What We Learned: Another Year of Building Chorus

A year ago, we wrote a manifesto about giving time back to changemakers. We talked about how every minute saved could mean another family receiving services, another donor engaged, or another strategy session that charts the course for real change. 

We meant every word and still do. 

But building taught us something important about how to actually deliver on that promise. In a world where AI can now do many things miraculously well, the question became: what can only Chorus do to help nonprofits raise more money and engage more supporters?

The Problem We Diagnosed (Still True)

The core insight that led Aaron, Sam and me to launch Chorus in the summer of 2023 hasn't changed. Nonprofits are stretched impossibly thin. There aren't enough hours in the day to do everything that needs doing. Teams are jumping between five, ten, and sometimes more platforms just to execute basic marketing. 

Technology built for Fortune 500 companies doesn't fit nonprofit workflows, because selling products and raising money for a cause are fundamentally different jobs.The fragmentation tax is real. 

Meanwhile, urgent work crowds out strategic work. The fundraising calendar marches on, and there's always another appeal to get out the door, which means the longer-range thinking that would actually move the needle keeps getting pushed to later.

This diagnosis hasn't changed from when we wrote our manifesto last year. If anything, we see the problems growing more acute.

What Changed Around Us

What has changed in the last year is the technology landscape.

When we wrote our Chorus manifesto, "AI-powered tools for nonprofits" felt like a meaningful differentiator. That changed fast! 

The mass market LLMs improved their capabilities. ChatGPT can write a great fundraising email. Sonnet can churn out press releases. Gemini crafts pitch-perfect social media posts. 

Every existing tool added AI features. Canva has AI built in. Opus Clip can automatically cut your long-form videos into shorter clips.

The productivity frame—"do things faster with AI"—became table stakes almost overnight. The thing we thought would set us apart became something everyone could claim.

This forced a sharper question: if everyone has AI, what's actually valuable?

What That Forced Us to Learn

The answer isn't better AI. It isn’t even AI at all, really! It's using the things LLMs are good at and coupling them with lots of other powerful capabilities from data science, machine learning, user experience, deep knowledge of nonprofit marketing, and insightful product design to create something new that actually understands your work. More precisely: how you do it on a granular level, and what you need to accomplish.

Here's what we mean. Yes, Opus Clip can edit your video. But it can't create multiple variations aligned to your style guide. It doesn't know which clips performed best with your audience last quarter. It can't use those results to inform what you create next. It doesn't understand that a fundraising video needs different framing than an advocacy video. It wasn’t built with the goal of getting you a validated winner as fast as possible, because you’re under a time and resource constraint while needing to respond to a happening story in the next 12 hours. 

The same gap exists across the entire marketing stack. Yes, ChatGPT can now search your Google Drive and draft a fundraising email. That's a real capability (even though we were actually ahead of them by about 6 months!). But connecting to your systems isn't the same as understanding them. Generic tools don't know what a fundraising email is trying to accomplish versus an advocacy ask versus a welcome series. They can't learn what works for your audience based on your historical performance. They can't tell you why your year-end campaign underperformed, or which donor segments are most likely to convert. They can pull your documents—but they can't pull your email performance data, connect it to your CRM, and tell you what to do differently next time. 

Pulling back, what every nonprofit marketer knows is that our success fundamentally comes down to knowing who to talk to, why they’re listening, and what will move them to action. The audience murmurs and the message nuances are the leverage points. We need finely-tuned tools to hear these signals and respond to them. And generic tools don’t do that.

We learned that the gap isn't capability. It's integration and context.

This led Chorus to a second realization.

We thought content creation would be our entry point. Help teams write faster, create more, and produce video at scale. But we learned the deeper pain is upstream. Organizations don't actually know what's working. They're making decisions on hunches because extracting insights from their data is expensive, slow, or often impossible. The reporting takes forever. The platforms don't talk to each other. By the time you have the analysis, the moment has passed.

Content follows insight. You can't write the right email if you don't know what "right" means for your audience.

Where That Led Us

This learning honed our focus.

Chorus went from "comprehensive productivity platform" to something more specific: the marketing intelligence interface for nonprofits. We're still heading toward the same destination—unified tools, time saved, impact amplified—but we found a clearer starting point. Chorus helps organizations understand what's actually working, then helps them act on it so they can raise more money and move more people to act.

Why marketing specifically? Because marketing is how nonprofits raise money and power action. It's the emails and direct mail letters that fund the programs. The social posts that build awareness or mobilize supporters that provide the power to get things done. The ads that acquire new donors. The videos that educate and motivate.

Marketing is where organizations allocate significant resources, where data exists but isn't being leveraged, and where better decisions translate directly into more dollars raised and more people engaged in the mission.

What We're Building Now

We're focused on analytics. Tools that let you ask questions in plain language and get answers in seconds instead of days, like: 

• "How did our year-end emails perform compared to last year?" 
• "Which topics drive the most revenue?" 
•  "What tone actually gets people to take action?"

Chorus recently worked with a few large national nonprofits to analyze their email programs using this approach. We found that variables like email tone and content style, things that were previously evaluated on gut instinct, could actually be quantified and optimized. For one organization, we identified how content style alone could translate to seven figures in additional annual revenue.

But here's the insight that mattered most: there's no universal playbook. What works for one organization doesn't work for another. The "best practices" that operators share at conferences are averages, and averages obscure more than they reveal. Each organization needs intelligence about their program, their audience, and their historical patterns.

That's what we've built at Chorus.

The vision from here is a unified interface that helps nonprofits raise more money and engage more supporters by giving them the intelligence to know what's working and the tools to act on it, all in one place. That means building out several connected surfaces:

Channels — One view across email, SMS, social, direct mail, ads, and any other marketing channel operating at scale. Understand performance across all of them, then eventually send and publish without switching tools.

Audiences — Not just "who are our donors" but predictive intelligence and a real understanding of what is moving people. Who's likely to respond to this specific ask? What topics do they care about most? Which supporters are at risk of lapsing? What's the right ask amount for each person? We want to tell you who will engage before you hit send.

Content — Creation that's informed by everything else in the system. Brand memory that learns your voice. QA that checks against your style guide automatically. Variations generated and tested based on what's actually worked.

Dashboards — Save any question as a report. Build views for different stakeholders. Stop recreating the same analysis every month.

News & Social Intelligence — Know what's happening in your space, what's breaking, and what's being said about your issues. Connect external signals to your content strategy. Respond to important moments in hours instead of days.

Two things tie all of this together: Integrations and Memory.

Integrations means doing the messy, unglamorous work of connecting to your actual systems: your CRM, your email platform, your ad accounts, and your donation processor. We pull your data in and normalize it so it's actually usable.  With Chorus, the fragmented nonprofit tech stack that generic tools won't touch becomes an integrated whole. 

Memory is the intelligence layer that learns from your brand standards, your messaging priorities, your historical patterns, and what works for your audience. Our system gets smarter about your organization over time.

One without the other isn't enough. Integrations without Memory is just data pipes. Memory without Integrations has nothing to learn from. Together, they create a flywheel: more data flowing in, better learning, more value, and more usage. The more you use it, the smarter it gets.

Why does building all these surfaces together matter? Because right now, nonprofits use a patchwork of tools to execute one workflow: gather insights, create content, distribute it, measure performance, repeat. Each tool is optimized for one step. None of them talk to each other. 

When all the data flows through one system, we can answer the question that actually matters: how do you raise more money and move more people to act? Together, we can eliminate  guesswork, and instead act with precise intelligence about what to send, to whom, through which channel, and with what message.

What Stayed the Same

The "why" hasn't moved.

Time is still the scarcest resource for changemakers. Wasted time still means diminished impact. Nonprofits still deserve tools built for them, not adapted from corporate software. AI should still enhance human judgment, not replace it.

And the long-term vision is the same: every nonprofit, regardless of size, operating with sophisticated capabilities that used to be reserved for the largest organizations.

We're still building toward that. We just have a clearer path to get there.

Why We're More Confident Now

A year ago, we had conviction about the problem. Now we have conviction and evidence about the solution.

We've seen what happens when organizations get real insights from their data. They can raise more money for the causes we all care about. They can engage more supporters and do it in ways that strengthen their ties rather than weary their ears with more generic messages. Teams stop guessing and start knowing. The work that used to take months, or never happened at all, becomes possible.

Our team at Chorus is building something specific that solves a real problem. It’s one that general-purpose tools, for all their power, can't touch.

Our manifesto's vision is still where we're headed. We just know a lot more now about how to get there.

The chorus is still building. The song just got clearer.

—Aaron, Tim, Sam, and Tareq