Practical ways to put AI to work at your nonprofit.
Turn the files, information, and examples you already have into useful tools, clearer data, reusable content, and repeatable workflows. No coding required.
Welcome to the Prompt Cookbook V2! At Decoded Futures, we see nonprofits wrestle daily with what AI can really do for them, so we put together our favorite quick, practical prompts and “recipes” that we've seen improve daily nonprofit work. After the success of the Prompt Cookbook V1, which we launched exactly a year ago, this new version showcases some of the new and powerful ways nonprofits can use AI. Of course, the V1 Cookbook is still relevant today so hop there if you can't find what you're looking for here.
Please send any feedback you have to decodedfutures@technyc.org. We hope you enjoy!
How to Use This Cookbook
Step by step
- Browse or search: use the sections or the search bar to find a task you actually face.
- Copy the whole block: there's one per recipe, and nothing to fill in first.
- Paste it into your AI chat: whichever one you use.
- Answer its questions: it asks one at a time, in plain language, and works out the technical details from your answers.
- Check the result: it walks you through this at the end. That part is still yours.
Tips for success
- Answer in your own words: it's built to work from how you'd actually describe your work, not technical terms.
- Ask it questions back: it will answer in plain language and then pick up where you left off.
- Say when something looks different: if an instruction doesn't match your screen, describe what you see and it will adapt.
- Stop if it tells you to stop: several recipes check whether your material is safe to paste. That check is the point.
Type to filter · matches titles and descriptions
Getting Started
Before you begin, we have two quick tricks to increase your safety and privacy. The first makes sure your settings on your software of choice are set for minimal data tracking. The second has your AI write a webpage you can use to remove sensitive data from files before sending them into AI for testing these recipes.
Start with these two, then go anywhere
These two recipes make every other recipe in the book safer and smoother. After them, there is no required order, find the section that matches your problem and start there.
Set up your AI the right way
A ten-minute check before anything else: which plan you're on, whether web
search is on, what your privacy and training-data settings are, and where Projects live. Half
the problems people hit with these recipes trace back to setup.
Remove names and personal details before you paste
A small tool that strips names, emails, phone numbers, and addresses from any
text, on your own computer, before anything goes into a chat. It lets you use the rest of this
book on real material without exposing the people in it.
You'll also notice these colored badges that we've included to help you navigate how much sensitive information could be involved in that recipe depending on what information you choose to put into it. We hope these tags are helpful reminders of when to double check your work but remember, when in doubt, leave it out! You don't have to put data or information into these systems you don't feel comfortable using.
Nothing leaves your computer
Public or non-sensitive material
Your files go into the chat, or the output goes public
Connects to your accounts, or your data goes to a vendor
Turn one piece of writing into everything you need
You already wrote the report, the event description, the training doc. These recipes turn that one finished piece into the other five formats you need, in your organization's voice, because you show it real examples instead of describing what you want.
Write the event description once, get every version
Give it your new event description plus one past example of each channel you
liked. Get back the registration blurb, the social caption, the newsletter item, the reminder
email, and the day-of signage, all matching how your organization actually sounds.
Make any document readable for everyone
Turn a dense flyer or intake letter into a plain-language version with the
reading level scored, a large-print version, and a first-draft translation. A fluent human
reviews any translation before it goes out: that rule is part of the recipe.
Turn a report into a real, editable slide deck
Give it your finished report and last year's deck as the design template. Get
back an actual PowerPoint file your board can open and edit, not a web page pretending to be
one.
Turn a report into an interactive web page
For the audiences who will never open a PDF: your annual report or program
overview becomes a single web page you send as a link, scrollable, clickable, readable on a
phone. No website changes and no hosting required to try it.
Add captions to any video
Drop a video onto a small tool that runs on your own computer and get it back
with captions burned in, for accessibility, for social, for people watching with the sound
off. The video never uploads anywhere.
Make a training video without filming anyone
Record yourself once: a photo and a short voice sample, then type any
script and your avatar presents it on camera. When the policy changes, you edit the script
instead of re-booking a filming afternoon. Works in multiple languages.
Turn a report into a podcast or narrated video
Your public annual report becomes a two-host audio conversation or a narrated
video overview that supporters will actually finish. You listen to every minute before it goes
anywhere: the tool performs, you approve.
Mine your annual report for a quarter of social posts
The report you already finished holds months of content: stat callouts,
story excerpts, milestone posts, quote graphics. It pulls them out in one pass, labels every
one with the page it came from, and helps you check the figures before anything is scheduled.
Turn any quote or statistic into a ready-to-post graphic
A small page on your own computer that makes branded cards from your own
colors and logo. You type, click, and download. It never rewords a quote, and it asks who
checks a card before it posts.
Turn a training document into a whole volunteer kit
A facilitator guide, a plain-language handout, and a click-through practice
quiz that runs on any laptop or phone with no login. It asks who your volunteers are and
writes for them, rather than at a fixed reading level.
Get information off paper and out of recordings
The information your funders ask for is sitting in sign-in sheets, receipts, whiteboard photos, and recorded conversations. AI can now read handwriting, photos, and audio, these recipes turn the analog pile into files you can actually use.
Type up handwritten sign-in sheets
Photograph the paper sign-in sheets from every session and get back a clean
attendance spreadsheet in your format. This is the attendance data your funder reports need,
currently trapped in a binder.
Turn a pile of receipts into an expense report
Photograph the month's receipts, give it your budget categories, and get back
a categorized expense table ready for your bookkeeper, with a flag on anything it wasn't sure
how to file.
Turn whiteboard photos into a real document
The flip-charts and whiteboards from your retreat, photographed and handed
over, come back as a structured document: the themes, the decisions, who owns what, and the
parking lot, before everyone forgets what the arrows meant.
Rebuild a paper form as a digital one
Photograph your paper intake or registration form and get back a working
digital version people can fill in, plus a cleaner print version. The form your organization
has photocopied for ten years, rebuilt in an afternoon.
Transcribe recordings without uploading them
A page that turns a recorded meeting or interview into a transcript entirely
on your own computer. The audio never leaves your machine, which makes it usable even for
sensitive client conversations recorded with consent.
Build a quote library from recorded interviews
Ten-minute recorded conversations with participants, consent is a step in
the recipe, not a footnote, become a searchable library of transcribed quotes, tagged by theme
and program, that your communications work draws on all year.
Prepare photos safely before you publish them
Before photos of clients, volunteers, or kids go on your website: a small
tool that removes the hidden location and device data from each file and blurs the faces you
select, all on your own computer.
Make sense of your spreadsheets and lists
The answer is usually already in your data, it's just spread across three exports, buried in an inherited workbook, or sitting in 300 survey answers nobody has read.
Clean up and understand what you have
Turn a spreadsheet into a dashboard
Show it two or three made-up rows with your real column names and get back a
file you double-click: drag your actual spreadsheet on and see totals, charts, and a searchable
table. Your real data never uploads.
Understand a spreadsheet you inherited
The eleven-tab workbook your predecessor left behind, explained in plain
language: what each tab is for, what calculates what, and which cells everything else depends
on. Works on a copy with the dollar figures blanked out.
Match the same people across your lists
Your event platform, mailing list, and donor system each have their own
version of everyone. Get one combined list, a "these might be the same person, you decide"
pile, and the answer to who registered but never attended.
Find the themes in hundreds of survey answers
One open-ended question, 300 answers nobody has read. Get the recurring
themes, how often each appears, and three exact quotes per theme, with a required spot-check
against the originals before you quote anyone.
Make certificates, name tags, and letters from a list
Paste your attendee columns and one example of last year's certificate. Get a
page that generates print-ready certificates, badges, or personalized letters for the whole
list, the afternoon-long task, done in minutes.
Explain your finances in board-ready language
Your budget-versus-actuals export becomes a plain-language summary a board
member can absorb in five minutes: where the money went, what's off track and by how much, and
the questions worth asking. You verify the numbers; it does the translation.
Fix the mess in the page, then export a clean file
The next step after the Viewer: edit cells and add rows in the page itself,
then download a corrected file. Still nothing uploaded, and it deliberately won't remember
your edits, so the clean export is the thing you keep.
Find who registered, attended, and never finished
Three lists reconciled into plain lists of names rather than a pivot table,
so you can see exactly where people fall out. It checks first whether these lists are safe to
paste, and offers a version that runs on your own computer if they aren't.
Add information you don't have yet
Find everyone's council district
Paste your list of partner sites or member addresses and get each one's
district plus the elected official's name and contact, with a source link on every row, so
found data and made-up data can't hide in the same column.
Look up any nonprofit's size and budget
Paste a list of organization names and get back each one's budget size, staff
count, and program focus from public tax filings, turning "60 potential partners" into "the 15
worth calling first."
Check which employers match donations
Your donors' employers, checked against publicly posted matching-gift
programs, with a link to each program page and a plain "unknown" where nothing was found. The
free version of an expensive fundraising database.
Find out where your volunteers work
Their email domains already tell you most of it. Sort your volunteer list by
employer from the domain column alone, then search only the ambiguous ones, and spot the
companies where a sponsorship conversation is waiting.
Pull public data off hard-to-use websites
The county records, license lookups, and funder directories with no download
button: an AI assistant in your browser pages through them for you, while you watch, and hands
you a spreadsheet. For public data only: the recipe is explicit about where the lines are.
Get answers from documents you don't have time to read
Load the document once: the 400-page manual, the contract, the funder's own guidelines, and ask it questions all year. Every recipe here requires cited answers you can verify, because an answer you can't check is an answer you can't use.
Ask questions of a manual instead of searching it
The Medicaid manual, the HUD handbook, your state's licensing regulations,
loaded once into a Project you question all year. Every answer cites the page it came from, so
you verify before you act.
Let staff ask the handbook directly
Your employee handbook, bylaws, and fiscal policies answer "do I get
bereavement leave for a grandparent?" with the section quoted, so HR stops being the
bottleneck for questions the documents already answer.
Review a contract before you sign it
The venue contract, the office lease, the insurance renewal, read closely
and returned in plain language: what you're committing to, what's unusual for this kind of
agreement, and the three questions to ask before signing. Preparation for a decision, not
legal advice.
Understand what a rule change means for you
A proposed regulation or bill, read against your own program documents: what
actually changes for your organization, what doesn't, and a first draft of a public comment if
you want to respond. The 60-page federal register notice, made actionable.
Score your draft the way the funder will
A reviewer built from the funder's actual published guidelines and scoring
rubric reads your draft the way they will, before they do. It critiques against their criteria
; it doesn't write a word for you.
Test how an announcement will land before you send it
Before the difficult announcement goes out: a program closing, a fee
increase, a leadership change, it reads your draft as each audience: the worried parent, the
longtime donor, the skeptical board member. You hear the objections while you can still edit.
Keep a departing colleague's knowledge askable
Before your longtime coordinator leaves, she picks the email threads and
conversations where she's actually solving problems, she selects, she redacts, and they
become a resource her successor can ask "how did we handle this last time?"
Make good work repeatable across your team
These recipes take something one person does well: a voice, a format, a habit, and turn it into a tool the whole team uses, so quality stops depending on who happened to do the work that day.
Make everyone's drafts sound like your organization
Your five best published pieces, plus one example of what you never sound
like, become a reusable writing tool. The intern's draft and the board chair's draft come out
sounding like the same organization, and it improves every time you feed it a new best
example.
Draft personal notes in your own voice
Fifteen or twenty notes you actually sent: thank-yous, condolences, board
nudges, teach it how you write. Then the endless personal correspondence an ED owes comes out
sounding like you on a good day, in minutes instead of evenings. You still read and send every
one.
Get the same follow-up from every meeting
Any transcript or messy notes come back in your team's exact format:
decisions, owners, deadlines, parking lot, plus a draft follow-up message. Follow-through
stops depending on who took the notes.
Standardize the data your partners send you
Thirty partners, thirty formats. A reusable tool takes whatever they send and
returns it in your canonical format, flagging what it couldn't map instead of guessing
silently. Every new weird format becomes a training example.
Assemble the board packet the same way every quarter
The same inputs every quarter: program numbers, the financial summary, last
meeting's minutes, assembled into your board packet format on schedule. The recurring
half-day of formatting becomes an hour of reviewing.
Put AI to work inside your files, inbox, and systems
The most powerful recipes and the most careful ones. Each connects an AI assistant to something real: your shared drive, your inbox, a system you log into, with permission granted deliberately, a human approving everything that goes out, and read-only as the default posture.
Find things in a shared drive nobody organized
Which of the six "FINAL" budgets is actually final? Where is the current
logo? What did we promise this funder last year? Connect your drive read-only, ask in plain
English, and get answers with the file path cited: you open the files yourself.
Triage a full inbox into a short list
The weekend pileup, sorted: what needs a reply from you, what has a deadline
hiding in it, what's just FYI, with draft replies for the routine ones. Drafts only. Nothing
sends without your click.
Get your data out of a system with no export button
The legacy database or portal your organization pays for holds your data but
won't let you download it. An AI assistant in your browser logs in as you, while you watch,
pages through, and builds the spreadsheet the vendor never gave you. Your account, your data,
your supervision: the recipe covers the terms-of-service check too.
No recipes match that search. Try a different word, or a
problem, like "receipts", "captions", "contract", or "inbox".