Drafting reports and advocacy material

The blank page costs more time than anyone admits. A situation report, a press statement, a section of an appeal: the words already exist in your head and in your notes, and the hours go into arranging them.

These tools are good at rewriting what you give them and bad at knowing what you meant. Ask for a report about a topic and you get fluent, generic text that says nothing your organisation knows. Write the points yourself, then ask ChatGPT to turn one section into prose, and you have a draft worth editing.

Watch out for this

Your drafts hold what you have not published yet: case details, a partner who has not agreed to be named, a date that would identify who spoke to you. It gets pasted into a chat window because it was in the notes you were working from. Take the identifying detail out before you paste, and put it back into the final document yourself. Several donors now ask you to declare where AI was used.