At Level Up Cincinnati, we are the 7%. And we were the 7% before AI got here.
Everyone asks which tool got us there. It was not the tool.
The 7% problem.
The number comes from Virtuous’s 2026 Nonprofit AI Adoption Report. 92% of nonprofits report using AI. 7% report real impact from it. The gap between those two numbers is the story.
The obvious question is what is different about the 7%. The answer most people reach for is that they have better prompts, better tools, more technical staff, bigger budgets. None of that is what we found.
I believe what is different about the 7% is what was already there before AI arrived.
AI did not make us effective. AI gave us a way to multiply the effectiveness we had already spent three years building. The orgs that get real value from AI are the orgs that are already serious about how they spend every hour.
What we built before AI was even an option.
In 2022, as a nimble startup with no need for fancy automations and time saving tools, I built the unsexy infrastructure first.
A coach prospect would fill out an application form. Zapier piped that submission straight into Salesforce, where the contact was created automatically and slotted into the right stage of our coach pipeline. Mailchimp picked them up from there and ran them through a drip sequence designed to warm them up to what coaching at Level Up actually looks like. Calendly sat at the bottom of every email, so a prospect could self-schedule an intro call without anyone on our team coordinating a single calendar.
The Salesforce pipeline tracked every prospect from application through active coach. Stages, dates, drop-off points, all visible at a glance.
All that automation, probably wasn’t necessary but the stack cost us almost nothing - and we were planning on growth. ChatGPT was not public yet. Claude did not exist. None of this needed AI, but all of it needed thinking.
The principle I kept coming back to: how do we do this without touching it as much as possible? Every manual step we eliminated was a step we did not have to staff up to do later. That mattered when it was just me. It matters more now.
The proof showed up over time. Since 2022, more than 40 coaches have come through that pipeline. Roughly 80 prospects in total. 82% of them self-scheduled their own intro call. The 20% who required manual outreach were mostly no longer interested by the time we got to them. The pipeline was qualifying as it routed.
The system itself was doing the filtering.
Nobody has chased an applicant. Nobody manually entered applicant data. Over four years, it’s part of a staffing line we never had to add.
The accelerant we layered on top.
A year later, AI showed up. We did not throw the pipeline out. We sharpened every layer of it.
We used NotebookLM to generate the first episode of a series called Level Up Cincinnati: Inside the Program. The episode, The Impact of Coaching is hosted on Spotify and embedded as the first thing every new prospect sees in their welcome email.
A coach prospect can now hear the program described, in conversation, before they ever talk to a human.
The drip sequence itself got a rewrite. I worked with Claude to tighten the copy, sharpen the call to action in each email, and tune the cadence based on what we were seeing in open rates and click-throughs.
The analytics layer is the one that surprised me most. I had Claude write a lightweight script that pulls Mailchimp engagement data, summarizes click-through patterns, and lands a weekly report in my inbox. Used to be a thing I checked when I remembered to. Now it checks itself.
Each one of these only worked because the pipeline beneath it already existed. The podcast is useless if no one is getting the welcome email. The tighter copy is useless if Zapier is not delivering prospects into Mailchimp in the first place. The weekly analytics report is noise if there is no funnel underneath to measure.
AI did not give us the pipeline. AI gave the pipeline a podcast, a sharper script, and a weekly checkup.
Last week, we did it again.
For four years that pipeline did one job extremely well: get coaches in the door. But the moment a coach said yes, the automation stopped and the manual work started.
Onboarding meant a chain of links and Adobe Sign forms going out by email. Someone had to send them. Someone had to chase the people who did not complete them. Someone had to file the signed copies into the right Google Drive folder. Someone had to know where every coach and every scholar stood in the process.
Last week, I pushed the same system downstream to fix that, for coaches and scholars alike.
That work is now gone.
A coach or scholar logs into the Level Up app and gets prompted to complete onboarding. They click through each document and sign it in the app. Webhooks fire as each signature lands. The signed document files itself into the correct Google Drive folder automatically. Their status updates in real time on an admin dashboard, so our Director of Student Success can see at a glance exactly where everyone stands. No hand-holding. No chasing.
The follow-up layer is where AI does the work. If someone falls behind, a single click generates a personalized email with how much time is left before Match Day, exactly which forms they still need to complete, and where they are in the process. Then it sends.
Every piece of that workflow used to be manual. Every piece of it is now automated.
Same playbook I used in 2022, four years later and one stage further down the journey: audit the workflow, design out every manual step, layer in AI where it earns its place. The foundation did not just hold. It compounded.
A multiplier, not an upgrade.
The Virtuous report frames the gap as an AI problem. The gap is an operations problem. The orgs in the 7% did not get there by buying smarter software. They got there by doing the boring work first. Mapping their processes. Cleaning their data. Building the foundation that an automation layer could sit on.
Most of the 92% are running pilots on the latest tool, building chatbots on top of broken intake forms, layering generative output on top of processes nobody has audited in five years. The tool is fine. The foundation under it is the problem.
AI is not an upgrade. It is a multiplier. And zero times anything is still zero.
Start with the workflow, not the tool.
The audit I did in 2022 is the same audit I would do today. I walked the coach intake process end to end and wrote down every place a human had to touch it. That list was the map. Every item on it became a manual step I designed out before I built anything else. The pipeline this post just described is what came out of that exercise.
That work is the work. It does not require AI. It requires honesty about where your time is actually going.
A broken workflow with AI on top is a broken workflow that runs faster. A working workflow with AI on top is leverage.
The orgs in the 7% were already serious about how they spent every hour before the tools arrived. That is not a credential you buy. It is a habit you build.
We are not an AI nonprofit
We are an operational nonprofit. AI is the latest layer we built on top of work we have been doing for four years.
The 92% have the same tools we do. What they do not have is the four years we spent auditing every workflow and automating every manual step before the tools arrived.
The toolbox.
The whole thing runs in two connected stages.
Getting coaches in the door (2022):
Salesforce: pipeline stages, contact data, source of truth
Zapier: form-to-CRM connection, no manual data entry
Mailchimp: prospect drip sequences
Calendly: self-scheduled intro calls
NotebookLM + Spotify: an AI-generated welcome podcast, embedded in email
Claude: drip copy rewrites and a weekly analytics report
Onboarding coaches and scholars (last week):
Salesforce: still the source of truth; flags when someone enters onboarding
Firebase: the engine that moves each person through in real time
Dropbox Sign: in-app document signing for commitments, waivers, and releases
Google Forms: pre-program and pre-match questionnaires
The Level Up app: where coaches and scholars complete onboarding
Admin dashboard on Vercel: live status for our Director of Student Success
Postmark: reliable, branded email
Claude: drafts the personalized nudge when someone falls behind
Most of it runs on free tiers and nonprofit pricing. The rest is a few modest paid tools that earn their keep.
What comes next.
This is the last post in The $0 Department on a regular cadence. Nine posts in, I think the case is made: a 1.5-person nonprofit can turn what used to be overhead into student impact by getting serious about how we work.
I am not done building. The cadence just shifts. From here on, I will share what I build when there is something worth sharing, not on a schedule.
Stay subscribed if you want to follow that. If you only signed up for the series, thank you for showing up.
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This is the last regular post in The $0 Department: What Happens When a Nonprofit Stops Hiring and Starts Building. Subscribe to catch what comes next.
Level Up Cincinnati empowers first-generation college students through mentorship, scholarships, and professional development. 100% of donations go directly to student programming. Learn more at https://levelupcincinnati.org