You're right to be cautious. Data centers are real. Job displacement is real. The people you serve deserve better than being someone's training data. So before your organization touches any AI tool — ours included — run it through these three questions. Write the answers down. One page.
Question 1
Question 1 of 3
Ask the vendor, in writing: what data leaves our organization, where is it stored, and is it used to train their models? If they can't answer clearly, that's your answer. (Our own standard, for the record: inbound-only, always disclosed, and your donor database stays yours. Hold us to it too.)
This page practices Question 1: your answers are saved only in this browser. Nothing leaves your device.
Saved ✓Question 2
Question 2 of 3
Name the person. If the tool drafts grant reports, does your grant writer become an editor, or become redundant? "Augmentation" isn't a slogan; it's a staffing plan. Write the plan before you buy the tool. The organizations that do this well don't cut staff — they finally let their best people do the work only they can do.
Question 3
Question 3 of 3
Run the tool past the people it affects — including the community you serve. If a chatbot answers your clients at midnight, your clients get a vote. Fifteen minutes of asking beats a year of apologizing.
That's the audit. Three questions, one page, twenty minutes. Tape it inside the cabinet where you keep the passwords. Any vendor who flinches at these questions — including us, if we ever do — doesn't deserve your mission.
Time saved: every bad AI purchase you now won't make. Value: your community's trust, which is the whole budget.
Published Friday, September 11, 2026 as Issue #1 of the Sawdust Silicon newsletter — read the full issue, with this week's frontier and free fuel. This page is the playbook itself, frozen as published: playbooks never change after they go up. If a better way appears, it gets a new number, not a rewrite.
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