AI consulting for nonprofits
Your team’s hours belong to the mission. Not to the spreadsheet.
We build custom, AI-powered tools for nonprofit operations — the funder report that assembles itself, the intake that only has to be typed once, the donor data that finally lives in one place. Built around how your organization actually works, then handed to your team to own.
Small, specific projects. Weeks, not quarters. Priced for a nonprofit budget.
Small teams, enterprise-sized paperwork.
Nonprofit operations run on people doing by hand what software should be doing for them. Not because the staff lack the skill — because the tools were built for someone else, and nobody had the budget or the time to make them fit.
Sound familiar?
- Quarterly funder reports mean pulling numbers out of four systems and reconciling them by hand.
- Intake happens on paper, then gets typed into a spreadsheet, then typed again into the database.
- Nobody can answer “how many people did we serve last year” without a week of work.
- Your donor records live in the CRM, the email tool, the event platform, and three spreadsheets.
- The one person who understands the reporting workbook is the one person you can’t afford to lose.
- The nonprofit discount still assumes you have an IT department.
Every hour spent reconciling a workbook is an hour not spent on the work your funders are paying for.
What we build
We don’t sell you another platform to learn. We build the specific tool that removes the specific task eating your team’s week.
Funder & grant reporting
Program and financial data assembled into the format each funder actually asks for. What took a week of reconciliation becomes a review-and-send.
Intake & program tracking
One place to record who you serve and what happened, shaped around how your program actually runs — not around a vendor’s idea of it.
Donor & constituent data
The CRM, the email tool, the event platform, and the spreadsheets, reconciled into one record per person that stays current on its own.
How we work
Review
We sit with your staff and map where the hours go — every system, handoff, and workbook. You get a written plan you own, whether or not you build with us.
Build
We build the one or two tools with the highest return on staff time. Small, specific, and in your hands in weeks rather than quarters.
Hand off
Your team gets trained and documented. Nothing we build should require us to keep it running — support is a choice, not a dependency.
Who you’d be working with
Hi — I’m Ben.
I’m a designer and product strategist with twenty years in startups — working out what to build, who it’s really for, and how it should behave, then shipping it with small teams under real constraints.
Co-lab is where I point that at nonprofit work. The constraints are familiar: a small team, not enough hours, and tools built for somebody else’s org chart. What’s different is what a recovered hour is worth. In a startup it’s margin. Here it goes straight back into the mission.
That’s the part I’m here for. If there’s a process your team dreads, I’d like to hear about it.
Service menu
Fixed scope, fixed price, no retainer required. Start with a review and stop there if that’s all you need.
Operations Review
We map your systems and where staff time is going, then hand you a prioritized plan. Useful on its own — many organizations take it in-house from here.
- Staff interviews and systems map
- Where the hours actually go
- Prioritized, costed recommendations
- Written plan you keep
Custom Build
We build the tool. Reporting, intake, or data consolidation — designed around your program, with AI where it earns its place and plain software where it doesn’t.
- Scoped to one clear outcome
- Built on your existing systems
- Staff training and documentation
- Yours to keep and modify
Ongoing Support
Quarterly check-ins, small changes, and someone to call when a funder changes their reporting format. Month to month — cancel whenever.
- Quarterly review
- Small changes included
- Priority response
- No contract
Working from a grant or a restricted line item? We can scope to your budget and provide the documentation your funder needs.
Tell us where the time goes.
Describe the task that eats your team’s week. We’ll tell you honestly whether it’s worth building something for — and what it would take.