Regional nonprofit · ~25 staff
Grant reports took a week, though the data was already available.
No IT staff, an outside IT firm on a basic contract, and a development director building grant reports by hand from the donor database and the accounting system every quarter. Volunteers were using free AI tools on donor lists.
Representative profile. Figures are illustrative.
The work
What we did, and why
Nonprofits run on grants, and grants run on reports. This one's development director spent a week every quarter pulling exports from the donor CRM, the system that tracks donors and gifts, and the accounting system into a spreadsheet. Then she rewrote the numbers for each funder's template. Volunteers, meanwhile, were pasting donor lists into free AI tools to draft thank-you letters.
The board adopted the AI Use Policy with donor data as protected information and, unusually, a section covering volunteers. The AI security and governance assessment found donor exports in two personal AI accounts. Both were closed the same week.
The nonprofit had no Microsoft cloud account of its own, so we set one up in the organization's name. The donor CRM and accounting system were connected in the first month. The grant-tracking spreadsheet was retired once the dashboard could produce each funder's numbers directly. The board added the vCIO Advisory tier so someone owns the technology plan and the quarterly brief, without a hire the budget could not carry.
Where they stand
The outcome
Grant reports come from the dashboard in an afternoon. The board receives a quarterly technology brief from the vCIO. IT spend is visible for the first time, and one duplicate subscription was canceled.
For leadership
What changed
The executive director has an owner for technology decisions without hiring one, and a board that stopped asking whether donor data was safe in a public AI tool.
This is a representative profile, drawn from the kinds of companies we work with. Figures are illustrative. We publish named results only with a client's written permission.
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