The Arts Workplace

If you’ve been wondering whether Claude is actually useful for arts administration work, or whether it’s just another tech tool you’d have to rebuild your brain around, this video is the answer I wish I’d had six months ago.

Start Here: Nonprofit Pricing

The first thing I want arts administrators to know is that Anthropic has nonprofit pricing, and it makes Claude genuinely accessible in a way that other AI tools are not. If your organization qualifies (most 501(c)(3)s do), you can get Claude Team at a meaningful discount. That changes the ROI math considerably when you’re presenting this to leadership. The plan that makes sense for most organizations is Claude Team, not the individual plan. Team gives you a shared workspace, which is where the real operational value lives.

Workspaces and Projects: The Setup That Actually Matters

The single most important thing I cover in this video is Projects. If you use Claude without Projects, you’re starting from scratch every single chat. You lose the context, the instructions, the org-specific knowledge. It compounds over time and makes the tool much less useful than it should be.

Projects solve this. Inside a Project, you can add custom instructions (how you write, what to avoid, who your audience is), upload knowledge files (your style guide, strategic plan, program descriptions), and have Claude produce output that actually sounds like it came from your organization. I set up Projects for different work areas. My writing projects have different instructions than my data analysis projects. That separation matters.

Custom Instructions: Where Most People Leave Value on the Table

Custom instructions are where most people underinvest. They write one line and wonder why Claude sounds generic. Your custom instructions should include how your organization talks about itself, who your audience is for that specific project, what good output looks like in your context, and what Claude should do when it’s uncertain.

The knowledge files go further still. Upload documents once, and Claude can reference them whenever it’s working in that context. For arts organizations, that could be your mission statement, your program descriptions, your board communications style guide, your current strategic plan. Claude stops needing you to re-explain the basics every session.

Connectors: Linking Claude to Where Your Work Actually Lives

The connectors feature links Claude to Google Drive, Notion, Asana, Microsoft 365, and a growing list of other tools. This means Claude can pull from documents that live in your real systems, not just files you’ve manually uploaded. For organizations that are stretched thin, the less re-pasting you have to do, the more useful the tool becomes day-to-day.

The Workflow Demo: From Data to Asana Task

In the video, I walk through a full end-to-end demo using fictional CRM ticket-sales data. Review and analyze the dataset, pull out the key findings, and create an Asana task from those findings, directly from Claude. That last step is worth paying attention to. Not because it’s magic, but because it removes a switching cost that adds up across a hundred repetitive tasks.

What Automation Actually Means Here

I want to be direct about this, because the word gets misused constantly. Automation in this context means speeding up repetitive cognitive work. It does not mean removing human judgment. Deciding whether findings are significant enough to act on: that’s you. Deciding what the task should say and who should own it: that’s you. What Claude handles is the extraction, the formatting, the first draft, the routine structure.

We do not have the luxury of getting this wrong. Our work requires judgment, institutional knowledge, and relationship context that no tool has. What we can do is stop spending mental energy on tasks that do not require those things.

What to Do Next

Check whether your organization qualifies for nonprofit pricing. Sign up for Claude Team, not the individual plan. Set up one Project for your most common work area and write real custom instructions, not a placeholder. Watch the video for the connector setup and the full workflow demo. If you’re already using Claude but have not set up Projects yet, that’s the first thing to fix.