It's how a 1.5-person team stewards every dollar. See how we use AI to make sure your gift reaches our students, not our overhead.
Start with the series opener →Every dollar we don't spend on overhead is a dollar that supports a scholar.
Efficiency is the means. Students are the point. Here's what your support produces.
Scholars like Sarah, who turned a Level Up connection into a full-time Management Trainee offer at Cintas.Sarah, at her University of Cincinnati graduation.
Catch the high level, or open any one to read more. Each links to the full story on Substack.
We used to pay a consultant to write our grants. Now AI drafts, a human reviews, and the quality holds.
For years a $15,000 line item sat in our budget for a grant-writing consultant. It was normal, and it was the kind of overhead that quietly eats a small nonprofit alive.
Today that $15,000 funds three full $5,000 scholarships. Not a cost cut. A stewardship decision.
Continue reading on Substack →
The app our scholars use every day was built in-house with AI. Zero developer fees.
Built and shipped to the App Store and Google Play, a comparable app would run an agency around $40,000 at the conservative end.
We built ours with AI, no developer on payroll. Our scholars get a professional-grade experience and we spent nothing on engineering.
Continue reading on Substack →
In four days and 118 commits we turned a basic CRM into a full student-success platform.
A custom build like this runs around $14,000 from a Salesforce consultant. With AI we built it in four days: scholar dashboards, relationship-health gauges, and board-ready metrics.
Now we can answer "how is Jada doing?" in seconds, for every scholar in the program.
Continue reading on Substack →
The entire organization in one place, from fundraising and finance to coaching, programs, and our tech stack. Searchable, interlinked, built in-house.
When knowledge lives in one person's head, it leaves when they do. So we built a dense, searchable internal wiki that documents the whole organization: 13 sections spanning mission, fundraising, finance, operations, governance, partnerships, marketing, events, our student programs, coach management, and the full tech stack.
We had to aggregate and structure all of it from scratch, a build-and-populate effort that would run around $40,000. Now anyone on the team can find how anything works, and it updates as we do.
Continue reading on Substack →
Donations, volunteer signups, and our whole story. We built it and we maintain it.
Most nonprofits spend at least $8,000 to have a website built, plus thousands a year to maintain it.
Ours was built with AI and we maintain it ourselves. Every dollar saved is a dollar that never left the mission.
Continue reading on Substack →
Employment agreements, HR policies, waivers. AI drafts, real attorneys review every word.
Drafting a small nonprofit's core legal documents runs around $3,500. We drafted ours with AI, then had pro bono attorneys review every word.
Right tool for the right work, with a human safety net where it counts.
Continue reading on Substack →
Signed in-app, filed automatically, status tracked live. The chasing and paperwork just disappeared.
Onboarding used to mean sending forms, chasing signatures, and filing them by hand. We layered an automated system on top of our app: documents signed in-app via e-signature webhooks, synced to Salesforce, filed automatically, with an AI nudge engine and a live admin dashboard.
A six-integration custom build like this runs around $35,000 conservatively. Nobody chases paperwork anymore.
Continue reading on Substack →
in value created with AI, and growing.
plus about $54,000 a year in work AI now handles
These are conservative estimates of what this work would cost at 2026 market rates. Most is capability we created with AI, not cash we would have spent. Some, like the $15,000 grant-writing consultant we let go, is money we redirected straight to students.
"I'm not a developer. I'm a nonprofit director who got a little obsessive about making our budget go further. Everything on this page, I built with AI so more of every dollar reaches our scholars instead of our overhead. If you're thinking about supporting Level Up, I'd genuinely welcome a conversation."
Every dollar we saved went to scholarships, coaching, and programming. Your gift goes further here.
Funders and partners: let's talk about what your support makes possible.