Part one of five on running a small nonprofit with AI: the fundamentals.

Let’s get cooking

“Start using AI at your nonprofit” can feel a bit like being asked to cook dinner for fifty people. Sounds fun and challenging, but first you’d quite like to know whether there’s a kitchen.

At High Impact Athletes, where I run tech, we’ve been building a team and culture where everyone has the tools and confidence to get cooking.

If you’re starting or running a small nonprofit, here’s the stack I’d use: a basic version costs US$8 per person per month for a ten-person team that qualifies for the listed nonprofit offers.

Claude sits at the centre. Once it can work with your nonprofit’s tools and information, things start to get interesting. Give a man a fish and he’ll eat for a day. Teach a man to use AI with the right content and guardrails and he now has a personal chef.

My morning sweep

I’ve been using my morning sweep for over a year. Claude rounds up the loose ends: emails waiting for a reply, requests buried in Slack, things I said I’d do in a meeting. It pulls from email, Slack, Fathom meeting actions and our standup notes in Notion. I choose what needs doing, and Claude adds it to my to-do list.

I can be quite chaotic and forgetful, so having those loose ends brought back to me is a huge relief. Some AI workflows help me do things I couldn’t do before. This one helps me do the things I said I would.

I’ve connected Claude to those tools and given it instructions for what to look for (yes to important things, no to my bad jokes etc.). It can still miss or misunderstand things, so I check anything consequential against the original source (which I ask Claude to link directly in line, so it’s just one click away!).

What you actually need

You probably already have documents, emails and meeting notes scattered across a few tools. The useful change is letting Claude work with them. Locking yourself into software your AI assistant can’t work with is probably the most regret-maximising decision to make in 2026. Here’s what I’d choose to get started:

An AI assistant: Claude

I’d start with Claude Team Standard at the nonprofit rate of US$8 per person per month, with a two-seat minimum. It’s what we use, and what I’ll be showing you throughout this series.

We pay US$40 per person per month for some Premium seats. Once you get going, the extra usage can feel like a godsend. You can upgrade the people who need it without moving the whole team.

Email and documents: start with Google Workspace

Google Workspace for Nonprofits gives eligible organisations Gmail, Docs, Drive and calendars for free. The ongoing Notion-ification of Google Docs, including tabs within documents, makes it an easier recommendation than it used to be.

We use Notion for shared documents and light databases. It has a great interface, but I’m increasingly unsure about the value. Even with its 50% Business discount, the annual-billing price is US$10 per person per month.

Paying $10 for what I use as a glorified word processor, while $8 buys the assistant doing my morning sweep, feels weird. If you’re mainly writing and organising documents too, I’d start with the free Google tools.

Team conversations and meeting records: Slack and Fathom

We use Slack for team conversations and Fathom to record and transcribe meetings.

I think recording and transcribing your team’s calls is probably the single biggest unlock for making Claude useful. So much of your team’s context lives in those conversations: what you’re working on, why you made a decision, what you’re still unsure about. Transcripts let Claude get up to speed without you explaining it all again. You can spend less time trying to write everything down. Say the decisions and next steps clearly in the call, and let the transcript capture them.

Slack Pro is free for eligible nonprofits with up to 250 members, and Fathom offers ten free nonprofit seats. If your current tools already do these jobs and Claude can access them, start there.

Don’t skip this. Give it a try and see how you go.

What that costs

For a ten-person organisation approved for these nonprofit offers, in US dollars per person per month:

CRM hosting and specialist software sit outside this budget.

What I’d add when there’s a job for it

I’d add these as the problems arise:

• A CRM: Twenty is the flexible, open-source option I’d look at first. We chose self-hosting, using our free AWS credits; the appendix covers that and paid hosting options.
• Automation: We use Make and Cloudflare Workers to move information between systems. We increasingly use Claude routines to do this too, with a generous allowance on the nonprofit Team plan.
• Analytics: Filament brings our fundraising and marketing data together. I love it, but I’d add it once there’s enough data to justify the cost. Disclosure: it’s built by my friend Tom Maitland, and we piloted it before launch.

Where I’d start

Get the nonprofit discounts, get Claude, record a meeting and:

1. Ask Claude to compare the transcript with your notes and suggest follow-up actions.
2. Review what it finds, then ask it to draft a follow-up email or message.

If it isn’t good enough, tell Claude why, ask it to try again, then update the saved instructions with what you’ve learnt. We’ll get into these improvement loops later in the series, but you can start that conversation now.

In part two, I’ll get into choosing tools Claude can actually work with, so the next thing you buy makes this easier.

So for now, start automating your meeting follow-ups and keep improving the process until you can rely on it. You get some time back, and a reason to think: what else could I do this with? As we work through this series and you keep exploring, you’ll find yourself venturing further, following your curiosity into new territory, and leaving a trail of automation behind you. 🌈

Appendix: hosting Twenty

Three options worth looking at:

• Self-host, as we do. The AWS nonprofit credit programme can help with eligible cloud costs. Check your country’s offer and budget for hosting after the credits run out, plus someone to handle updates and backups.
• Pay Twenty to host it. Twenty’s own Pro plan is US$9 per person per month, billed annually. I haven’t found a published nonprofit discount, so I’d budget at the listed rate.
• Pay Kawkav to host it. Kawkav advertises €25 per organisation per month, excluding VAT, with unlimited users for verified nonprofits, managed updates and backups, and fair-use storage limits. I haven’t tried it, but that flat price caught my eye.

AI helped draft and edit this post from my notes, interviews and a recorded walkthrough. Public prices were checked in October 2026.