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Write the board memo, then the minutes it turns into

Today

You write the board report Sunday night, so it turns into eleven pages nobody reads and the meeting drifts. Then the minutes sit in someone's notebook for five weeks until the next meeting, when nobody can remember what was actually voted on.

With Claude

A two page memo that names the three things that matter, the risks in plain words, and each decision written as a motion the board can vote on. After the meeting you paste your rough notes into the same chat and get minutes with movers, outcomes, and owners.

The prompt

Paste this into claude.ai and replace anything in brackets.

You are helping the executive director of a small US nonprofit prepare for a board meeting. Our board has [number] members, meets [how often], and honestly reads [almost nothing in advance, or the whole packet closely].

The agenda:
[paste the agenda]

Our figures for this period, already checked by me or our bookkeeper:
[paste them: cash on hand, months of operating reserve, revenue against budget, grants pending and awarded, program participation, headcount]

What is actually going on that the board needs to weigh in on, including the awkward parts:
[write it plainly: a funder not renewing, a hire we cannot afford, a program underperforming, a board member who stopped showing up]

Decisions I need from the board at this meeting:
[list them, or write none]

Write a board memo of no more than two pages, structured as:

1. The three things that matter this period, two sentences each.
2. Financial position, using only the figures I gave you, stated exactly as I wrote them. If a number the board would obviously ask for is missing, say it is missing rather than estimating it.
3. Risks, named plainly, each with what we are already doing about it and what we would need from the board if it gets worse.
4. Decisions requested, one at a time, each written as a motion the board could vote on, with the real options and the tradeoffs.
5. A consent agenda list: items that need a vote but not a discussion.

No fundraising language and nothing described as exciting. A board member skimming this in the parking lot should come away knowing the three things and the decisions in front of them.

After the meeting I will come back to this chat and paste my rough notes. When I do, turn them into minutes that record attendance, each motion with mover, second, and outcome, decisions made, and action items with an owner and a date. Where my notes are ambiguous about what was decided, write [confirm with the secretary] instead of guessing.

What to skip in nonprofits and associations

  • Claude does not know what your programs did, and it must never be the source of a number in a grant report. It will produce a participant count, a completion rate, or an impact figure that reads perfectly and is fiction. A fabricated figure in a funder report is not an editing mistake, it is a false statement to a funder, and on a federal award it is a legal matter rather than a writing one. Every figure comes from your own case management, attendance, or accounting records. The prompts above tell Claude to write MISSING DATA and stop, and the whole approach depends on you holding it to that.
  • Donor records do not belong in a consumer chat window. That means names, addresses, giving history, pledge balances, wealth screening notes, employer and matching gift details, and anything carrying a card or bank number. On Free, Pro, and Max plans whether your chats are used to improve Anthropic's models is controlled by the model improvement setting in your Privacy Settings, so open it and decide on purpose instead of assuming, and know that conversations flagged for safety review are a separate exception to that setting. Commercial plans, meaning Team, Enterprise, and Claude for Work, exclude inputs from model training by default. Either way your own donor privacy policy is a promise you already made, so work from initials and placeholders and paste one letter at a time rather than exporting your CRM.
  • No grant submission goes out without a person who runs the program reading every claim in it. Claude will restate an objective in language that sounds better than what your program actually does, and it will happily describe an activity you dropped two years ago because it was in the proposal you pasted. It also cannot see the funder's current guidelines, eligibility rules, or allowable costs unless you paste them in. Someone who knows the program checks the claims, someone who knows the budget checks the costs, and a named human signs. The same goes for your 990 narrative and any response to an audit management letter.

Want all 4 workflows for nonprofits and associations in your inbox?

Every prompt on this page plus the rest, so you still have them on Monday. One email, then four short ones on making it stick. Unsubscribe any time.

Or answer four questions and Claude writes three workflows for your specific business rather than the industry generally.

Before you try it

More for nonprofits and associations

Full guide for nonprofits and associations