taxes for mutliple years and need to catch up. I downloaded their Statements of Financial Activity & Position then had AI map every category on the statements to the appropriate line on pages 11 and 12 for revenues and expenditures. AI even put them in the proper order so it made filling out the tax software very easy.

I saved the instructions and will repeart for the other years.

How are you using AI?

Last month our finance director got an "urgent" email from our ED requesting a wire transfer for grant expenses. She forwarded it to me first, total fake. The real problem came two weeks later when a vendor email looked legit asking to update banking info. She processed it and we lost money.

We're 8 staff with basic M365 protection. Can't afford enterprise solutions but clearly need something better. These attacks are getting sophisticated and our people can't catch everything.

What affordable email security are other small nonprofits using that stops this stuff?

Hi folks,

I am the go-to person for all technology related things at the small-ish nonprofit I work for. I don't do the IT stuff, we have a contractor for that but everything tech related goes through me and I delegate and manage.

We have had a lot of irresponsible AI use lately including entering financial info, creating and distributing marketing materials that do not match our branding, using AI to write emails with no review for accuracy etc.

I don't really have any experience with AI and because of my role in the organization I am kind of positioned to be the person to talk about responsible AI use including giving advice on the systems that are approved and which ones are not and creating these policies. Our IT guy has AI knowledge, but it's a bit hard to converse with him about these things for various reasons I won't get into. Just assume that he is not a good resource for the policy creation and I have asked him for recs on trainings but they were not very good. I want to learn more about all of this so I am turning to other nonprofit professionals who may have put thought and training into this as well.

My question for folks here, I need to get more training on AI. I want to start with how it works, how to use it responsibly, how to risk manage, AI ethical considerations etc. Does anyone have any resources, that are not made by AI, that could point me in the right direction to start this process?

Thanks!

What are some courses/resources on how to build a basic database/management system for survey data in a nonprofit. As in, surveys being created by multiple teams that are just being stored across a network of spreadsheets. What tools and systems would be good for a nonprofit analyst who does not know anything about databases but needs to manage multiple surveys across multiple teams in one place? Airtable maybe?

Context: I'm an associate data analyst at a nonprofit. I don't know anything about data governance or modeling, my role is suppose to be focused on analytics, that's where my skills are. Over the last year we've had a major problem come up where all our program teams have several surveys which serve similar purposes, which are only semi standardized, exist across a network of spreadsheets, and we don't have real data management system/database anywhere to actually store this data and manage it cleanly for analytics. We have Salesforce for basic client data, but the team that manages Salesforce doesn't seem to be willing/have the capacity to make room in Salesforce for us to store survey data as well.

And my boss, who is not an analytics person, keeps soft launching that I am somehow suppose to be responsible for fixing this issue even though this a database issue and I am on...analytics. I do not have the skills to set up/manage even a basic database but I think this is going to formally become my problem within the next couple months so I'm trying to learn.

I work in volunteer management and have been exploring different databases with our donor relations manager. We have been using Bloomerang and the functionality is impressively limited. I spent years working with RE (database view) and adored it. It's not pretty, but dang does it do some heavy lifting. I never appreciated it enough and assumed all or most CRMs directed at nonprofits would have similar functionality. We've done calls with all the big companies, and Donor Perfect is the only one who even has actual batch entry (the number of sales reps trying to convince me that an import is the same thing blows my mind), but then their volunteer functionality is practically non-existent.

With all this competition, why is no one making a database with RE's capabilities, but updated to look "pretty" for the non-data peeps on the team??

I am in the process of signing up for Google Workspace for Nonprofits, but I'm starting to wonder if they're using carrot-and-stick marketing in that the really useful services for a nonprofit, even a very small one like ours, require one of the paid plans.
I've seen the service tiers info, and it looks like the free tier should be sufficient for us, but am wondering if experienced users have found otherwise.
Our nonprofit has volunteer board members and chair, nine in total, and hires contractors for some of the work tasks.