📨 AI for Social Impact Deep Dive: MCPs

✍🏼 A Note From the Editor

Welcome to an MCP Deep Dive! If prompt engineering is about learning to speak AI's language, MCP connectors are about putting that language to work in the tools you use every day. It’s AI that doesn't just draft for you—it does for you. So let’s dive into a few examples to help you understand MCPs more deeply.

🔌 Quick Refresher: What is an MCP?

Model Context Protocol (MCP) is an open standard introduced by Anthropic in November 2024 that allows AI tools like Claude to connect directly to the apps and data sources you already use—think WordPress, Canva, and more.

Here's how working with Claude through an MCP might go. First, you start with a project and describe what you want to do. Then, you iterate. Claude can ask some clarifying questions, and together you’ll refine the plan. Hopefully you are used to this evaluate-and-iterate process by now, building your LLM muscles to get to a favorable output. 💪 

Then AI agents take it from there. Rather than you implementing the steps, an agent does it for you when you connect the MCP to your desired app. Think of the conversation with Claude as the strategy session, and then the agent is the one that does the thing.

A disclaimer: AI is not a silver bullet. 🪄 The examples below are ideas and starting points. A huge part of the AI adoption journey is testing, evaluating, and iterating. You might try a connector today and not get the output you were hoping for. But because AI is advancing at a breathtaking speed, a workflow that feels clunky now might work beautifully in a month. The most important thing is to play!

🌐 WordPress MCP

Your organization just wrapped a major program and you need to turn your impact data into a blog post. With a WordPress MCP connector, Claude can draft the content and an AI agent can create the blog post on the back end of your website. Because the quality of your output is only as good as the quality of your instructions, spend time having a conversation with Claude first about what you want to achieve. You can include contextual information about your work, like your mission, program summary, and outcomes data. Share an example of a blog post you have already written and ask Claude to mimic the tone. Once you have arrived at a solid draft, connect your MCP and ask the agent to push it to WordPress. Remind Claude to never publish anything live to your website. A human should be the only one with that authority.

🎨 Canva MCP

Content creation is a hamster wheel, and is often done by a one-person development and communications department. The Canva MCP connector could very well be this tired professional’s best friend. Following similar steps as above, have a conversation with Claude to refine the process and goals for your content creation project. Provide additional context and examples, and create a draft of the copy. Then connect the MCP to Canva, and try a prompt like: "Using the copy we developed, create a social media graphic in Canva to publish on LinkedIn. Use our brand kit in Canva and include the headline Do Good, Better." As the human, always review designs for brand consistency and accuracy before posting!

🔍 Candid MCP

Candid (the organization behind GuideStar and Foundation Center) is a goldmine for social impact sector data in the US. With the Candid MCP connector, you can ask Claude to pull funder information, explore grant opportunities, or analyze nonprofit data without manually doing it yourself. To use it: connect the Candid MCP in Claude, then try: "Search Candid for foundations that fund environmental justice work in the Southeast with grants between $50,000–$250,000." Or “Search Candid and compile a list of nonprofits serving veterans in the Northeastern United States.” You may hit a paywall at some point if you’re not a Candid subscriber. And as always, fact-check the results—don't skip the human judgment step of qualifying the leads yourself!

👋🏼 About AI for Social Impact

I’m Joanna, and I’m on a mission to help folks in the social impact sector understand, experiment with, and responsibly adopt AI. We don’t have time to waste, but we also can’t get left behind.

Let’s move the sector forward together. 💫

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