For Nonprofit Executive Directors ·
What you'll accomplish
You've run a dozen stakeholder interviews and sent out a community survey for your strategic plan, and now you're staring at a pile of scattered notes and a spreadsheet export with no obvious starting point. Upload de-identified notes and the survey data directly into a ChatGPT chat, and it can read across all of it at once, surface recurring themes, and draft a SWOT summary you can actually start building a plan from. This uses a plain ChatGPT chat with file upload, not a Project, since this is a one-time synthesis task rather than something you'll return to for months.
What you'll need
Go through your interview notes and replace names with a role label instead: "Board Member A," "Longtime Volunteer," "Program Participant." Stakeholder interviews often include candid, sometimes critical feedback shared in confidence, so this step happens before anything gets uploaded anywhere, not after.
What you should see: A clean set of notes where no interviewee is identifiable by name, only by role or relationship to the organization.
Troubleshooting: If a note contains a detail specific enough to identify someone even without their name (a specific job title only one person holds, a very particular story), generalize that detail too, or leave the specific point out of the version you upload.
Open your survey results and export them as a spreadsheet or CSV file. Remove any open-text answer that includes a name or an identifying detail, the same way you cleaned the interview notes.
What you should see: A spreadsheet file with your survey responses, de-identified in the same way as your notes.
Go to chatgpt.com and sign in. Start a regular new chat (not a Project, since you're not planning to return to this synthesis repeatedly the way you would a governance or HR library).
What you should see: A blank chat window with a text box and an attachment icon.
Click the attachment icon and add your cleaned interview notes and your survey spreadsheet. On the free plan, there's a daily cap on how many files you can upload, so if you have many separate interview files, combine them into one or two documents first rather than uploading a dozen individual files.
What you should see: Your files attached to the chat, ready to reference in your first message.
Before asking for a SWOT draft, ask ChatGPT to surface patterns across everything you uploaded.
Example prompt to copy-paste:
I've attached de-identified stakeholder interview notes and a community survey export for our nonprofit's strategic plan. Read across all of it and identify the 5 to 7 themes that come up most often, with a rough sense of how many sources mentioned each one. Quote a short representative phrase for each theme without naming who said it.
What you should see: A list of themes with supporting quotes or references, giving you a sense of what's actually recurring versus what's a single outlier opinion.
Once you've reviewed the themes and they look accurate, ask for a structured SWOT summary.
Example prompt to copy-paste:
Based on the themes we just identified, draft a SWOT summary for the strategic plan: strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats, each with 3 to 5 points grounded in what the interviews and survey actually said, not general nonprofit sector assumptions.
What you should see: A SWOT summary that traces back to real input rather than generic strategic-planning language you could have written without any interviews at all.
Skim back through a sample of the original interview notes yourself and confirm ChatGPT didn't overweight one especially vocal interviewee or miss a theme that came up in quieter form across several conversations.
Troubleshooting: If a theme feels off, tell it directly: "Theme 3 seems to come from just one interview. Check how many sources actually raised that point." It will recheck and adjust.
Theme extraction with source counting:
Across the attached notes and survey data, list every distinct theme that came up in at least 2 sources, with a rough count of how many sources mentioned it.
SWOT draft:
Draft a SWOT summary for our strategic plan based on the themes identified, with each point tied to something an interviewee or survey respondent actually said.
Outlier check:
Which of the themes we identified came from just one or two sources rather than a broader pattern? Flag those separately so we don't treat them as consensus.
Committee-ready summary:
Turn the themes and SWOT summary into a two-page briefing document for a strategic planning committee meeting, written for people who haven't read the raw interview notes.