AI for Fundraisers
Where AI earns its place in a fundraising week, and where it doesn't. Leave with your first workflows.
The PLAIground · Year-round membership
Live AI experiences for the people driving social change. Any week. Any level. All year.
The PLAIground is a year-round membership. Unlimited live sessions to change how you think about AI, use it, and design solutions with it. Between sessions, a community of 1,100+ peers across the sector backs you up, and access to quality resources to put it into practice the same week.
1,100+ members from 850+ organizations in 50+ countries. Executive directors, fundraisers, comms leads, program managers, publishers, board members.
Fundraising.AI Summit · Attendee offer
Attended the FAI Summit? It's half price!
50% off PLAIground membership for Summit attendees. Secure your seat. Offer closes this Friday 16 October at 5pm Eastern US Time.
PURPOSE
Why we built the PLAIground
We've spent more than four years running AI training programs inside nonprofits and across the social sector (yes - before ChatGPT). We heard the same challenges again and again.
- Everyone on your team is at a different level with AI, so team trainings only work for 50% of the room... So we offer sessions customized for beginners and pros, different roles and orgs from your local nonprofit as well as global NGOs.
- There is a multitude of free webinars you'll get to "when things calm down." They haven't calmed down. We focus on learning that sticks - live, experiential, practical and with others.
- You're the only one in your organization who's experimenting, or part of a small team where AI suddenly became your responsibility. So we built the support system - experts on call, and a community to share your challenges with.
- You've been using AI for a while now, your team did a session last year, people loved it, but six months later nobody can point to what changed. The "what now?" after a one-off training or limited budgets is the gap most learning leaves open.
PLAIground Membership
What's Included
Live experiences that shift how you think about AI, build the muscle for using it with excellence, and give you all the support and resources you need to put it into practice in the days and weeks after.
- Unlimited live sessionsFor every role. Topic. Level.
- Hands-on workshops on a tool, a role, or a question: Responsible AI, prompting and context engineering, finding your use case, designing Copilot and Claude agents, AI for fundraisers, when not to use AI, building an AI task force. Beginner through advanced. Plus Candid Conversations, open discussions on the hard stuff like disagreement, the environment, and what to keep human.
- A community across the sector1,100+ members
- Connect with leaders and learners across the social sector. A member space searchable by role, organization, and location. Work on challenges together, learn from others, and gather for community conversations, practice labs, sharing spaces, and more.
- Open office hoursBring what's stuck
- Drop-in time with the PLAI team for the thing holding you up this week. A prompt that won't behave, a tool decision, a policy draft, a conversation with IT. We work it live, with you, and the whole community learns from the answer.
- Quality ResourcesWorkflows, skills files, and system instructions
- We don't believe in gatekeeping the good stuff. We share a library of resources that you can put into practice immediately. One-shot prompts that transform a single task, Claude skills files, Copilot agent instructions, full workflows, templates, ready to edit and press go. Tool-agnostic: whatever your organization uses, you'll find the version for it. Plus a bunch of playbooks and guides.
- + Bonus AI SparksInvite your team along
- You'll also be invited to share the learning with your team and organization. We run regular 90-minute live sessions anyone can join, members or not - we call them 'AI Spark'. Live demos, hands-on, the newest ways people across the sector are using AI. Bring your colleagues. Bring your board chair.
Coming soon: an AI coach inside the community for quick questions between sessions, and practice tools for the conversations and decisions you'll face.
What makes this different
Your PLAIground Experience
You'll see a live demo, then you'll put it into practice on a challenge you brought. Every voice is part of the conversation within the first few minutes. We hold space for the fear and the risk alongside the opportunity, because both are true, and we show you how to work in the middle of that with discernment. The energy is high. There is a lot of laughing going on. People stay past the end.
We build in public. When we solve something live, you get the whole workflow, the prompts, the system instructions, and the tips along the way. Nothing is gatekept. The sessions draw on how adults learn and change, from psychological safety to peak moments, and they're designed to build toward the moment when a switch flips.
"It felt like a private tutorial. I walked away with a fully formed something that I could interact with."
Peter Metsopoulos, CEO, Arcadia Strategy Group
"This was NOT a service preview, you know, the ones riddled with sales pitches. Kaz and the team were genuine and provided a truly informative experience that is accessible to users at every level."
Kai, Salesforce Administrator, Harold Grinspoon Foundation
WHAT'S INCLUDED
Unlimited Live Sessions
Inside the PLAIground you'll get access to join unlimited live sessions - workshops, labs, candid conversations, and drop in community sessions to get support or connect with others. Here's a glimpse:
Responsible AI: a practical deep dive
Past the principles and into practice. What to use, what to protect, and how to explain it to your board.
Prompt like a Pro
The thinking behind prompts that work, in whichever tool you use. Leave with prompts for your own tasks.
AI + The Environment: Candid Conversations
Exploring our community's questions and concerns around the environmental and planetary impacts of AI.
Identifying AI Use Cases
A framework and methodology to identify, prioritize and scale proven AI use cases.
Copilot Agents
Design and build an agent for your team. Leave with one running, and its instructions to reuse.
Personalizing & Customizing AI
Making AI work for you across context, memory, instructions, and knowledge.
Navigating Disagreement: Candid Conversations
A community conversation around navigating the expected disagreement within your team around AI.
Multi-Agent Teams and Agentic Architecture
Becoming an AI-native social impact organization without losing your values.
and many more... with new sessions every month, and your say in what comes next
"I learned more in this 90 minutes than I have in the 3 years I've been playing with ChatGPT."
Live session participant · AI Spark
15,000+
leaders and learners across the social impact sector have learned with PLAI
9.2/10
average session rating across hundreds of workshops, immersions and masterclasses
87%
of participants report meaningful improvement in their ability to use AI strategically in their work
From "almost paralyzed" to Leading 300 campaign volunteers
Tobey runs the Pennsylvania Pardon Project and had never opened an AI tool. Confidence: 1 out of 10. Within weeks of one session he'd drafted an elevator speech for state representatives, a leave-behind, and a campaign follow-up. New assets were being reviewed for use across 300 volunteers statewide.
Tobey Oxholm, Pennsylvania Pardon Project
From never using AI to leading and teaching an organization
Eloco leads a small community organization in Toronto and works in English as an additional language. He came in with zero experience and a 10 out of 10 belief it could help. He now trains his own staff and volunteers to use AI for fundraising conversation practice, strategy, and language barriers.
Eloco Issa, CEO, Nuru Association
From AI Stigma to 10 x Reach across Social Media Channels
Jennifer has worked in media for 30 years and came in carrying her team's stigma about AI. She now uses it daily. Since applying what she learned to how she writes, prompts, and makes evidence based decisions, their organization has grown social media reach ten fold.
Jennifer Vail-Storrs, ICTV
"The prompt thing about my extra person in my corner literally changed my life."
Graeme Wallace, CAFOD
"Rather than using AI as a tool, using it as a mentor. 10 out of 10. Something I never thought about before."
Rocky Radovanovich, UC Law SF
"Top ten trainings in 30 working years."
Live session participant
Why we made the sessions unlimited
When we started in 2022, the whole sector was at roughly the same place with AI. We could walk into an organization and run one thing that worked for everyone.
That's gone. Now every person and every team is somewhere different. Different roles, different tools, different levels of comfort, different questions. A single program has to pick a level, and it ends up missing most of the room.
So we opened the room. Members come to whichever live session fits where they are this week, on the topic they need, at the level that stretches them. A brand new beginner, a skeptic who needs better answers, and the person pushing the edge of what AI can do in their organization can all be members and all get what they need. Organizations stop choosing one program for everyone and start giving everyone the one that fits.
And the people in the room decide what we run next.
Shape what's next
You decide what we run next.
After every session we ask what's missing. Members vote on the topics, and the most-requested become the next sessions, usually within a few weeks. This is some of what the list has right now.
- Draft your organization's AI policy in one session
- AI for small teams with no IT department
- Reading grant and donor data with AI, within privacy rules
- How to teach what you learned here to your own team
Requested and already run: the No-Slop Content Guide · a tool translation guide for Copilot teams who saw a Claude demo · When not to use AI.
Who's in the room
A community of social sector leaders.
The PLAIground community is made up of social sector leaders like you. About half lead organizations. Some run programs, raise money, tell the stories, sit on boards, and others report the news. They're driving social change around the world and bring a wealth of wisdom, experience and insights.
1,100+
members and growing
50+
countries, across the Americas, Europe, Africa, Asia and the Pacific
500+
leaders - executive directors, CEOs, Heads if Fundraising, Program leads
The people we didn't expect to love it most: community journalists and people working on climate. The parts of the sector that feel the most threat from AI. What they found here was agency: the discernment to know what to use, what to hold human, and how to make new things possible without giving up the craft.
From PLAI Learners
How people describe learning with PLAI.
A warm, supportive, collaborative and inclusive environment that brought everyone into it. It completely reframes how I interact with, engage with and hone my ability with AI. The reframes were 10 out of 10.
Rocky Radovanovich
Chief of Staff, AI Law & Innovation Institute, University of California
What stood out to me most is that it didn't feel like another conversation happening above the people doing the work; it actually pulled voices like mine into the room. That's rare.
Pam Baker
Founder, Breeze Street Friends
It reminded me that what I knew about AI was just a drop in the ocean. The sessions were intense and insightful. What I appreciated most was how engaging, interactive, and thought-provoking it was.
Maryanne Emomeri
Communication Coordinator, United Disabled Persons of Kenya
Their dedication to helping others produce quality results versus 'AI slop' is commendable. Kaz and the team were genuine and provided a truly informative experience accessible to users at every level.
Kai
Harold Grinspoon Foundation
It shifted how I've been thinking about AI, and I've been putting what I learned into action over the last week. I'm also impressed by the materials. They're both accessible and full of great information.
Rebecca Coker
Founder & Principal, Cresvara Partners
I'm still an AI skeptic. And I'm still learning. But I now feel that I am able to apply a much better lens to all of this.
Doris Bäsler
Strategic Consultant & Mediator
The PLAIground is for you if
- You're the person in your team or organization who's furthest ahead with AI, and you want your colleagues to catch up with you
- You've done a one-off session and want somewhere to keep going
- You lead a team at mixed levels and one program keeps missing most of them
- You work in leadership, fundraising, comms, programs, philanthropy, or journalism in a nonprofit, INGO, or mission-driven organization
- You're wary of AI and want to work out what to use and what to protect, with people who take that question seriously
Probably a better fit elsewhere
- You want a deep, cohort-based program with a project you build over a semester. That's The PLAI Fellowship, first cohort launching 2027. Watch this space!
- You need a program designed around your whole organization's strategy, policy, and systems. That's a Custom Engagement. Contact us to have a chat.
- You want a certificate or a self-paced video course. We run live rooms, because it works better. Recordings are available temporarily, if you miss a session. The live session is where it works (we've tested it!).
For the person who sees the gap first
Need to make the case to your manager?
Here's a note you can send as-is, or change.
For teams of 50 or more, there's a seat rate and a private space. For smaller teams, individual memberships on one invoice work well, and a few colleagues learning together is where the change sticks.
To: [your manager] · Subject: AI learning for the team, one option
I've been looking at how we keep building AI capability across the team without picking one program that only fits some of us.
The PLAIground is a year-round membership run by PLAI, who work only with nonprofits and mission-driven organizations. Members get two to four live, hands-on sessions a month at every level, drop-in office hours, a community of 1,100+ people across the sector, and the workflows and templates from every session to reuse.
It's $365 USD per person per year. For [number] of us that's [total], which is less than a single custom workshop, and everyone gets a year of access at their own level. There's a free open session on November 4 if you want to see how they work first.
I'd like to join and bring [names]. Can we talk about it this week?
Pricing
A dollar a day.
All prices in USD. Annual membership, rolling start. Renews yearly; you can switch that off any time from your account.
Individual
$365
per person, per year
Everything in the PLAIground, from the day you join.
- Unlimited live sessions, two to four a month
- The community and member directory
- Open office hours
- Every workflow, skills file, template, and guide
- A vote in what we run next
Teams and organizations, 50+ seats
Let's talk
networks, funders, whole organizations
Year-round access for everyone, at their own level. A private branded space, admin view of attendance and progress, sessions co-designed around your people and open to the whole community, and reporting for funders.
- Everything in Individual, for every seat
- Private space and admin dashboard
- One invoice, custom rate
Under 50 people? Individual memberships work on a single invoice. Email us and we'll set it up.
Before you join
Questions people ask.
How often are sessions, and will they work in my time zone?
Two to four live sessions a month, guaranteed, usually fortnightly. Times rotate so that over a month there's something that works for North America, Europe, and Asia-Pacific. We add times as the community grows in a region. If you miss one, the recording is there, and office hours are a second chance to ask.
What is it, and how does it work?
A membership. You join once, for a year, and come to whatever live sessions fit where you are, as often as you like. Between sessions you have the community, office hours, and everything we built in the sessions. Think of it as the smallest version of our school: year-round, open, and shaped by the people in it.
Can I see how it works before I pay?
Yes. We run free AI Spark sessions open to anyone. The next one is on November 4. Come, bring a colleague, and decide after.
Register for the free AI SparkWhich AI tools do you cover?
All of them, by design. Sessions use Claude, Copilot, ChatGPT, and Gemini, and we teach the thinking that transfers between them. When we build something live, you get the version for the tool your organization uses.
How much is in there right now?
The live sessions are the heart of it, and they're what members come for. Alongside them you'll find the recordings, the workflows and guides from every session, and a community of 1,100+ people. We're building the on-demand side out as we go, with members telling us what to add. Come to a session this month and leave with something you'll use. That's the test.
Does it renew? Can I cancel?
It renews annually. We email before it does, and you can switch renewal off yourself from your account.
Who runs the sessions?
The PLAI faculty: people who've spent their careers in fundraising, comms, programs, and leadership inside nonprofits, and who've gone deep on AI. Plus guest faculty from the sector when a topic calls for it.
PLAIground Team & Faculty
Nonprofit roots. AI specialists.
Kaz McGrath
Founder & CEO
Stephen Silveira
COO
Led by Kaz McGrath, Stephen Silveira, and the PLAI team.
25+ years inside the nonprofit sector
We started PLAI because we kept watching brilliant people in brilliant organizations get handed AI tools by trainers who'd never done the kind of work those people do every day.
Our team and faculty are nonprofit-native and AI-fluent. We understand AI as deeply as we understand the complexities of social change, and we've worked in the impact space our entire careers. We've run campaigns, written grants, and lead board meetings.
We've trained 15,000+ nonprofit professionals. We create learning experiences that are memorable, meaningful, and a little bit magic (a participant's words, not ours). We guide you to build things that bring value to your mission while navigating tensions like security, ethics, and organizational readiness. Our average session rating is 9.2/10 and we pride ourselves on bringing the best quality learning experiences to the social sector.
P.S We're called PLAI (pronounced "play") for a reason. We teach through games, build labs, hands-on work, and juicy conversations, not just because it's fun but because it works!
AI stopped being a one-off. Your learning shouldn't be either.
$365 USD a year. Live sessions at your level, a community of 1,100+ peers to back you up, and the practice to make it stick. Next free AI Spark: November 4.
Teams and funders: talk to us about seats.