Using AI for your report without losing your sources
AI can help you write a report faster. Here is how to keep track of where every figure comes from. Then you are ready when a participant, a partner, a funder or an auditor asks.
For charities and non-profits, public sector bodiesAccountabilityBelongs to
- For
- Charities and non-profits, Public sector bodies
- Perspective
- Accountability
- Phase
- Intelligence operations, Engagement & communication
- Technology
- Language models with evidence
- Keywords
- Impact report
Writing a report takes time, whether it is for a funder, for participants or for partners. You dig through notes, emails and spreadsheets to piece together what happened this year. AI can help with that. Think of it as a quick intern. It may search and sort, but you are the one who signs. The risk is that you end up with figures nobody can trace. A few simple habits stop that from happening.
Start with your sources, not with your prompt. Put everything you plan to use in one folder. Think of meeting notes, survey results, the original application and last year’s report. If it is not in the folder, it does not go in the report. That way you always know what you drew on.
Then ask the AI about those documents only. Upload them and ask it to base its answer on them. For every figure and every claim, ask for a word-for-word quote and the name of the document it comes from. A quote is text that appears in the source exactly as written. A summary does not count.
Next, check every quote yourself. Open the document and search for the sentence. If you cannot find it, the figure goes. That is a shame. But you now know exactly which figures you can stand behind, and where you still need to measure.
In the report itself, give the source next to each figure. A short line will do, such as the name of the document and its date. Anyone who reads the report can then check it for themselves. That goes for participants and partners as much as for a funder or an auditor. Is your project funded by the ERDF or the ESF? Then the audit will ask for evidence behind every figure anyway, so you will have it ready.
Be careful about what you paste into an AI assistant. Some information about participants does not belong in a public AI tool, such as names or stories shared in confidence. Remove it, or use a tool where you know where the data is stored. We have not found good tools for this ourselves. So we build our own tools and workflows, and run them locally. That way we know where the data stays.
Finally, read the whole text through yourself. Does the story match what you saw happen this year? AI writes fluently, but it has no idea what really went on in your programme.
