AI Academy: Where Whispering began

Whispering began with teaching. Before we were designing and building our own apps, AI Academy was our first endeavor: helping nontechnical people use generative AI in their everyday work and personal lives.

The starting point was my own experience. As I brought AI into my work and eventually into my routine, I kept a record of what I used it for. That growing collection became the foundation of what we taught.

Why we called it Whispering

We saw prompt engineering as having something in common with working with horses. In my experience, patience, empathy and clearer communication led to better results. That idea gave the company its name.

It shaped our approach to teaching too. We wanted people to get comfortable explaining what they needed, giving useful context and refining a request. The emphasis was on the person's communication skills and judgment.

Start with something you already need to do

The examples came from real tasks: working with spreadsheets, making a packing assistant, planning menus, getting help writing in my own voice and analyzing information through particular lenses.

These were things I had tried and brought into my own life. They gave us a practical way to introduce AI to someone who might otherwise wonder where to begin.

The core of Academy was simple: prompting skills, together with a collection of useful applications people might not have thought of yet. Learning how to ask became more meaningful when there was something you wanted to accomplish.

When our learning platform became the obstacle

We originally delivered Academy through Kajabi. At the time, it was one of our largest expenses. When the price rose significantly, the added features used to justify that increase did little for our business.

Managing the content was difficult too. We spent time navigating a system whose priorities did not always match our own. By then, our software development skills had advanced enough that we felt confident building the platform ourselves.

The move gave us an opportunity to rethink the work around what Academy actually needed.

A CMS designed to get out of the way

We built our own content management system around a smoother flow: get in, move between content, make changes and carry on. The aim was to reduce the friction in the work we repeated.

We left out the upsell and cross-sell distractions and the features we did not need. The platform could focus on our requirements, without constantly presenting someone else's commercialization strategy.

We also wanted a free-trial approach that had not been available to us on our previous platform at the time. Building our own gave us room to shape that experience around the way we wanted people to try Academy.

What is available now

As of November 2026, AI For Nonprofits 2.0 is live on the web. We are migrating the remaining course content, with the rest of the courses planned to return in January 2027 alongside our new mobile app.

The website is available today; the mobile app is still being built. You can explore the current course at AI Academy.

The project has come full circle. Teaching people how to use AI was our first endeavor. Learning to build with it then gave us the ability to create a platform around that teaching.