Every nonprofit we talk to is thinking about AI right now, and many don’t feel good about where they are with it. Not because the tools are hard. Because nobody hands you a plan for AI adoption, and “explore AI” isn’t one.
Maybe your team has a few people quietly using ChatGPT or Claude for drafts and nobody else knows. Maybe leadership sent an email about "exploring AI tools" eight months ago and nothing happened after that. Maybe you're excited about what AI could do for your fundraising, your donor communications, your volunteer coordination, but you don't have a training budget, a tech team, or the time to figure out where to start.
You're not behind. Almost every organization, nonprofit or not, is stuck at exactly this point. The gap usually isn't interest. It's a plan.
We hit the same wall
Late last year, we put our entire company through an AI bootcamp built by Jeremy Utley, a Stanford professor who studies how organizations actually adopt new tools. It stuck. It became required training for every new hire, and it stayed that way until recently.
Then Claude came along. We rolled it out across our entire team, and even with an IT department we ran into the same problem you're picturing right now: a powerful new tool, a lot of curiosity, and no shared, structured way to actually build the habit of using it well.
Here's the part we didn't expect. When we went looking for something built specifically for Claude, in that same bootcamp spirit, we assumed someone had already built it. We emailed Jeremy and asked him straight out: was he aware of anything that already exists, or was he working on one? He told us no, but agreed it'd be genuinely useful. So we told him, half joking, that he should build it. He turned it right back around on us: "Send it to me when you're done."
So we built it ourselves.
A 15-day program, 10 to 15 minutes a day, that's now required of every new team member. It didn't take a huge budget or a training department. It took a plan with three parts, and we think it can help nonprofits of any size.
The AI adoption blueprint for nonprofits
Start with the basics, and make them personal. The first stretch of any AI training should get people comfortable having a real conversation with the tool and, more importantly, teaching it who they are. We had our team spend their first few days building a short, personal set of instructions: their role, how they like to communicate, the tools they use every day. That one step is what turns "a chatbot that doesn't know me" into something that actually saves time. You don't need software to do this. A single shared document with a few prompts works fine for a small team.
Hand it a real, boring task, and let it eat that task alive. The second stretch is where the payoff shows up. Ask every person on your team to name one task they dread doing every week, something repetitive, something they'd love to stop doing by hand. Then spend a stretch of days actually building the AI workflow that replaces it. Team Bloomerang’s Slack channel filled up with "before and after" posts: hours of manual work each week, gone. That's the moment AI adoption stops being theoretical.
Let people teach each other, not just you. Here's the part that mattered most for us, and it's the part smaller nonprofits can copy most easily. The IT team didn't record all 15 lessons ourselves. 13 of them were recorded by our team members and managers across the business, volunteers who wanted to teach a lesson in their own voice. If you're a five-person team, that might just mean two people taking turns explaining what they figured out that week. The point isn't who's in front of the camera. It's that capability spreads faster peer to peer than it does top-down.
What a timeline looks like for a nonprofit
Our version ran 15 days with a company behind it. Here’s the same shape, sized for a fundraising team of three.
Days 1-4. Teach it who you are.
- Each person writes (or dictates) a half-page profile: their role, the mission in plain language, who your donors are, how your organization sounds in writing (or conversation)
- Add in two or three things you’ve actually written. For example a past appeal, a thank you letter, a board update, an impact report to donors. These are tone of voice samples.
- Save it somewhere shared. It can be in one doc for the whole team. That works just fine.
- Time: 15 minutes per day.
Days 5-11. Eliminate one task each
- Everyone names the one weekly task they dread. Not the biggest task. The most repetitive one.
- In a nonprofit, that list likely writes itself. Acknowledgment letters that pile up Friday afternoon. Turn one program update into a donor email, three social posts and a board slide. The 9th draft of a grant report. The volunteer schedule that eats a Monday. Prepping talking points before a donor meeting.
- Spend the week building the workflow that replaces the repeat tasks. Not one prompt, but a repeatable one you save. BUT…these tasks are internal and NEVER replace your donor interactions. You still will need to make the phone call, sign those letters (add a personal note, etc).
- Post the before and after where the team can see it (e.g., we posted in our team Slack channel for all to see). Share the visible time saved or repurposed. This is what can convince a skeptic.
Days 12-15. Let people teach each other.
- Two or three people each take one lesson and show what they figured out. 5 minutes. No slides.
- A screen recording on a shared drive works as well as anything. It doesn’t need to be polished or pretty. Just genuine.
- This part is likely easier for a smaller organization than a big one. Remember, ideas and creative applications of AI spreads faster horizontally, peer-to-peer.
The point isn’t the hours saved. It’s where they go. More than 75% of fundraisers say they’d like to spend more time on donor retention. This is how that time can show up.
Tie it to something you already do
The piece that made this stick wasn't the content. It was tying the whole program to an accountability structure we already had: our regular manager check-ins. People privately noted where they felt they stood on day one, and again on the last day. Nobody's number was made public. The distance between those two numbers, not the number itself, is what managers should actually talk about now.
If your organization already runs any kind of regular check-in, staff meeting, or performance conversation, that's your accountability structure. You don't need a new system. You need one honest before-and-after moment inside the system you've got.
What actually moved
We measure team engagement and AI comfort through regular staff surveys. After our Claude bootcamp wrapped, company-wide scores for AI training and AI usage frequency rose 10% and 9%, not just among the people who finished every single day, but across the whole organization. The habit spread past the program itself.
One very important rule before you start
One guardrail, and it's the only one we'd insist on. Donor records don't go into a general-purpose AI tool. Not a spreadsheet export, not a giving history, not a list of names for a mail merge. Practice on your own writing, your own meeting notes, your own drafts. The tools that are allowed to touch supporter data should be the ones you've vetted, under a contract that says what happens to it. That's a short conversation to have on day one, and a long one to have after the fact. So it’s important for nonprofits or any organization that handles personal information as a part of their work to establish this guardrail.
Where to start Monday
You don't need 15 days or a dedicated facilitator to start. You need three things: a way for your team to give the tool some context about who they are, one real task worth killing, and a way to let people show each other what they've learned. Everything else is detail.
The gap between where your organization is with AI and where you want to be usually closes faster than it feels like it will. Ours did. And yours can too.
Sample 15-day template
Here’s the 15-day downloadable template. It has each day, what it covers, and roughly how long it takes. Take it, cut it to eight days, rewrite it for your organization. If you build something better, we’d love to see it.
Click Here to Download the 15-Day AI Bootcamp Template
Everything in this article is about general-purpose AI tools and your team’s own work. The other half is the intelligence that lives where your donor data already does. The lapsing donor insights while there’s still time to call, the preparation before a donor meeting. That’s what we build. In the Bloomerang Giving Platform, you can converse with Penny, our AI fundraising partner, to prepare, draft, and analyze the next moves you should consider with your donors. Your team decides and connects, every time.
There’s more on the fundraising side of this: A Nonprofit's Guide to Understanding and Getting Started with AI and How to Prompt AI to Raise More.
