Take 5 in Action: From 60 Pages to Six

The Take 5 Callback

Serving on a nonprofit board is a commitment that comes with a lot of reading. Each month, board members receives a report packed with data, charts, and updates. At roughly 60 pages, that’s a lot of information to absorb, especially when board service is just one of many responsibilities competing for your time.

With only a week to prepare for the next meeting, getting through the report can become a project in itself. So, instead of working through all 60 pages, one community leader decided to Take 5.

The Prompt

The task was straightforward: take a lengthy report and make it easier to digest.

He uploaded the 60-page report to Microsoft 365 Copilot and asked it to produce a six-page summary. No elaborate prompt. No lengthy back-and-forth. Just a clear request with a specific goal.

What Was Produced

Copilot produced the six-page summary on the first try.

The community leader didn’t need to refine the prompt or ask for multiple revisions. He got the condensed version he wanted and stopped there. That’s an important reminder: not every AI experiment needs to become a complicated workflow. Sometimes, the first result is enough to make a task more manageable.

Why It Worked

A 60-page report can be difficult to navigate when you’re balancing board responsibilities with a full-time job and everything else competing for your attention.

A concise summary offers a starting point, helping a reader get an overview of the report before deciding where to spend more time. Instead of treating every page as requiring the same level of attention, the reader can use the summary to identify the information that deserves a closer look.

Of course, a summary isn’t a substitute for reviewing the original report when the details matter. Important figures, charts, decisions, and supporting context should still be checked against the source material. The value is having a more manageable way into the information.

What Surprised Us

Sometimes, the most useful part of an AI experiment is how little effort it requires. The community leader received the summary he requested on the first attempt and didn’t need to keep prompting Copilot to get there.

That’s Take 5 in practice: identify a task that takes more than five minutes, spend five minutes considering whether AI can help, and see what happens.

Where Could You Take It Next?

The six-page summary solved the immediate problem. But what if the he wanted to go a step further?

Imagine collecting the reports from every board meeting over a quarter or a full year. With the appropriate documents and permissions, AI could help compare them, identify recurring themes, and highlight changes over time.

Are certain expenses consistently increasing? Are program outcomes improving? Which challenges keep appearing in meeting after meeting? What has changed since the previous quarter?

Those questions could lead to a more useful conversation with AI. The community leader could then explore whether reliable national benchmarks or publicly available industry data exist to provide additional context.

The important distinction: these are potential next steps, not results from this particular experiment. Any identified trends would need to be checked against the original reports, and comparisons with national data would require relevant, credible sources and comparable measurements.

The point isn’t that every summary needs to become a research project. It’s that one small experiment can reveal opportunities to make future work more useful, too.

Take 5. Use AI. Keep your guardrails.

Before uploading reports, make sure you’re using an approved AI tool and understand your organization’s policies for handling confidential, financial, employee, or other sensitive information. Board materials may contain information that isn’t appropriate to share with every AI service.

And remember: AI can help you find patterns and summarize information, but it can also miss context or misinterpret a chart. Check the source before relying on the conclusions.

Not sure which tools are appropriate for your organization? OneSource can help you start the conversation.