What AI Can and Can't Do for a Church or Community Group's Admin

An AI chat tool is a word machine. Give it rough notes and it hands back tidy sentences. That's the whole trick, and it's useful for a good share of committee admin. The rest is better left to people.

Most chat tools run on a large language model. Wikipedia says these models can typically write, shorten, translate and pick apart text across many settings.¹ For a volunteer secretary, that means first drafts, rewrites and shorter versions of long messages.

Tasks that suit a chat tool

You'll spot these by the way they feel. They're repetitive. They start from words you already have. Nobody is hurt if the first try is clumsy.

• Turning a rough list of dates into a clear notice.
• Rewording a long email so it's friendlier or shorter.
• Drafting a polite "no, the hall's booked" reply that you then edit.
• Making three versions of the same reminder for different audiences.
• Suggesting an agenda order from a list of topics.

The pattern is the same each time. You supply the facts. The tool supplies the phrasing. You read the result before anyone else does, because a draft that nobody has checked is only a guess dressed up in neat sentences.

Tasks to keep for people

Some jobs shouldn't go near a chat tool at all, however handy it feels.

• Anything pastoral, religious or about a person's wellbeing. A kind word from a real person can't be outsourced.
• Legal, tax and fundraising-law questions. Ask the official regulator in your country, or your own adviser.
• Deciding who gets a roster spot, who's let into a group, or who's turned away.
• Anything with members' health, family or money details in it.

On that last point, The OAIC, which is Australia's privacy regulator, would rather you left members' personal details out of public chatbots.² A separate page covers which member details to hold back.

What a wrong answer looks like

The first thing you notice is that the draft reads well. That's the danger. Smooth isn't the same as right. A smooth paragraph can still carry a wrong date or a made-up detail.

The OAIC warns that these systems can give wrong or false answers.² The trade word is "hallucination": an answer that states something false as if it were true.³ Sometimes the falsehood is believable, which makes it harder to catch.³

In group admin, that usually shows up in small, checkable places:

• A start time that differs from your notes.
• A phone number or street name that you never supplied.
• A promise ("tea and coffee provided") nobody agreed to.
• A tone that's too formal, or too chirpy, for your members.

Read every draft against your own notes, line by line. If a detail isn't in your notes, delete it or confirm it.

A sensible first week

Start with something low-stakes, like rewording a reminder that goes to the committee only. Paste in made-up or generic details, never real member information. Look at what comes back and notice what you changed. Those changes tell you how the tool misses your group's voice.

Then try one real task from this site. The pages on volunteer roster messages, newsletter drafts and meeting minutes each follow one job from rough notes to a checked message.

Keep a short list of "ask the tool" jobs and "do it ourselves" jobs, and share it with the committee. A one-page list stops two volunteers from using the tool in two very different ways.