Fractional Chief AI Officer for nonprofits

Practical AI for nonprofits doing more with far less.

Your team got into this work to serve people — not to wrestle disconnected systems or copy-paste data into grant reports until midnight. We build the small, durable automations that quietly hand those hours back. Built for nonprofit budgets. Sponsored and grant-funded options available.

No software to install · No long contract · Sponsored options available
A few things we've built recently
Donor acknowledgment drafts
Personalized thank-yous queued for every gift, ready for the ED to send.
Live
Volunteer intake & matching
Application in. Skills tagged, opportunities suggested, coordinator notified.
Live
Impact dashboard from disconnected data
CRM + financials + program tracker pulled into one live board view.
Live
Multi-grant deadline tracker
Every report, every renewal, every check-in. 30-day warnings & drafted prep.
Live
Board packet auto-assembly
Financials, program updates, KPI roll-ups — one PDF, every month.
Live
Salesforce / Blackbaud connector layer
Make your existing CRM do what it should have done in the first place.
Live
ED inbox triage & reply drafts
Sorts overnight. Drafts the routine ones. Flags what needs you personally.
Live
13 years building for small teams
10–15 hours/week typically saved per org
$0 cost to start with a needs assessment
1 real human — not a chatbot

Everyone's telling you to “use AI.” Nobody's helping you do it on a nonprofit budget.

“I'm writing grant reports until midnight. I don't have time to figure out ChatGPT.”

Small teams are stretched thin running mission-critical programs while drowning in manual reporting, disconnected systems, and admin work. Funders want more data every year. Enterprise software is priced for orgs ten times your size. And the AI consulting market starts at $20k.

  • Enterprise software priced for someone else

    You don't need Raiser's Edge for a 4-person team. You need the three features you actually use, at a tenth of the price.

  • Reporting eats program time

    Hours every week pulling numbers from four systems, formatting them for funders, copy-pasting the same narrative in different word counts.

  • Systems that don't talk to each other

    CRM, accounting, program tracker, volunteer DB, email platform. Every report is a manual reconciliation.

  • AI advice is either $20k or a YouTube video

    Big-firm consulting is out of reach. Self-serve courses sit unfinished. There's no middle path built for how nonprofits actually buy.

Small, useful things that give your team back hours every week.

Five service categories. Dozens of possible builds. Nothing flashy — just small, durable workflows that quietly hand 10–15 hours a week back to your staff, every week, so they can spend them on the mission.

Grants · Reporting

Program data to grant report draft

Funder-ready narrative and metrics drafted from your existing program tracker — reformatted to each funder's template and word count.

→ Saves ~8 hrs/report
Development · Donors

Donor acknowledgment automation

Every gift triggers a personalized thank-you draft, segmented by gift size and donor history. ED reviews and sends in minutes.

→ Saves ~5 hrs/week
Volunteers

Volunteer intake & matching

Application in. Skills tagged, background check status tracked, opportunities suggested, coordinator notified — all without manual triage.

→ Saves ~6 hrs/week
Programs · Impact

Impact dashboard from disconnected data

Your CRM, accounting, and program tracker pulled into one live dashboard. Real-time view of what's working, ready to share with board or funders.

→ Saves ~6 hrs/month
Compliance · Admin

Multi-grant deadline tracker

Every report due date, every renewal, every check-in across every funder. 30-day warnings, prep drafted, never miss a deadline again.

→ Saves missed deadlines & ~3 hrs/week
Governance · Board

Board packet auto-assembly

Financials, program updates, KPI roll-ups, executive summary — one branded PDF, generated every month from your live data.

→ Saves ~6 hrs/month
CRM · Existing systems

Salesforce / Blackbaud layer

Build the features your CRM was supposed to have. Custom reports, donor segmentation, automated workflows — without paying for the enterprise upgrade.

→ Save $5k–30k/year on upgrades
Operations · ED inbox

Inbox triage & draft responses

Sorts the ED's inbox overnight by priority. Drafts routine replies. Flags what needs personal attention. Pulled-out time-sucks, returned.

→ Saves ~7 hrs/week
Software · Replacements

Replace enterprise SaaS at 1/10th the cost

Pay $100/month for a tool you use 15% of? We build a purpose-built version for $10/month with the features you actually need.

→ Saves ~$1k–15k/year
Lightweight CRM

Purpose-built client / donor database

For orgs where Salesforce is overkill and a spreadsheet has stopped working. Modern, simple, built for your actual workflow.

→ Replaces $5k–20k/yr platforms
Events · Programs

Event registration to CRM sync

Eventbrite, Givebutter, your own form — registrations land in your CRM tagged correctly, with attendance tracked and follow-up queued.

→ Saves ~4 hrs/event
Annual reporting

Annual report data assembly

End-of-year scramble, automated. Program numbers, financial summary, donor stats, impact stories — pulled and organized for your designer.

→ Saves ~20 hrs/year
Beneficiaries · Intake

Client intake form → case file

Intake form completed. Case file created, eligibility checked, case manager assigned, welcome email sent, follow-ups scheduled.

→ Saves ~30 min/intake
Finance · Accounting

Restricted fund tracking automation

Grants in, spend categorized against the right restriction, real-time view of remaining balance per fund. Auditor-ready records.

→ Saves ~6 hrs/month + audit time
Communications

Newsletter & story drafter

Trained on your voice and past content. Pulls from program updates, drafts the newsletter, suggests stories worth telling. You polish and send.

→ Saves ~4 hrs/issue
Hiring · HR

Applicant screening & shortlist

Resumes pile up. AI ranks against your criteria, drafts personalized "moving forward" or "not this time" responses. Reduces ghosting.

→ Saves ~6 hrs/role

A real person. A real plan. Real things built for your team.

Phase 01

The needs assessment

We start with a 60-minute call to learn your team, your tools, your funder requirements, and your time-sinks. You leave with a written roadmap of 5–10 high-impact automations ranked by effort and savings — yours to keep whether you engage us or not.

Phase 02

The launch

We build one high-value automation end-to-end — usually a grant report drafter, donor workflow, or impact dashboard. 4–6 weeks. Delivered with Loom walkthroughs and documentation so your team actually uses it.

Phase 03

The scale-up

Once the launch is live, expand to additional workflows on a monthly retainer — or hand the work off and walk away. We're not trying to make you dependent. We're trying to give you back your time.

A note from a partner
Our grant reporting used to eat two full days a month. Now it's a 90-minute review. That's a full day a month our program manager spends with clients instead of spreadsheets.
ED
Executive Director
Community-based nonprofit, Midwest

What does it cost to actually get unstuck?

Hiring in-house ops is out of reach for most small nonprofits. Enterprise software is priced for orgs ten times your size. A focused launch with a real builder sits exactly where most nonprofits need to land.

Option
Annual cost
What you get
In-house ops / tech hire FT operations manager
$80–120k
Salary, benefits, taxes. Hard to recruit at nonprofit pay. Burnout-prone. Wears five hats and ships none of them well.
Enterprise nonprofit SaaS Raiser's Edge, Salesforce NPSP, etc.
$15–50k
Built for orgs 10× your size. 80% of features you'll never use. Long implementation. Still needs someone to wire it up.
AI / tech consultant $200–400/hr
$20–60k
A deck and a strategy. You still have to build it. Or pay them again to build it. No continuity, no accountability to outcomes.
Built for nonprofit budgets — with grant-funded paths when the budget isn't there at all.

Three ways to bring AI leadership into your org.

Built for nonprofit reality. Every engagement starts with a free needs assessment and a written roadmap — yours to keep whether you continue or not.

Launch
From $5k one-time
One automation, built end-to-end

A single high-impact workflow. Scoped, built, documented, deployed. Launch the workflow eating the most staff hours and prove the model on your first build.

  • One automation, ~4–6 weeks
  • Loom walkthroughs + documentation
  • 30 days of post-launch tweaks
  • Training for your team
  • Hosted & monitored during launch
Start a Launch
Sponsored
$0 to your org
Grant-funded capacity-building

When a capacity-builder, foundation, or donor underwrites the work. A fractional CAIO for your org — paid for by someone investing in nonprofit infrastructure.

  • Launch or CAIO retainer, fully funded
  • Open to capacity-building intermediaries
  • Cohort engagements for funder networks
  • Same delivery, same quality
  • Reporting back to the funder included
Explore sponsored

Built for two kinds of partners.

Most of our nonprofit clients are organizations under $2M in budget with small teams, modest tech stacks, and growing demands from funders.

We also work directly with capacity-builders, intermediaries, and funders — teams serving a network of smaller nonprofits who need a scalable AI partner across their members.

Human services organizations
Arts & culture nonprofits
Community development orgs
Youth & education nonprofits
Faith-based organizations
Environmental nonprofits
Capacity-building intermediaries
Community foundations
Funder collaboratives
Advocacy & policy orgs

Solution Studio has been quietly building for small teams since 2012. Nonprofits are the ones doing the most with the least — and the ones AI can help most.

Over the years we've watched a lot of “next big things” come and go. Websites, then social, then funnels, then no-code, then crypto. Most were noise. AI isn't.

But the conversation around it has gotten unbearable. Every consultant pitches a $20k engagement. Every vendor promises a platform. Every funder asks why you're not "leveraging AI" without offering to pay for any of it.

Meanwhile actual nonprofit teams are exhausted, a little behind on grant reports, and not sure who to ask. They don't need a transformation. They need someone who'll spend two hours a month with them and quietly hand back the time they keep losing to admin.

That's what this is. A real person who knows the tools, builds the small things, works within nonprofit budgets — and tells you the truth, including when AI isn't the answer.

— The Solution Studio team
Real humans · est. 2012

A few honest answers.

Don't see your question? Just ask us directly.

Yes — this is one of our preferred engagement models. We work directly with capacity-building intermediaries, community foundations, and individual donors to underwrite work for nonprofit clients. You get the build. The funder gets a tangible capacity investment with documented impact. We can help structure the proposal.
We'll tell you. About 30% of the “AI” problems we hear are actually tool selection problems — you need a different CRM, a real bookkeeping service, or a process change, not AI. We'd rather save you money than sell you something that won't work. The needs assessment roadmap is yours either way.
Yes. Most of what we build sits on top of what you already use. We layer intelligent automation onto your existing CRM, accounting, or program tracker rather than asking you to migrate everything. If a tool has an API or export, we can work with it.
Critical question for nonprofits. We use enterprise-tier AI providers with strict no-training policies, sign mutual confidentiality agreements by default, and follow least-privilege access for any tools we touch. For HIPAA-covered work, regulated populations, or anything involving minors, we use HIPAA-eligible and SOC 2 compliant providers only and scope accordingly.
That's the rule, not the exception. We build for non-technical users — the front door is usually email, a form, or a button. Loom walkthroughs and short written docs are included with every build. If your team can use Gmail, they can use what we build.
Pro-bono work is generous and sometimes excellent, but it's built around the volunteer's schedule and walks out the door when they do. We're paid (or grant-funded), which means we ship to deadlines, we document everything, and we're accountable to outcomes. The tradeoff is cost — which is why we offer sponsored engagements.
Yes. For capacity-builders, intermediaries, and funders supporting multiple member organizations, we can run cohort engagements — launch with 2–3 orgs, build a portfolio of repeatable solutions, then scale across the network. Email us to discuss.
Yes — every workflow, configuration, prompt, and document is yours. We don't hold work hostage. What the Fractional CAIO retainer adds is the operational side: hosting, monitoring, maintaining API integrations, and adapting builds when tools change (which they do, constantly). Most clients keep us on retainer because that maintenance is real work most small teams can't do themselves. But if you ever want to walk away, you can — we'll hand over everything documented so you can self-host.

Start with a free needs assessment.

Fill out the form below. We'll review your situation and follow up within 2 business days to schedule a free needs assessment call. You leave the call with a written roadmap of 5–10 high-impact automations ranked by effort and savings, yours to keep whether you engage us or not.

We'll reply within 2 business days to schedule your free call. No card. No catch.