AI on a shoestring budget: what we learned by actually doing it

In 2025, Community Directors represented the community sector at a corporate-focused roundtable hosted by the National Artificial Intelligence Centre (NAIC), and this year we convened a national AI roundtable for the sector, bringing together key representatives from banking, sport, insurance, philanthropy, justice, First Nations, health and more. The group discussed the benefits of AI as well as risks, and looked at what holds some organisations back and pushes others towards using AI, considering policy, regulations and culture.

The group expressed concerns related to misuse of AI (plagiarism, fraud, scams, fake content, misinformation, intellectual property abuse and so on), community members left behind in the race towards AI adoption, job losses, effects on the quality of services, the pace of change, data sovereignty, data governance and losing human connection. All of these are significant concerns and they have very important implications for communities and the community sector. The group agreed that policies and processes for safe AI use are fundamental to protecting organisations and their beneficiaries, partners and stakeholders.

At Community Directors, I asked my own team a simple question: what are you using AI for right now, in your day-to-day work? The answers were unglamorous and genuinely useful in equal measure. So here is what AI augmentation can look like, role by role, for no more than the cost of an enterprise-level AI account with Claude, ChatGPT or similar:

AI assistant to a program coordinator

As a program grows, the volume of coordinating tasks – creating campaign emails, building student portals, sending communications, following up on payments – grows with it. One team member has used AI to automate calendar reminders across all her work, replacing a reliance on memory and ad hoc systems with something reliable. The tasks still require human judgement, but the AI-generated calendar reminders make sure none of them get overlooked.

AI assistant to a trainer

From workshop outlines to slide structures, one team member uses AI throughout the content development cycle. Particularly useful is AI’s ability to check a workshop plan against different audience perspectives, or to generate a range of angles for an article when the blank page is the main obstacle.

AI assistant to a designer

When nearing completion of a recent publication, rather than manually combing through the document for inconsistencies between the Word document source and the final designed PDF, one team member uploaded both files and asked AI to compare them. It caught several errors before the publication went out. The same team member has also used AI to generate a table of contents after articles in a book were reorganised, a fiddly task that previously required careful manual work.

AI assistant to a business development lead

Manually searching for contact details can absorb significant time for any NFP or social enterprise. One team member has configured AI as a contact-finding assistant that identifies relevant people, suggests likely email formats (“firstname@departmentname.gov.au”) where email addresses are not public, and asks questions upfront to sharpen results before generating them.

AI assistant to a marketing specialist

Comparing a marketing email list to a training participant database sounds straightforward until the two lists use different name formats and require a tangle of Excel formulas to reconcile. One staff member used to spend at least 25 minutes a week on this task. Now, a custom tool does it automatically, so the staff member just has to upload two files, select what he needs, done. Added up, the time saved in a year is signficant.

Getting started

If your community group is not yet comfortable with using AI, start by asking questions about how your group might benefit from it, how you could use it in a way that is aligned with your values, and how you could manage the risks of using it.

A simple way for the leaders or anyone else in your organisation to increase their digital literacy is to invest a small block of time each week in playing with AI in a safe way. This could mean listening to a podcast about AI on the way to the office, attending a free training course at Infoxchange, reading Community Directors’ book on AI, or experimenting for five minutes with prompting a generative AI system such as Copilot, ChatGPT, Claude or Google, using some of the examples above to fuel your imagination.

Tech essentials for your NFP

Community Directors houses a huge web library of free, practical resources, and here's where to find help related to technology and artificial intelligence. You’ll find guidebooks, templates, policies and more articles covering issues such as data, cybersecurity, technology planning, ethics and using artificial intelligence.