Hey Reader,

Something dropped yesterday that I think every nonprofit consultant needs to know about. And I want to give you my honest take before the panic sets in.

On August 31, Candid made its AI fundraising assistant broadly available to Candid Search users. It can now help organizations find aligned funders, evaluate eligibility, analyze award history, recommend an ask amount, build prospect pipelines, and draft initial letters of inquiry.

In plain terms: the tool does a significant portion of what some consultants charge a lot of money to do.

If your consulting offer is primarily 'I will research funders and write proposals,' this matters. AI isn't going to replace you tomorrow, but your clients are eventually going to start expecting those tasks to be done faster, and priced differently.

Things are evolving and we have to be nimble and prepared to evolve.

Here's the reframe I want you to sit with:

This is not a threat to consultants. It is a signal.

The consultants who are going to be just fine (and actually better positioned) are the ones whose value was never really about the research or the writing in the first place. It was always about the judgment behind it. The relationships. The strategy. The 'here's why this funder is actually wrong for you right now' conversation. The narrative that makes a proposal feel like it was written by someone who actually understands the work.

That's the stuff the tool cannot do reliably.

So here's the question worth asking yourself this week:

When a client hires me, what are they actually paying for?

If the honest answer is mostly research and first drafts, it might be time to reposition.

The stronger offer is strategy, funder positioning, revenue diversification, program design, and final proposal judgment. The thinking that happens before and after the document gets written. That's where the real consulting value has always lived. And it's also the stuff that earns longer engagements, better clients, and rates that don't have to compete with a tool.

These are the kinds of conversations we will be having inside KatalystEDU...it's the part of our Katalyst ecosystem for the learning, the execution, AND the conversation.

If you haven't grabbed early access yet, we are still at $197 through October 31. After that, the price goes up.

Get lifetime early access to the KatalystEDU pilot community here.

I'm keeping watch on things that are moving. More soon.

Kamilah