We Just Deleted Half Our Product

Last December, we wrote about how Chorus was evolving from a productivity tool into a marketing intelligence platform. That post was about focus: sharpening the vision to help nonprofits raise more money and engage more supporters through intelligence, not just speed.

This post is about what happened next: we went into the product and started cutting.

We removed the documents feed, the content composer, the text editor, the news tracker, and the research feed. These features served us well. But the product needs to match where we're going, not where we've been.

What replaced all of it? A single chat interface.

A chat interface lets our AI agent mix and match everything Chorus can do in a single workflow: your documents, your news archive, your performance data, your organizational context. Tell it what you need and it figures out how to get there.

"Write a legislative update using this week's news coverage in Louisiana." "Draft a fundraising email using our style guide and last quarter's top-performing framing." "Research foundations funding criminal justice reform in the Southeast."

One interface, any workflow.

Everything you could do before still works. It's just faster and more flexible. Here's what it looks like in practice:

News intelligence → stakeholder reports. Ask the chat to search recent news coverage on your issues, then generate a narrative report with sources and links, ready for your stakeholders. No more scrolling through a feed manually to find what you need.

🎥 Watch: Building a legislative news report in under 2 minutes →

Content creation with context. Drop a Google Doc, upload a file, or paste a link, then tell the chat what you need. It can create grant proposals, fundraising appeals, social posts, analyses, and more. Your documents become live context for anything you create.

Research and discovery. Ask the chat to research funders, explore a topic, or summarize findings across your documents. No separate research tab. Just ask.

🎥 Watch: Researching funders and drafting a set of resources →

That's what's live today. Here's what we're working on next.

We've been studying how news coverage affects email fundraising, analyzing thousands of emails across multiple nonprofits matched against tens of thousands of news stories.

The short version: when the news is talking about your issues, your fundraising emails raise dramatically more money. To most digital fundraisers, this probably sounds like a no-brainer. But when you dig below the surface, it’s not as straightforward as you’d think. We found that every organization – and even every issue – has a different news model. For some, emails sent while a story is actively breaking outperform those sent days later. In other cases, the tenor and shape of how the news is being covered matters most. 

The most salient point: getting it right really matters. Using Chorus to understand your news model and then to shape your digital strategy doesn’t lead to modest improvements. It actually leads to multiples better performance, not incremental percentages.

This is where Chorus is headed. We want to proactively tell you which stories to build campaigns around and when to send them to maximize your fundraising and advocacy results.

We're running this as a pilot with a small number of organizations right now. If your team wants to improve digital fundraising performance, and you'd like to be part of the next cohort, reach out.

Here's what we're most excited about. We're building something we've wanted to build since Chorus launched: audience optimization based on what you're about to send.

Most targeting tools look at historical behavior: who gave last time, who opened recently. That's useful, but it misses the most important variable: the content itself. The same person who ignores a fundraising email about one issue might respond enthusiastically to an email about a different issue, with a different ask amount, framed a different way.

We're piloting this with a partner organization now. Most organizations send the same email to their entire list. But different supporters respond to different issues, different framings, and different ask amounts. If you have three appeals ready to go, Chorus can help you figure out which email each person on your list is most likely to act on. The result: more donations from the same list, without sending more email.

We have room for a few more organizations in this pilot. If you have an active email fundraising program and want to test content-aware targeting on your list, we'd love to talk.

We'll be publishing case studies from both pilots in the coming weeks, including real results and what we learned. Stay tuned.

-Tareq

P.S. Want to see the new interface in action? Reply to this email or book a walkthrough.