Module 1: Pre-Flight Checks
A private, safe setup that never leaks member, donor or grant details.
For charities, clubs & community groups
Give your tiny team extra hands, and give the hours back to the cause.
You’re the Captain. The crew is here to teach you.
You’re writing the grants, the newsletters, the member emails and the board reports, with a handful of volunteers and no budget. This course turns AI into extra hands for your cause, sensibly, and without the hype.
Module 1 is completely free. No payment required to start.
The whole philosophy in one idea
You are the Captain. The crew is here to teach you.
This isn’t a course where you sit back and let the technology fly. From the first minute, you’re in the pilot’s seat of your own journey with AI. You set the destination. You make the calls. You keep control of the aircraft, always.
You command
AI never flies the plane. It reads the instruments, drafts the flight plan and hands you the options. Every decision stays yours.
The crew serves & teaches
Your community crew: ChatGPT for fast newsletters and social posts, Claude for careful grant applications and member replies, Perplexity for finding funding and comparing options, and Gemini if you live in Google Workspace. All free to start. They do the heavy lifting and teach you the controls. They never take them.
You graduate in command
You finish not as a nervous passenger hoping the tech behaves, but as a confident captain who knows when to call the crew and when to fly solo.
The fear that keeps small teams stuck
Let’s name it before lesson one
“We’re stretched thin and can’t afford fancy tools, and this feels like it’s not for us.”
Fair. So here’s the truth: the tools are free, the course is plain, and every lesson is anchored to a job you already do, writing the grant, the newsletter, the member email, the board report, and shows you the fastest honest way to do it with AI. No coding, no jargon. The time it saves goes straight back to the cause.
The 6-module flight plan
The same journey, told for you
Module 2: Cleared For Taxi
The four flight controls applied to grants, newsletters, posts and policies.
Module 3: Cleared For Takeoff
Real jobs: grant applications and acquittals, member emails, social posts, board reports.
Module 4: In The Air
Your real project: a grant submitted, an event promoted, a newsletter sent, shipped this month.
Module 5: Holding Pattern
Staying safe: what to never paste in, plus scam-aware habits for your organisation’s inbox.
Module 6: Final Approach
A weekly routine that keeps the time-saving going once the course ends.
Module 1 is a free preview: try the controls before you buy the seat.
When you take the controls
By graduation, you’re flying in command, with…
- A set of saved prompts for your most repeated tasks
- A real grant, newsletter or board report, finished
- Clear rules on what member and donor data is safe to use
- Several hours a week, reliably, back in your pocket
Everything in the kit bag
What’s included
One course, told in the language of your work. Whichever path you choose, the full kit comes with it.
Six modules of video
Roughly 6 to 8 hours of plain-English lessons, broken into short, watchable pieces.
Screen-recorded walkthroughs
Watch the exact clicks, the exact prompts and the real results. Nothing hidden, nothing sped up.
One-page cheat sheet per module
Print it, stick it next to the keyboard, and fly with it until you don’t need it.
The Cleared To Try workbook
Guided exercises that turn watching into doing, one small win at a time.
The Tool Hangar
A plain-English guide to the wider AI fleet, so you know which tool suits which job.
Lifetime access + quarterly updates
The tools keep changing. Your course keeps up, at no extra cost.
Where AI gives a tiny team extra hands
Most community groups run on too few people and too little time. A coordinator who is also the bookkeeper, the social media person and the one who remembers the gate code. AI will not fix the funding or the roster, but it can take a real chunk of the desk work off your plate so more of your energy goes where it actually matters.
Here is where small organisations are genuinely getting value from it.
Grant applications and acquittals. Paste in the question, your notes and last year’s numbers, and ask it to draft an answer that fits the word limit. It is good at structure and at tightening waffle into something a funder can read quickly. You bring the facts and the story. It saves you the staring-at-a-blank-box hours. Acquittals are the same: feed it your activity notes and let it shape the report.
One update, many places. Write your news once, then ask it to turn that into a member newsletter, a short Facebook post and a warm thank-you to a donor. Same information, three voices, ten minutes instead of an afternoon.
Member and volunteer communications. Rosters confirmations, reminder emails, the slightly awkward message asking someone to renew. It will draft the kind one for you so you only have to edit.
Event planning. Ask for a run sheet and a checklist for your fete, AGM or working bee, and it will give you a sensible starting list you can cut down. It thinks of the boring things you forget at 11pm.
Board and funder reports. Hand it your minutes or your figures and ask for a plain summary for the next meeting. You check every line, because the judgement is yours, but the first draft is done.
Repurposing what you already wrote. That grant story becomes an annual report paragraph, a speech, a poster blurb. Nothing wasted.
Be honest with yourself about what it is not. It does not know your members, it does not hold the relationships, and it does not make the mission calls. Treat it as a fast, tireless assistant who needs checking, not an expert. And the tools that do all this, ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, are free to use. For a group with no budget, that is the whole point.
Common questions about AI for non-profits
Can it really help with grant applications? Yes, for drafting, structuring and tightening, which is where most of the time goes. You give it the real numbers and the heart of why your work matters, and it shapes that into clear answers that fit the questions. What it cannot do is know the truth of your organisation, so you check every claim, every figure and every promise before it goes anywhere near a funder. It writes the draft. You stay accountable for it.
We have no budget. Is this for us? Especially you. The free versions of the main tools are genuinely enough for everything above, and you do not need to pay for anything to get started. That is the point of teaching this to community groups. The organisations with the least money to spend on staff time are the ones who get the most back from a tool that hands them a few hours a week.
Is it hard for volunteers to pick up? No. There is no software to learn and no jargon. You type what you want in plain words, the way you would ask a capable helper, and it answers. A volunteer who can write an email can do this on day one. The handy part is that the skill carries across the whole team, so once one person gets the hang of it they can show the next, and you are not stuck depending on a single tech-savvy member.
The runway is clear
Choose your path
Self-paced
Go at your own pace
$49 AUD
- All 6 modules (~6–8 hours of video)
- Screen-recorded walkthroughs
- One-page cheat sheet per module
- Cleared To Try workbook
- The Tool Hangar: guide to the wider AI fleet
- Lifetime access + quarterly updates
Module 1 is free to preview, no payment details, no commitment. Also available: Cleared For Take-Off, the book, $12.99 AUD. Training a whole team? Workshops and institutional programs are available separately.