Hi Mark, this page is a useful reference for you and your SLT colleagues. It summarises the key points from our conversation and sets out how better WAI works and what an engagement with Naomi and Jack's could look like in practice.
What We Covered
Who We Are
better WAI is an AI operations consultancy working exclusively with charities and ethical businesses. Our purpose is to help organisations deliver more results for their cause with less effort.
We do this through three pillars:
AI policy, strategy roadmaps and the governance frameworks that let teams use AI with confidence.
Practical sessions that build confidence across the whole organisation, not just the tech-savvy.
Bespoke tools and workflows that remove manual work and free your team for higher-impact activity.
The outcomes of our work result in teams saving time, reducing the amount of admin they do, and doing more of the work that makes the biggest impact.
Everything better WAI builds is hands-on and collaborative – created side-by-side with your team, enhancing their strengths rather than replacing them.
Human review is built into everything, so AI never works unsupervised and is never designed to replace people.
Case Study
We are currently eight months into a retained engagement with Together for Short Lives (who referred this intro) covering strategy, policy, bespoke AI builds and organisation-wide training. Below are three examples of builds delivered as part of that engagement.
The TFSL communications team previously spent significant time manually tracking media coverage across a wide range of sources. We built an automated monitoring tool that continuously scans trusted sources, surfaces relevant coverage, and delivers a summarised report to the team.
This freed up meaningful hours each week for the campaigns team to focus on higher-value work.
Frees up meaningful hours each weekTFSL needed a clearer picture of how staff time was being allocated across restricted projects and programmes – important both for operational planning and for reporting to funders.
We built a lightweight time tracking tool that is completely free to run, no matter how many people use it. The tool integrates with existing Microsoft systems, giving leadership more accurate data and will save thousands in time tracking subscription costs.
Free to run, no per-user costsThe Family Support Hub team were receiving support requests from families, and responding could take up to a week because researching the right solutions for each family required manually searching through almost 200 different websites and resources.
We built a custom AI tool that the team can now speak to directly. They describe the family's situation and the tool searches every source simultaneously and returns a comprehensive list of every grant and support service available to that family's specific needs.
The team then reviews the output, checks each source and the tool produces a branded PDF that can be sent directly to the family.
What previously took up to a week now takes around an hour. The tool is currently in final testing and due to roll out to the full team imminently.
Response time: up to a week → around an hourThe Process
Work is structured as a 12-month partnership, typically following five stages.
We begin with a 60-minute Learning and Inspiration Session with senior leadership, exploring what AI can do in practice with real examples from across the charity sector. This is followed by a 60–90 minute Scoping Workshop to map your biggest operational challenges and identify where AI can make the greatest difference.
We finalise and embed your AI policy – written not as a dry governance document but as a practical, interactive guide that empowers staff to use AI safely and in line with your values. Alongside this, we develop your strategy roadmap: a clear, prioritised plan of AI-powered solutions with quick wins and longer-term opportunities identified.
Every build is designed around your organisation's specific needs. These range from lightweight automations that remove repetitive tasks to larger bespoke tools built to solve specific operational problems, such as the family support tool built for Together for Short Lives.
Monthly sessions open to all staff, focused on practical AI skills and grounded in your AI policy. Designed to build confidence across the organisation and make AI a natural part of how your team works.
Why better WAI
We work exclusively with charities, and we already work in palliative care — so we understand the sector, the pressures, and the kinds of solutions that actually work in this environment.
We are a small team, which means you deal with me directly rather than being passed to an account manager. I enjoy getting stuck in and am happy to travel for face-to-face sessions.
Our developers have more than 20 years of experience working in Microsoft and automation.
For us, the technology always comes last. We start by getting to know your purpose and ways of working, learning from the team to understand their processes and strengths — only then do we decide the right tool or approach to implement.