How to Use AI to Complete Your Impact Report

Follow the steps below including prompts and review steps to create the most accurate draft report you can then use to fill in True Impact's Report Builder.

1. Gather what you have

Start by making your own copy of the Report Builder Preparation Worksheet and downloading it into a Word document. It lists every field you will be asked for, and uploading it to your AI tool is what keeps the tool answering the actual questions instead of writing you a general impact summary.

Then collect whatever program documents you have. Here's some ideas of what to include:

Your program page from your website
Attendance, registration, or client records for the report year (removing identifiable information)
Post-program survey results
Grant application or proposal
Last year's annual report or a board report
Program budget documentation
Program planning documents

Check what is inside your files before you upload them. Attendance sheets and client records often contain names, addresses, dates of birth, and case notes, and some funder agreements and privacy obligations do not allow that information to leave your systems. You do not need any of it here. The tool needs the count of people you served, not the list of who they were. Bring aggregate counts and summary tables, and if you do need to share a spreadsheet, delete the identifying columns first.

Attach your files rather than pasting links to them. Many AI tools cannot open a link at all, so including a downloaded copy ensures your AI tool of choice can read all its contents.

Two reminders before you start:

You are reporting on one program, not your whole organization. If your organization has chapters or affiliates, report the program you run rather than the network's totals.
You are reporting the full program, not just the share a funder paid for, because True Impact attributes outcomes to each funder based on their share of your funding. Report the full program once and it works for every funder who supported it.

2. Paste this prompt, the report builder document, and any program documents you’ve collected

In your AI tool of choice, attach all the documents you’ve collected (including the report builder questions), then paste in the prompt below and fill in the brackets:

I'm completing a True Impact impact report for ONE program. I've attached my documents and the Report Builder Preparation Worksheet. Help me fill it in.

PROGRAM: [name]

ORGANIZATION: [name]

REPORT PERIOD: [start date] to [end date]

Rules:

1.Return the worksheet in its own format. Work through it section by section in its original order and keep every section, field name, table, column heading, and row exactly as the worksheet has them. Put your answers in the fields that already exist. Do not add a field, remove a field, rename anything, merge or split columns, turn a table into a paragraph, or leave out a table's unused rows. Reproduce the location table and the full demographics table even where I have no data to put in them. If something you want to tell me doesn't fit an existing field, put it in that section's notes field.

2. This one program only. Never use an organization-wide figure as a program figure.

3. Budget means the full cost of running this program for the period. Not the grant amount, not my organization's total expenses. If my documents don't contain a program budget, say so and ask me how to build one.

4. Before you fill in Succeed, ask me who my end beneficiary is. If I reach people through someone else, for example if I train teachers, staff, caregivers, or businesses, then Reach, Learn, and Act count the people I trained, and Succeed counts the people whose lives improved because of them.

5. Demographics describe the people counted in my Reach number, not my end beneficiaries. Never infer them. Do not derive age, race, ethnicity, gender, or any other demographic percentage from participant names, photographs, staff names, or where my program is located. If my documents don't report a breakdown, leave those fields blank and remind me that the platform requires at least one category before I can submit.

6. Never invent a number. Label every field as [FROM SOURCE] with the document and section it came from, [DERIVED] with the calculation you used, [NEEDS CONFIRMATION] with your reasoning, or [NOT IN MY DOCUMENTS] with the exact question I need to answer. Put the label on its own line, separate from the answer, so I can copy the answer into the platform without editing it.

7. Recommend one measurement type for every indicator, using Reference F in the worksheet and the column matching that indicator's stage. Tell me which of the three tiers it falls in: direct measurement, estimate based on data, or guess.

8. My report dates tell you whether my numbers forecast what I expect to achieve or report what I did achieve. Use the right one throughout.

9. Where the worksheet gives a list of options, use one of those options exactly as written. This applies to beneficiary term, intermediary term, delivery type, intervention, cause category, impact model, indicators, and measurement type. Do not invent a term, combine two, or add a parenthetical. If nothing fits well, pick the closest one and explain why in the notes field.

10. Give every location its own row with its own percentage of people served. Do not combine cities, counties, states, or a regional name into one row.

11. Do not name any funder, donor, or company anywhere in the report, including in the budget notes. Our report builder flags reports containing donor names. Refer to funders generically, for example "a corporate funder."

12. Respect the worksheet's character limits.

13. Give me the filled-in worksheet first, then the questions I still need to answer, most important first.

3. For any missing data fields, build your data collection workbook

If there are any questions from the Report Builder that your existing documents could not answer, your next step is to gather that data. Often this is data that might sit with someone other than you. Follow up in your AI chat for a workbook you can send out to your team and get back with the missing data:

Now build me a data collection workbook covering only what is still missing, as an Excel file I can download and send to colleagues.

Sheet 1, called Instructions: my program name, my report period, one short paragraph on what this workbook is for and what to do with it, and a line for who to return it to. Leave the return-to name and the deadline blank for me to fill in.

Sheet 2, called Data Needed: a frozen header row and one row per missing worksheet field, with these columns in this order.

A. Worksheet section

B. Field name, exactly as it appears in the worksheet

C. What's missing, in one sentence

D. Required or optional, as the worksheet marks it

E. Answer

F. How you got this number

G. Status

H. Assigned to

I. Due date

J. Suggested owner

K. Likely source system

Rules for the workbook:
1. Columns E through I are for us to complete. Leave every one of those cells empty. Do not pre-fill them, do not put your suggestions there, and do not answer your own question from column C.

2. Column F is where the person answering names the sign-in sheet, survey, report, or calculation their number came from. Column G should offer a dropdown with Not started, In progress, Provided, and Not available.

3. Columns J and K are your best guesses. Keep each to one short phrase naming one or two roles or systems. No semicolon-separated lists.

4. Keep column C to one sentence a colleague outside my team would understand.

5. Required rows first, then optional.

6. One row per worksheet field. A field that needs both a number and a method is still one row, using columns E and F.

7. Set sensible column widths and turn on text wrapping so nothing has to be expanded to read.If you can't produce an Excel file, give me the same two sheets as tables I can paste into a spreadsheet.

Fill in the assigned-to and due-date columns yourself, then send the workbook to the people who hold each piece. When it comes back, paste the completed rows into the same AI conversation and ask the tool to update the worksheet.

Keep the workbook after you submit. The rows that came back marked "Not available" are a list of what your program is not currently tracking, and that is what makes next year's report easier than this one.

4. Review the draft before you enter anything into the Report Builder

We recommend reviewing your report in full for accuracy as AI tools can get things wrong, including the following:

Intermediary stages. If you serve people through an intermediary, your Reach, Learn, and Act stages should focus on that intermediary group while Succeed counts the people whose lives improved because of the program. AI tends to put the same group in all four. The test: if your program disappeared tomorrow, whose life would get worse? Those people belong in Succeed. More on intermediary work.

Measurement types. Every indicator needs one, and the measurement type you pick tells your funder how you determined that number. If your AI tool filled in "direct measurement", make sure you can point to the sign-in sheet, assessment, or survey behind it. If you cannot find where a number came from, it was potentially generated and needs to revised.

Demographics. These describe the people in your Reach stage. A program that trains businesses to serve people with disabilities should not come back with "People with disabilities: 100%." Scan the table for any row you did not personally hand the tool a number for. Category definitions.

Budget. If a figure matches your organization's total expenses, please update. Your program budget should represent the cost to run this particular program.

5. Enter your answers in the Report Builder

The worksheet does not submit anything. When you are confident in it, log in and enter your answers in the Report Builder. Next year, clone this report and update the numbers instead of starting over.