Use Claude Design To Turn Your Board Report Into A One-Pager Your Elders Will Actually Read

AI for Church Leaders | Claude Design, Part 2 of 2

Hey there!

Part 1 covered the fast wins: Sunday slides, lobby signage, and a volunteer flyer. If you built one of them, you already know your way around the screen.

The 3 projects below take a little longer, 20 to 30 minutes each. They also reach further into your week than a flyer does. One is for your board. One is for your website. One is for whoever helps you with all of it.

Here is what they solve.

Your board gets a report nobody reads past page two. Your staff has been going in circles about the website for months because everyone is describing a picture using words. And your communications volunteer is sitting idle because the file is stuck in your account and you have not had ten minutes to send it over.

Claude Design handles all three. Same access as last week: claude.ai/design in a browser, or the Claude Design item in the sidebar of the Claude desktop app. Included with Pro, Max, Team, and Enterprise.

Let’s take them in order.

1. Turn your last board report into a one-pager.

Time: 20 minutes. Export: PDF or PowerPoint

Your board report is probably a Word document with a budget table pasted into the middle of it.

Claude Design accepts Word, PowerPoint, and Excel files directly. Drag the report and the budget spreadsheet into the same message, then type this:

Turn this into a single-page board summary. Top third: our attendance, our giving, and our number of active volunteers, set in large type. Middle: the giving trend from the attached spreadsheet, as a simple chart. Bottom: the two decisions we need from the board this month. Use the colors from the attached deck.

Claude gives you the whole page laid out on the first try. Read it and check the numbers against your source documents before you do anything else.

Giving numbers often change the morning of the meeting. When that happens, click the number on the page and type the new one over it. The rest of the layout stays where it is, and you do not have to start over.

Then: export as a PDF for the board packet, or as PowerPoint if you are putting it on a screen.

One page gets read before the meeting starts. That is the whole reason to build it.

2. Prototype the web page your team keeps debating.

Time: 30 minutes. Export: shareable link

Say your staff keeps circling the giving page. Your executive pastor wants the give button bigger. Your business administrator wants recurring giving easier to find. You want fewer words on the page. Nobody has seen any of these versions, so the meeting ends with another meeting.

Claude Design has a tool that pulls in a live web page and uses it as the starting point. Point it at your current giving page. Then type this:

Rebuild this giving page. One clear action visible before anyone scrolls. Take the recurring giving option out of the dropdown menu and put it on the page where people can see it. Add one short sentence about where the money goes. Keep our colors and our logo.

Claude builds it on screen. From there you have three ways to change it. Talk to it in the chat panel. Click one element and leave a comment on it. Or work on the design directly, dragging, resizing, and aligning elements with your mouse. Claude also offers adjustment knobs for spacing, color, and layout that update the design as you turn them.

Be clear with your team about what this is. It is a picture of a page. It does not go live on your website, and nothing changes on your site until whoever maintains it builds this for real.

Then: build three versions, put them next to each other, and show your team. Choosing between three pictures takes one meeting. Describing a page in words takes four.

A note on sharing. Every design starts private. You can open it up so anyone in your Claude organization with the link can view it, or give specific people edit access. That matters most if your church is on a Team or Enterprise plan where your staff share one account. On a solo Pro account, export the design and email it.

3. Get the finished file into your volunteer’s hands.

Time: 5 minutes. Export: several options

This is the step that turns the other five projects in this series into something your church can repeat without you.

For most churches, the path runs through Canva. Export the finished design straight to Canva, send your volunteer the Canva link, and they finish it inside the tool they already use every week. The Export button also sends designs to Adobe, Miro, Gamma, Lovable, Replit, Vercel, and Base44, and it saves out PDF, PowerPoint, a standalone web page, or a zip file of everything.

Once someone has edit access, the two of you can work in the same design and chat with Claude together in a group conversation. Your volunteer types a request, you type a correction, and you are both looking at the same screen.

If your church has a developer, or you use Claude Code yourself, Claude packages the finished design into a handoff bundle you pass to Claude Code with one instruction. Your developer starts from the actual design files.

Then: your volunteer opens a draft and edits it. Editing is a faster job than designing from nothing, and more people on your team can do it.

Two cautions before you start.

• It is still a research preview. Anthropic says so directly. Expect a layout every so often that needs a second pass, and expect the tools to shift while they keep building it.
• Large images use up your monthly allowance quickly. A MacStories reviewer testing the preview ran out of included usage in the middle of a project and started paying for extra. If you are on Pro and uploading big files, keep an eye on it.

Are you in our peer community of over 8,300 pastors and church leaders discussing AI? Join us: www.facebook.com/groups/aiforchurchleaders

Now turn six projects into a system somebody else can run.

Everything above gets you six finished files. Building them once is a project. Building them every week, without you in the room, is a system, and the rest of this issue is that system, written so you can hand the whole thing to your volunteer.

It starts with the one-time brand setup, about twelve minutes of work, including the two messages you send Claude word for word and the way to test whether it took before you trust it with anything real.

Then the five-line formula every prompt in this issue follows, and why the line most people skip is the one that decides whether a design is readable.

Then eight fill-in-the-blank prompts for the things your church makes every year: sermon series title card, bulletin cover, giving campaign progress graphic, new members class invitation, staff and ministry chart, VBS registration flyer, annual report spread, volunteer thank-you card.

Then the exact sentences that change one piece of a design without wrecking the rest, the four things that will go wrong along with what to type when each one happens, and the checklist to run before you export anything to print.

Print that part. Tape it above your volunteer’s desk.

The one-time brand setup, about 12 minutes.

Do this once. Every project you build afterward will follow it.

Step 1. Put four files in one folder. Your logo as a PNG with a transparent background. A screenshot of your website home page, top to bottom. A recent bulletin or program as a PDF. Your most recent sermon slide deck. Three files is enough if you cannot find the deck.

Step 2. Open claude.ai/design and start a new project. Drag all four files in at once, in a single message.

Step 3. Send this exactly as written:

These four files are our brand standard. Read them and write back to me: our exact color codes ranked from primary to accent, the fonts you can identify, how much empty space should surround our logo, and the two or three visual habits you notice across all four files. Do not design anything yet.

Step 4. Correct whatever it got wrong. Claude will list your colors and fonts back to you. This is where you spend two minutes fixing it. Screenshots wash colors out, so if your navy came back as black, say so plainly: “Our primary color is #1B2A4A, not black. Use that code.” Getting this right one time saves you from correcting it in every project after.

Step 5. Lock it in:

Save that as our brand standard for this conversation. Apply it to everything I ask for from here without me repeating it. If you are unsure whether something fits the standard, ask me before you design it.

Step 6. Test it before you trust it. Ask for one throwaway graphic, an event announcement for a made-up date. Look at the colors. If they are right, the setup held, and you can start your real projects in this same conversation.

Two things keep it working. Stay inside this one conversation for related projects, because a brand new conversation remembers nothing. When you do have to start fresh, upload the same four files and paste Step 5 again.

The 5-line prompt formula.

Every prompt in this section is written on five lines, always in the same order. Write your own the same way and you will skip most of the back-and-forth.

Line 1, Item. The thing and its size. “16:9 announcement slide.” “Half-sheet flyer, 5.5 by 8.5 inches, tall.” “One-page board summary, 8.5 by 11.”

Line 2, Words. The real headline, the real dates, the real names, pasted in. Claude builds the layout around the text you give it, so filler text gets you a layout sized for filler text.

Line 3, Biggest. Rank what should be largest, second largest, and smallest. Most people skip this line. It is the one that makes a design readable at a glance.

Line 4, Seen from. The setting and the distance. “Back row of a 400-seat room.” “A car going 15 miles an hour.” “A phone held at arm’s length.” Claude sizes the type to match.

Line 5, Brand. “Use our brand standard.” That is all you need if you did the setup above.

8 prompts to run this month.

Fill in the brackets and paste the whole block.
Each one assumes your brand setup conversation is still open.