From our 2026 webinar for Nonprofit Builder, presented by AlignIQ co-founders Dan Garmat and Caroline Stauss.
We run the numbers on one grant-writing workflow, then ask the harder question: once AI saves you an hour, where does that hour go?
Key takeaways
- Time dividend = manual time minus (AI-assisted time plus verification time), times how often the task happens. In the example, 240 minutes by hand becomes 90 with AI plus 75 to check, saving 75 minutes each time.
- Verification belongs in the math. Skip it and the savings exist on paper only.
- Saved time drifts into email and meetings unless you decide ahead of time where it goes. Participants most often named donor outreach.
- Try it for seven days: pick one workflow, set how many times you’ll use AI for it, set a minimum check, and name the task the saved time will fund.
Try this with your team
Run the time-dividend math on one workflow together: minutes by hand, minutes with AI, minutes to verify, times per week. Then agree, out loud, what the saved time will go to.
Going further
Not sure which workflow to start with? Try the free Can I Use AI for This Workflow? tool, or rebuild one stuck workflow with us in a Workflow Upgrade.
More from this series
Transcript
Lightly edited from YouTube’s automatic captions for readability. Wording and order are the speakers’ own.
This is a way to think about the time dividend and calculate it, as an estimate anyway. How long does drafting the grant narratives take?
Yes. So think about how long it currently takes manually each time you go through it. An example could be 240 minutes for a certain workflow. If AI is helping draft it, that speeds up the process, so maybe it takes 90 minutes.
“You still have to do a lot of prompting to get there.”
Yes. And as part of a responsible workflow, it’s not just the AI itself. It’s also verifying and making sure everything is true, and that could take another 75 minutes. So in this case the net savings is about 75 minutes.
“Okay, I’ll believe you. I hope AI didn’t come up with that answer.”
It depends on the organization, but let’s say this happens once a week, and one person is doing this task. The math is easy: 75 minutes a week, or an hour and a quarter, just for that task. And this is just one of many possible AI workflows. For your organization there will be many more.
Now that you’ve saved an hour and a quarter, how do you make sure that time doesn’t go to more email and meetings? For example, 30 minutes of savings could fund two funder calls: work you’ve identified as important, but maybe not as urgent as other things.
“It came up a lot in the responses: if you saved some time, you’d spend it reaching out to important donors.” That was one common answer. There were a few.
As an action step to make this concrete: in the next seven days, use AI for a certain workflow. It could be one of the six from earlier, like the donor drafts, a set number of times. That might be once, and something else might be more often. Add a minimum check, which is the responsible verification, and that will fund the reinvestment in the valuable task.
As an example: using AI for a board briefing, a one-page decision brief, used one time, checking that everything is factual, and funding that time with two stakeholder outreaches, maybe one donor or partner and one program contact.